Cage Rage

The bouts were bare-knuckle brawls with no judges, no time constraints, no weight classes, and scarcely any rules. During one of them, Hélio's 26-year-old son, Royce, annihilated a boxer with 25 KOs under his belt. Then he took out a 220-pound Japanese submission fighter in less than two minutes and then a world champion kickboxer to snag the title. "It was supposed to be a one-off event," quips the bald-headed, sparkly-eyed UFC President Dana White. "But it ended up being so successful they did another."

Followed by another. And another.

Back then fights were promoted more as a traveling freak show of caged carnage than a sport. And though they attracted a lot of attention, not all of it was positive. A neurosurgeon and board member of the American Medical Association, Dr. Peter Carmel, declared the fights were "about as close to murder as you can get." Avid boxing fan Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, dubbed it "human cockfighting."

And in the mid-Nineties, armed with his sway in the Senate, McCain began a crusade to crush the sport, lobbying governors nationwide to heed his call to arms. By the end of the decade the events were largely illegal. The sport limped along by staging bouts in Indian casinos that aired on direct-broadcast satellite TV.

But the organization had caught the eye of three Las Vegas friends: White, a former amateur boxer; and brothers Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta III, billionaire casino owners. Addicted practitioners of jiu-jitsu, the diminutive Lorenzo and his fast-talking friend, White, realized the UFC was in financial trouble. So they bought the company for $2000.

"I told my partners, öHoly shit, this thing might be for sale,'" he bubbles excitedly. "A month later we owned it."

Soon they added regulations (no groin shots or head butts, no eye gouging or striking to the back of the head or spine), timed five-minute rounds (three for regular fights, five for title bouts), and weight classes. New Jersey legalized the sport in 2000, Nevada in 2001, and Florida in April 2002. "They did everything we asked them to do," says Marc Ratner, former executive director of the Nevada Athletic Commission.

But they couldn't shake the UFC's Neanderthal image, and despite pouring untold sums into the business, by 2004 they were close to folding. So they came up with a plan: a reality TV show that would take viewers beyond the blood and focus on the personalities of the players who spilled it.

"It was a fucking hard sell," White recalls. "We pitched it to every network in television, but at a lot of these networks, guys don't have any balls." Fledgling cable channel Spike TV agreed to broadcast the show, and The Ultimate Fighter premiered in January 2005.

Overnight the mammoth wall McCain had built against the UFC began to crumble.

In the ring Din Thomas may hunt his opponents like a rabid dog, but outside he is soft-spoken, bordering on shy.

On a recent morning, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a black hoodie, hands clasped in his lap, eyes downcast, blowing on a Styrofoam cup of coffee, he seemed about as threatening as Bambi.

That is, if Bambi had two mangled cauliflower ears and a rap sheet.

Born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, Thomas moved to Florida with his family at age twelve. After flirting with baseball and football at Port St. Lucie High School, he soon realized team sports were not his thing. It wasn't that he didn't like sharing the spotlight. "I would feel bad if I dropped the ball or whatever," he chuckles, revealing a row of pearly whites peppered with endearing gaps, "like I was letting everybody down, and I couldn't handle that."

So the mild-mannered teen turned his attention to the opposite sex. "It was a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday," he says, shaking his head. "I had been dating this girl, and we broke up. I went to her house one day and her new boyfriend was there, and I basically flew into a jealous rage and beat him up."

The boyfriend pressed charges and Thomas was arrested for battery. He had no prior arrests and the judge was relatively lenient, sentencing him to just weekends in jail for one year. "It was one of the most humiliating things I ever had to go through," he says. "I had to go out and pick up trash on the side of the road, but they would make us wear striped [clothing], and I felt like I was in a chain gang."

While serving his sentence, he put his life on hold. No college. Almost no travel. He discovered jiu-jitsu and enrolled at Dragon Karate, a small academy near his house.

"This is where his career started," quips Victor Diadata, the school's owner. "He would come here and train with a handful of guys when [mixed martial arts] was just a novelty."

In 1995, using money he earned from cutting hair at a barber shop in Stuart called Go For It, Thomas bought a ticket to a mixed martial arts seminar in North Carolina, where he began to tap into his talent. "There were about 200 people there," he recalls. "These guys would do moves on me, but they felt weak. I remember feeling I was stronger than they were. That's when I first started to think that maybe I had a gift. "