Karaoke, Big Bacon, and Mixed Martial Arts: Looking Back on the RUFF Million RMB Super Fight

On that time I helped launch an MMA promotion with the Chinese government ...

There’s nothing quite like a raucous karaoke jam after giving away $800,000 in prize money. 

This was the tradition after every fight card we promoted for RUFF, the Ranik Ultimate Fighting Federation. But tonight was special. Tonight was the Super Fight. After years of trying to launch China’s first government-sanctioned mixed martial arts organization, and taking the show to Shanghai, Chongqing, Nanjing, and Hohhot, we had reached our pinnacle, crowning the country’s first national MMA champions live on Inner Mongolia Television.

All things considered, the Super Fight was a rousing success. Five new champions were awarded giant checks for 1-million RMB, along with gold championship belts, for their heroic efforts in the cage. And now here we were, toasting Tsingtaos and Budweisers, along with endless shots of baijiu (the powerful 67-percent Chinese rice wine), in a smoke-filled private hall, snacking on plentiful platters of assorted melons, singing a mix of Chinese and Western pop hits in celebration.

It was a glorious, glorious time, the culmination of a years-long project. But it was also bittersweet. This would be the last time I’d see many of these young athletes and colleagues I had worked with during the previous two-and-a-half years.

It was also the last time I would ever collaborate with the Chinese government and the General Administration of Sport of China.

I first met Joel Resnick and his son Brandon on the terrace of an abandoned warehouse in November 2010 at a Cyberpunk-themed party on Shanghai’s South Bund.

Back then, I was a bonafide media darling in the city’s expat community, known for my handlebar moustache, bi-weekly column in a local entertainment magazine, and hard rock band, The Fever Machine. There really wasn’t a party or club I couldn’t gain access to, and on this particular night, I ventured out to this specific venue at the behest of my girlfriend, who would always get us on the VIP list for Riviera Events, a company run by young French expats.

The ongoing joke for years was that I was French because so many of my friends and contemporaries were, but in actuality, I was (and still am) an American Jew. So, when I saw Joel and Brandon out on the terrace smoking cigars, drinking champagne, gold Star-of-David necklaces popping out of their unbuttoned dress shirts, it was rather effortless to make introductions, share a drink, and follow up with a bit of small talk.

My life at the time was an endless string of party nights. There was always a show, an event, a DJ set, or opening with ample amounts of free booze. This Cyberpunk party was really just an appetizer, a warm up, for a night out that would inevitably last until close to sunrise, but it was clear that Joel and Brandon were celebrating something of note. I kept the conversation going to find out what the occasion was.

Within a few minutes, Joel asked if I was familiar with mixed martial arts, the UFC. Of course I was. I had seen the first two UFC events on VHS with my cousin in the mid 90s. That’s when he explained that they had just received an exclusive government contract to promote MMA fights in mainland China with the Wushu Administrative Center, a wing of the General Administration of Sport of China.

China in those days was the wild, wild east. Everyone was doing something bizarre and having a blast at the same time. Personally, my day job, the one that provided my government-issued work and residence permits, was as a travel writer, which was convenient, since I spent the better part of seven years gigging around the country, playing club shows and festivals with my band. So, if I was able to cobble together a semi-legit life as a musician, artist, and part-time socialite, posing for photographers on red carpets, and voicing SEGA arcade games, I had no reason to doubt Joel’s claim.

We threw back another swig of champagne and exchanged business cards before I took off.

Less than two weeks after this initial encounter, I had already lined Joel up as a client. He paid me a few hundred bucks to write some copy for RUFF’s debut press conference at a nightclub called Obama. It was 2010, and the name carried some serious cache.

For sure, I claimed to know more about MMA than I really did, but I was a quick study and picked up the jargon real fast, which was interesting because we were actually creating a new Mandarin MMA lingo on the fly. So, there really was no way I could completely bullshit my way through this gig.

At the press conference, Joel introduced me to his business partner Saul Rajsky, another Jewish fellow from Toronto, who like Joel, made a decent chunk of coin as Nike’s apparel buying agent in China. These guys had a bit of money to burn and connections to sign Nike and Ducati as brand sponsors before they even staged an event or signed a single fighter, so when they offered to put me on a monthly retainer, I didn’t hesitate.

Suddenly, I was a fight promoter.

Getting this kind of business off the ground in China, or anywhere for that matter, is no simple task. The debut event was scheduled, rescheduled, cancelled, and moved no less than six times before RUFF officially launched at the 13,000-seat Shanghai Qizhong Forest Sports Arena.

The string of delays was actually beneficial, allowing our small delegation some time to travel around the country scouting talent, signing fighters.

While Joel was RUFF’s frontman, a Chinese partner, Lin Yan Ming, would lead the way on the earliest recruiting trips. Lin and Joel had met at a high stakes table in Vegas years before, which opened the door for RUFF.

In actuality, the idea for a Chinese MMA promotion came from Brandon, an aspiring matchmaker, who was barely 18 at the time. But it was Lin’s deep government contacts that helped cut through all the red tape and secure a meeting with the Wushu Administrative Center, where Joel outbid all the other domestic suitors for this exclusive business license.

See, RUFF wasn’t the first mixed martial arts promotion in China. That distinction belonged to the Art of War, an organization that ran 15 events in Beijing between 2005-2009. Rumor around the Chinese martial arts scene was that Art of War was bankrolled by former NFL running back Rashaan Salaam and an Arabian sheik, but no one could be certain. However, when the organization went on an extended hiatus, a promotion in Hong Kong, Legend Fighting Championship came in and snatched up a bunch of talent.

There were also smaller promotions like Wu Lin Feng and TFC, but none of them were allowed to use a cage or octagon in those days, and their events mainly focused on Sanda, China’s version of kickboxing mixed with takedowns. Plus, they were plagued by constant accusations of fight fixing. RUFF, on the other hand, would be completely above board, government sanctioned, and free from controversy, ushering in a new standard for safety and officiating practices, implementing the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts.

Regardless, once RUFF entered the picture, there was a certain expectation that China’s top MMA fighters would sign with our promotion, and Lin’s contacts at the Wushu Administrative Center and the General Administration of Sport of China could make sure of it. Or so they said.

For the better part of six months, our group, or sometimes just Brandon, our Shanghainese colleague Michael Chen, and I would travel to Beijing and Xi’An to visit fighters at gyms like China Top Team, Xi’An Sports University, and a few others, trying to get them to sign contracts.

We inked fighters like Wang Guan, Jumabieke Tuerxun, Zhang LiPeng, and Liu PingYuan — all of whom would eventually go on to fight in the UFC years later — to deals when they were barely out of school. We also had more established athletes like Zhao ZiLong, a former national Sanda champion who was rather well known in the scene, sign contracts with our promotion.

Signing ZiLong was probably the highlight of the recruiting process, since sealing the deal meant going to a Mongolian yurt-themed restaurant 30km outside of Beijing, eating an entire spit-roasted lamb, paired with some near-lethal baijiu. The next day he arrived at the Ritz Carlton Beijing to put pen to paper over a complimentary breakfast that everyone was too hungover to eat.

There was one white whale that eluded us during the recruitment period: Li JingLiang, a highly regarded fighter from Xinjiang, who has since gone on to great success in the UFC. At the time Li was signed with Legend FC, and since we didn’t have a middleweight division (he fought at 185 pounds back then), there was just nothing to entice him to fight in RUFF’s 八角台, Chinese for octagon.

As we inched closer to our debut event in August 2011, our team grew. We hired technical advisors like Joel Gerson, a Canadian Judo and Brazlian Jiu Jitsu ace who was the first man to beat the legendary Japanese fighter Rumina Sato in mixed martial arts. Through Gerson, we were also able to contract Jerin Valel, an experienced referee and judge with legit UFC and Bellator experience, as our head regulation official. Valel, in particular, lent a level of credibility to the promotion, and on his trips to China, he helped educate our growing staff and officiating crew on many of the fight night and in-cage specifics.

With a roster of fighters now signed, and a skeleton crew of project managers, talent coordinators, and marketing personnel in place, we leveled up to promote the first event.

For my part, I was tasked with media relations and PR (my official title was Director of Communications), website management, writing marketing copy and press materials, but I became a de-facto event and TV producer, basically growing into every role I was assigned.

When we needed a brand launch promo spot and trailer for the first event, RUFF: Genesis, Joel asked me to write a script. I had never done such a thing before, but I nailed the assignment, even going one step further by negotiating a deal with Image Maker Studios, a major film studio in Shanghai where parts of Jet Li’s “Hero” and RZA’s “The Man with the Iron Fists” were shot. In actuality, the studio belonged to the family of my friend from high school and college, so I had some guanxi (关系), the Chinese virtue of relationship.

For the video shoot, we flew several of our fighters out to Shanghai and dressed them up in full Shaolin monk regalia and makeup. I was also required to write in a role for Fu Biao, our counterpart at the Wushu Administrative Center. He played the master.

This was my first lesson in film and television production; however, in the coming year, I’d have the chance to learn from some real industry pros, gaining unique insight into the difference between making TV in China versus the United States.

On August 27, 2011 RUFF officially launched, live from Shanghai.

The fights themselves were great, but the public reception was lukewarm and underwhelming, to say the least. With fewer than 3,000 people inside a 13,000-seat arena, the atmosphere was not exactly what we had been expecting.

Just weeks earlier, our fighters were invited to participate in Nike’s Festival of Sport at the Shanghai Indoor Stadium, where they gave MMA demos to thousands of attendees. Even NBA star Tyson Chandler and pro skater Eric Koston mixed it up with our fighters in the cage, but promoting events in Shanghai in the summer is notoriously difficult, and RUFF: Genesis flopped. None of this was helped by the fact that our local TV partner, the Shanghai Media Group (SMG), refused to broadcast the fights live on the air, citing that this type of combat was still too brutal for prime time Chinese audiences.

With a better understanding of the landscape, we moved our next event to Chongqing, a massive special economic region in south central China with a population of over 20-million, where we found a willing TV partner, Chongqing TV. It was in Chongqing where we had our first sell-out event, which came at exactly the right time.

While RUFF still wasn’t on live TV yet (we were broadcast on a tape delay so censors could view the programming first), we had our first interaction with Hollywood, courtesy of our cageside physician, Dr. Andy Brown, an American expat from New Orleans who, in addition to being one heck of an emergency surgeon, had a contact in Los Angeles interested in breaking into China. That contact was Neil Mandt, who along with his brother Michael, owned and operated Mandt Bros. Productions, the company behind Jim Rome is Burning, The Car Show with Adam Carolla, and Disney’s Million Dollar Arm, a feature film starring Jon Hamm.

Allured by opening up the China market, the Mandt brothers saw potential and imported their own reality TV crew for fight weeks. However, we still needed to secure more air time, so Joel found an even more amenable local TV partner, this time in Hohhot, at Inner Mongolia TV, where they would allow permission for RUFF 5 to become the first MMA event to be broadcast live on the Chinese airwaves. It was rather monumental.

An industrial city less than two hours from the lush grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot became the center of operations for the next few months. It was there that we began to film RUFF: Journey, a documentary style reality show chronicling the fighters in the lead up to the 1-million RMB Super Fight, hosted by Taiwanese VJ Jason Tang (唐志中).

Again, I had no real place in reality TV and no prior experience, but given that no one on the Hollywood crew spoke Mandarin, I was tasked with translating during interview tapings. I knew those intensive Chinese lessons years earlier at Henan University in Kaifeng would pay off.

The show was produced on the fly, filmed in just a couple days in China and edited in LA, before the masters were shipped back to Shanghai for distribution. All the previous TV partners – Shanghai Media Group, Chongqing Television, and Inner Mongolia TV – agreed to broadcast the show to their combined reach of more than 300-million homes across China. But Joel wanted to push the show even further, which resulted in another move, this time to Nanjing for RUFF’s seventh event.

With hopes of securing a TV deal with a station in Nanjing, RUFF 7 was booked into a local arena just before Christmas 2012 for what was shaping up to be a semi-final, of sorts. The winners of these fights would earn a chance to compete at the 1-million RMB Super Fight (百万争霸) in February 2013; however, less than a week before the event, the local partner tried to strong arm the company for more money. But there wasn’t any.

Rather than cancel the event – fight contracts were already signed, hotel rooms and plane tickets already booked, the wheels were already spinning in motion – Joel pulled off a nearly impossible move, securing a ballroom atop the 89-story, 1,476-ft. Zifeng Tower, then the eighth tallest building in the world. While the ballroom could only fit approximately 400 seats, there was some cache to promoting the highest MMA fight in history. It was a great night of fights, even despite the fact that the promotion gave my hotel room away to a Mongolian gangster-cum-sponsor known within our circle as Big Bacon, who would hand out oversized checks in the cage after the fights.

By this point, I already had one foot out the door. After nearly seven years in China, I was tying up all the loose ends, preparing for a new life in Los Angeles.

Creatively, my band, The Fever Machine, had just played its farewell series of shows in Beijing and Shanghai, releasing our final single “La Chupacabra” on vinyl. The title of the song was actually inspired by a slaughtered goat I had seen on the streets of Chongqing a year prior while promoting RUFF 2. Personally, I was newly wed and looking for a major change of scenery, closer to my family in California.

Still, I was determined to see this first season of RUFF through and complete my obligations at the Super Fight. That final event really was more of a celebration than anything.

Once a ragtag crew with absolutely no experience promoting fights, we had turned into a reasonably well-oiled machine during the previous two years, with the fight week press events, activities, weigh ins, and photo shoots all going rather smoothly at the Shangri-La Hohhot.

When fight night rolled around, all the government cadres from Beijing, the Wushu Administrative Center, and the General Administration of Sport of China, the very delegates who sold RUFF the million-dollar exclusive license to promote mixed martial arts on the Chinese mainland, flew out for the event.

There was a certain dog and pony show that was required when dealing with the government delegates. They all required special introductions by the house announcer before the fights could officially commence, and in their reserved section in the arena, custom name placards were created to offer the air of importance. We were also required to create lower thirds for each party member to be displayed on the live TV broadcast. These guys literally did nothing for us other than take a stack of cash, and yet we were obligated to kiss the ring. It wasn’t as demeaning as it might sound, but any time there were requirements placed on us by the government, it just felt a bit demoralizing.

Regardless, the fights went on and the champions were crowned.

First, it was Zhao ZiLong, the light heavyweight national Sanda champion, who needed less than a minute to claim the belt. Ironically, this highly regarded striker won his million on the ground, surprising everyone with a fluid armbar submission. Then, it was Rodrigo Caporal, a Brazilian lightweight who qualified to compete in RUFF due to his employment and resident status in Hong Kong. A Jiu-Jitsu ace and black belt from the famed Atos gym, the same gym where UFC legend Anderson Silva earned his black belt, Caporal steamrolled through the Chinese competition at event after event, ultimately claiming the Chinese national championship via first round armbar.

Next up were the flyweights, Zhang MeiXuan and Liu PingYuan.

While the latter ultimately would go on to compete in the UFC, it was the former who took home the title at the RUFF Super Fight. The result that night was clear. Zhang won the belt via heel hook submission; however, his inclusion in the event was controversial, as he had just been released from jail, having been locked up months prior for kidnapping and extortion. Given that he was legally deemed an accomplice, rather than the instigator, RUFF allowed him to participate, and with the winnings, he turned his life around.

South African bantamweight Irshaad Sayed then joined Caporal as a second foreigner to win the Chinese national title. Sayed, an accomplished Muay Thai practitioner and Hong Kong resident, would go on to donate a portion of his winnings to build an orphanage in China before buying his way out of his RUFF contract to compete closer to home in South Africa’s EFC promotion. And finally, in the main event, RUFF’s golden boy, Wang Guan, “The Dongbei Tiger,” claimed the featherweight belt with a first round TKO.

That night, everyone involved with RUFF gathered for a banquet-style dinner. Fighters, their coaches and cornermen, government officials, a Hollywood TV crew, and assorted managers, promoters, sponsors, and the aforementioned gangster, Big Bacon, sat side-by-side, eating exorbitant amounts of lamb, imbibing free flow baijiu. From the banquet hall, we moved on to the karaoke den, owned by Bacon, where we sang and danced, and recreated certain Jiu-Jitsu sweeps and finishing moves, recapping the event hours before.

China finally had its first, and only, class of national champions, the only government sanctioned national MMA champions in history anywhere in the world, before or since. And I had a flight home, back to the US.

Ten years later, I fondly look back on this experience. It was a truly incredible, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to venture inside the fight game and TV business, and in the decade that has since passed, I’ve continued to work some of the biggest fights in history, while forging a career in film and television.

The RUFF Super Fight was the last time I saw Joel Resnick. He passed away in 2019. A big man, with an even larger presence, Joel opened the doors for me to see the fight business from a unique vantage point. He was resilient in his pursuit of growing the sport of MMA in China, helping dozens of young fighters achieve their dreams of becoming professional athletes. Fighters like Ning Guangyou, Wu Lijiburen, Danaa Batgerel, Heili Alateng, and Song Yadong, who is currently the eighth-ranked bantamweight in the UFC, can all trace their professional lineage back to the RUFF family tree. There’s no doubt that RUFF made a distinct and lasting impact on Chinese mixed martial arts, long before the UFC built a state-of-the-art training center in Shanghai and crowned Zhang Weili as the women’s strawweight champion.

And while it wasn’t always rosy, I gained some lifelong friends in the process, as well as some tremendous stories that are so bizarre, well, they may even sound unbelievable.

But remember … all this is true.