Picture the World Cup’s knockout rounds.
Now picture one man standing after making it through those rounds by knocking out three different opponents — all in one night.
Welcome to the inaugural Copa Combate, a three-hour mixed martial arts tournament featuring eight professional bantamweight fighters from the United States, Latin America and Spain. The “MMA Cup” Saturday night in Cancun, Mexico (11:30 PM, NBC Sports) takes place almost exactly 24 years to the day of UFC 1, and that’s not a coincidence.
Combate Americas founder and CEO Campbell McLaren, the man behind Saturday’s tournament, was there for the UFC’s Nov. 12, 1993 event in Denver, Colo., when the sport had no weight classes, breaks, nor judges and just two rules: no biting or eye-gouging allowed.
That’s what he came up with as one of the founders of UFC, which before current president Dana White came along in 2001 was fighting in its most primitive form, putting a mixed bag of athletes in a no-holds barred cage and seeing who survived the carnage. McLaren once marketed the UFC as fights that could end only by submission, knockout or death.
“One of the reasons I wanted to do this was the first UFC was this tournament style,” McLaren said during a visit with The Post in Manhattan ahead of the Copa Combate, which is split up into a 5-minute quarterfinal round and three 3-minute semifinal and final rounds for a $100,000 prize.
“What’s interesting about it is if you see a fighter, an athlete go through three fights in one night, you really start to learn something about his courage, his heart, his stamina. I really do think fights are stories, they’re epic. [But] we are super careful. I did the controversy, I did no rules. I did it, it was a lot of fun, but it’s not what we’re doing now. The sport has evolved.”McLaren has learned unified MMA rules — as they’ve expanded since the first legalized MMA fight in California in 2000 — don’t have to translate to boring fights. Combate Americas, which McLaren broke off from the UFC to create in 2011, showcases Latin American and Hispanic talent by promoting dynamic and aggressive fighting.
While most UFC competitors are trained grapplers that learned to strike, McLaren explained, Combate fighters are natural strikers — punching and kicking — who use grappling as defense.
“We were talking about the [Nate] Diaz-[Conor] McGregor fight being such a great fight, and I was like, ‘All my f—king fights look like that.’ Every single fight in Combate looks like that because they’re very aggressive, they punch, they kick and they want to beat the other guy within two minutes,” McLaren said, comparing bouts in his promotion with McGregor and Diaz’s epic battle at UFC 202.
“So it just creates a much more exciting style of fight, much less careful. You might say there’s no strategy. The strategy is beat the crap out of the other guy.”
That do-or-die mentality translates into 81 percent of Combate Americas’ fights ending in a finish, according to McLaren, a far greater percentage than UFC or Beallator matches. Those numbers could change year-to-year based on the fighters’ individual styles and the level of competition, but McLaren hopes to separate his promotion in that way.
The type of fights Combate Americas is producing is just one reason many young and talented Latino fighters, like US-born John Castaneda, are leaving potential UFC deals on the table to sign with Combate, which “feels like home” to him.
“There’s something about Latin American fighters … we’re fearless,” said 25-year-old Castaneda, who dominated his one and only UFC fight in September before returning to Combate. “A lot of us come from nothing, so we fight with absolutely everything if that makes sense. We leave it all in there, we’re not scared of anything, we’ve seen the lowest of the lows. … The Latin American style is just straight-up savage.”
“Combate Americas opened the door to see the real me with my style and it feels good,” said Ricky Palacios, a 9-1 career fighter from Texas who joins Castaneda in representing the US Saturday night. “I don’t have to front or be somebody or not. I don’t have to s–t talk, I don’t have to be a Conor McGregor. I can just be me and people are gonna love me.”
However much McLaren and his fighters talk about the thrill of Combate Americas’ bouts, can fans get behind a one-night slugfest knowing the toll it can take on the athletes?
When Scott Corker took over as Bellator president in 2014, he cut the tournaments in favor of single-fight events. While he said he was waiting for the right prospects to come along before relaunching the heavyweight tournaments, the former Strikeforce and UFC executive plans to spread the championships out over the course of a year to protect his athletes.
“These fighters, when they’re heavyweights, they can do a lot of damage when they fight and a lot of them tend to get injured,” Corker said. “This is the way that gives them plenty of time to rest … and be 100 percent for the next match. And then also for the company, it gives us the ability to paint the picture and tell the story for the entire year.”
Corker said he made it his mission when he took over Bellator to build up the promotion’s roster with exciting, young talent. Holding the tournament fights every few months helps him develop storylines around his athletes, he explained, which is difficult to accomplish in one three-hour event — and televised live for just one-and-a-half hour — like the Copa Combate.
NBC Sports announced earlier this week it would broadcast the Copa Combate live, as well as Combate Americas’ next event in San Antonio on Dec. 1. President of Programming Jon Miller said he plans to leave the health of the fighters “up to the professionals,” while focusing more on the quality of fighting.
“I think we hope to attract new eyeballs and I think that’s why we’re excited about it,” Miller said. “I think both us and [Spanish-language partner] Telemundo see this as a way to expand our base, but we found that people who follow good quality MMA will know where to look for it, and when they find it, they’ll stick with it.”
McLaren, whose background is in TV production, has landed the Copa Combate on a variety of English- and Spanish-language platforms to appeal to his target fanbase: Millennials. He recognizes he doesn’t yet have the luxury of limiting the tournaments to pay-per-view like the UFC does with its primetime fights.
That doesn’t mean the man John McCain once called a “threat to western civilization” is not giving chase to his old partners. McLaren, 61, wants Combate Americas to become the most-watched MMA promotion in the world, let alone the US, and he believes he’s found just the combination of style and identity to accomplish that.
Getting there could all depend on how MMA fans perceive Saturday night’s mayhem. UFC became a viral sensation overnight when an epic 2010 fight between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar on “The Ultimate Fighter” pulled more people into the sport.
McLaren and his fighters feel their moment is coming because once people see their product, they hope they’ll be hooked.
“Who doesn’t want to see [a Combate Americas fight]?” Castaneda said. “As an outsider and a spectator, who doesn’t want to see two guys sit there and bang and absolutely throw haymakers and give it everything that they’ve got in close quarters?”
Said McLaren: “The rules are the same, but you can sort of play differently under the same rules.”