Saturday night at the bar

It's not your typical Saturday night at the local pub.

On most weekend nights, Coburns Tavern in Canton might attract patrons looking to eat dinner, watch college football or hit the second-level dance floor, but last Saturday the O'Donnell Street establishment catered to a different audience: mixed martial arts fans.

One Saturday a month for the last five months, Coburns Tavern has cleared out the first-floor dining area and promptly switched all the flat-screen TVs to an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) pay-per-view event at 9:30 p.m.

The assembled crowd for last Saturday's telecast of UFC 65: "Bad Intentions" mostly fit the UFC's target audience -- 18-to-34-year-old males -- but others fall outside that demographic, and everyone has a back story about their interest in mixed martial arts.

Behind the bar, Matt Hall, 26, pours drinks during an event that was partly his brainchild. When Hall isn't bartending or working his weekday job for an insurance company, he's a MMA fighter in training. The Scranton, Pa., native has been fighting for 11 months as a Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter with Team Ground Control, a MMA Academy in Canton. Hall, who grew up playing soccer and running cross country, says his goal is to eventually fight in the UFC or in International Fight League, the new MMA team league.

Hall and Jeremy Reed, a manager at Coburns Tavern, came up with the idea to televise the monthly pay-per-view events in July. The bar is happy with the response thus far. "Every UFC event has drawn a full capacity crowd," manager Jason Williams said.

In a corner of the bar sits an unassuming 37-year-old teacher, Binky Jones, celebrating his birthday by coming out to watch the fights. Jones is no casual fan of the sport -- he is a 10-year MMA fighter who has been training for the last three years with Team Ground Control, where he is also an instructor.

Jones represents the vanguard of the MMA movement, first entering the sport in the mid-1990s when UFC was still in its infancy. When the vocational teacher of 16 years at the Youth in Transition School isn't working with students in the classroom, he's training six days a week in a variety of MMA disciplines.

Jones' drive and work ethic have paid off. The night before UFC 65, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu purple belt was in Atlantic City, N.J., fighting in the first round of the Ring of Combat XII tournament in the 155-pound lightweight division. Jones won his first-round match against kung fu black belt Charles Wilson by decision and will return to Atlantic City in January for a second-round fight, the next step in his quest to eventually capture the $12,000 first-place prize.

As with Hall, Jones' ultimate goal is to fight in the UFC. He has already had brushes with this goal, qualifying as an alternate for Season Two of Spike TV's "The Ultimate Fighter," a reality show produced in conjunction with the UFC. He plans to audition for the fifth season of the show in December in Florida and believes his chances are better this time because half the fighters will be selected from his lightweight division.

The 37-year-old Jones is realistic, though, and realizes that his UFC window of opportunity may be closing. He acknowledges that his contribution to the sport going forward may be more as a MMA instructor and less as a fighter. He knows that "kids" are the future of the sport -- kids like Hall -- and says he will still be happy if he can't make the UFC, if at least one of his Team Ground Control students does.

Not all the fans in the crowd are MMA fighters. New York City resident Renee Tirado stays for the entire event -- one of the few women to do so -- but just six months ago she wasn't even a fan of the sport. After prodding from her friend, Colin Mulet, a computer programmer from Baltimore, Tirado, the events director of the National Basketball Retired Players Association, agreed to watch her first UFC fight a few months ago. "Watching [the UFC] for the first time was hard because it was so violent -- it seemed extreme compared to boxing."

However, after Tirado saw her first event and talked about it with Mulet -- another MMA participant who takes classes once a week at the Baltimore Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academy in Parkville -- she began to gain an appreciation for the "athleticism, strength, physicality and stamina" of the UFC fighters. Echoing a theme commonly expressed by many MMA fans, Tirado also notes the perceived lack of corruption in MMA compared to boxing.

Still, Tirado feels that the UFC "isn't doing anything special to attract women." She feels the UFC hasn't made a significant effort to market the sport to women or really worked to "bring women into the fold and have more diversity [in the fan base]."

The UFC fans gathered at Coburns Tavern order drinks and talk freely between bouts, but during the introductions of fighters, the first-floor volume dropped to barely above a murmur. As the onscreen action intensified, the quiet was broken as the crowd reacted to a fighter successfully executing a kick or punch to the face of his opponent. The assembled fans also applauded the more technical, but sometimes less exciting ground action. The bouts proceeded in this manner -- relative quiet where only the TV announcers' voices and bass from the second-level dance floor fill the room, punctuated by loud cheers after flurries of action.

The MMA fans had done their homework and rooted for certain fighters during UFC 65. During the heavyweight title fight between challenger Jeff Monson and champion Tim Sylvia, the crowd cheered loudly for Monson and groaned in disappointment at the eventual outcome of the fight -- a unanimous decision favoring Sylvia.

Minutes later, however, the fans were treated to a more palatable result as the bar favorite, challenger Georges St. Pierre, defeated welterweight champion Matt Hughes with a second-round technical knockout after a devastating kick to the head.

Still, not everyone at Coburns Tavern enjoys the fight broadcast, highlighting the challenges facing the UFC's attempt to appeal to new fans. One female bar attendee complained when the dining atmosphere changed abruptly at the start of the fights. Other patrons criticized the level of violence and questioned why people "pay to watch this." A male patron simply said he prefers "watching football," and can't "get into" mixed martial arts.

The assembled die-hard UFC fans didn't appear to mind the critics. When the last bout ended at 12:30 a.m. Sunday, the crowd began to empty out of the bar, apparently satisfied by the nearly three hours of UFC action they witnessed.

Stepping into the cool Baltimore night, UFC convert Tirado blurts out, "See you at UFC 66."

Related topic galleries: Television Industry, Hotels and Accommodations, Hotel and Accommodation Industry, Values, Ethics, Ultimate Fighting Championship, Wrestling

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