Referees in fight sports come in for all kinds of criticism, but on one weekend in Las Vegas, they gather to help each other get it right.
LAS VEGAS — It’s a blustery Saturday morning in the fight capital of the world and John McCarthy is reviewing his failures. He has an audience for this. It’s a crowd of roughly 50 people, men and women who are part pupils and part peers, all gathered here for three days of seminars and courses as part of the 2026 Combat Sports Officials Summit.
From veteran referees and judges to the heads of various state athletic commissions, these are experienced officials. They know what’s coming next. They know it as soon as they see former UFC fighters Yoel Romero and Tim Kennedy pop up on the screen.
“I screwed this up,” McCarthy says. His tone is bluntly matter-of-fact. That doesn’t change whether he’s discussing your mistakes or his own, as several people in this room will learn once he moves on from the latter and gets to the former. But for now, the accountability lens is aimed straight at “Big” John, the most famous referee — perhaps the only famous referee — in MMA history.
When he hits play, the chaos begins. It’s near the end of the second round of this main card bout at UFC 178 when Kennedy rocks Romero with a punch. The opening to land that punch, as the video replay later confirms, was Kennedy’s illegal grip on the inside of Romero’s glove — a foul, according to the unified rules of MMA.
“I never saw that,” McCarthy says, listing the first of his many mistakes in this sequence. But it’s what comes next that most people remember best.
A wobbly and exhausted Romero returns to his corner between rounds and sits on the stool. His corner works feverishly, with the cutman slathering Vaseline on Romero's head while his coaches place ice on his head in an effort to revive him for the third and final round. But when time is up and the inspector from the Nevada Athletic Commission orders the fighters’ seconds to leave the cage, Romero’s corner is conspicuously slow to leave. Romero himself remains sitting on the stool, in no hurry to rise and continue the fight. Here’s where it starts to get tricky for the referee McCarthy.
As he points out now, a little more than a decade removed from the 2014 incident, his focus at first was too narrow. He wanted Romero off the stool and his coaches out of the cage. He was so intent on achieving this that he didn’t notice the excessive glob of Vaseline covering a cut on Romero’s head. It wasn’t until he’d finally shepherded everyone else out of the cage that he saw it.
“Now what should I do?” McCarthy asks the room. The answer seems obvious at first: Wipe that Vaseline off. But it’s not that simple.
As the ref, McCarthy says, he doesn’t want to put his hands on a fighter’s face if he can help it — especially not one with an open cut that’s just been worked on by his corner. If the ref goes to wipe off the Vaseline and accidentally reopens the cut, he might be accused of tilting the fight toward the opponent.
But he also doesn’t want to invite Romero’s corner back into the cage. Not after what a struggle it was to get them out. They could very well use that as an excuse to delay things further and give their fighter more time to recover.
So McCarthy decides instead to get the cutman to do it. He works for the UFC — not the fighter’s corner — so he can be trusted. Except this particular cutman is not all that experienced. In fact, he’s not even paying attention anymore. He’s out of the cage and off looking for his seat as McCarthy tries to call him back. Meanwhile, behind McCarthy, Kennedy is growing restless. He’s asking, is this fight going to start up again or not? How much time is the recently-rocked Romero going to get, anyway?
So now McCarthy is fighting battles on multiple fronts. There’s no cutman in sight. A clock is ticking louder and louder inside his head. The crowd has begun to sense that order is unraveling. He has to do something, so he asks Romero’s corner for a towel. He does not let them enter the cage to provide it. What he should have done here, he tells us now, was physically escort Romero to the cage door and stand there guarding it while his corner wiped off the Vaseline. Instead, caught up in the rush to get the fight going again, he grabs the towel and wipes it off himself.
“And sure enough,” he tells us now, that cut popped right back open. Exactly what he’d feared.
On this video of the old broadcast, UFC commentator Mike Goldberg says we’re witnessing a “great job by referee John McCarthy.”
“No,” is all McCarthy says in response now, which gets a few laughs.
What happened next only solidified this moment of MMA weirdness into a full-fledged UFC controversy. The final round began and, perhaps refreshed by the extended rest period, Romero dropped Kennedy with a hard right hand and finished him with follow-up strikes on the mat seconds later. A total reversal of fortunes, and one McCarthy instantly knew he’d be blamed for.
He was right. By the following morning, MMA news websites were calling it “stoolgate.” Kennedy took to social media to insist the bout should have been ruled a TKO win for him the moment Romero failed to rise from the stool. UFC CEO Dana White labeled it a “dirty trick.” McCarthy got a hefty dose of the blame, which, as he doesn’t need to remind the people in this room, is more or less inevitable. The referee is the only one in charge of the fight. So when something goes wrong, it’s his fault.
“I made mistakes,” McCarthy tells the room now. “I won’t make those mistakes again.”
The point of this trip down memory lane isn’t just to explain to other officials how they might handle a situation like this one. It is, after all, not exactly the most common problem referees face. Instead, it’s more of a lesson about humility. No matter how many fights you’ve worked — McCarthy says he stopped counting once he passed 5,000 — you’ve never seen it all. There’s always some combination of variables that can stump you, especially when you have to make snap decisions in a packed arena on live TV.
“So what should I have done?” McCarthy asks his fellow officials. What follows is a spirited discussion about a referee’s options in this situation. Should he have awarded Kennedy the TKO he thought he deserved? Take a point from Romero? Declare the fight a no-contest?
All options are on the table. Many different opinions come bounding forth. Which is, of course, part of why they’re all here.
Over the course of three days in January, a broad swath of combat sports officials from multiple states gathered together to discuss the state of officiating and judging in MMA, boxing and bare-knuckle fighting. (For more on judging, stay tuned for Part 2 of Uncrowned’s officiating series.) This gathering provided an illuminating look at what refs and judges are saying to each other behind closed doors, and where their concerns about the state of the sport dovetail with frequent criticisms from fans, fighters and media.
For instance, there’s the question of what to do about the thing McCarthy insists is the single biggest problem referees have right now in MMA.
“Extended fingers and eye-pokes,” McCarthy tells the crowd that includes veteran referees of multiple UFC bouts, like Mike Beltran and Nick Berens, as well as former fighters turned refs, like Chris Leben. “It’s a fricking problem. And it’s your fault.”
To the amusement of everyone and surprise of absolutely no one, the slide that accompanies this part of the presentation is a collage of Jon Jones fights. The former two-division UFC champion gets mentioned by name a lot in this segment. He developed a reputation for not only skewering the eyeballs of opponents, but also using his long reach and extended fingers as a long-range deterrent, not unlike sticking a pitchfork in someone’s face and daring them to charge into it.
But it’s not just Jones, as everyone here knows. The last UFC heavyweight title fight ended in a no-contest after champion Tom Aspinall was gouged in both eyes by challenger Ciryl Gane. There’s hardly a UFC event these days that doesn’t see at least one incident of stray fingers to the eye, with repercussions that rarely go beyond a warning (or two) issued to the offending fighter. So why wouldn’t you at least graze an opponent’s eyeball and see if it doesn’t improve your chances at winning?
In the not-so distant past, the unified rules attempted to address this problem by making it a foul even to extend the fingers in the direction of an opponent’s face. The idea was that this would allow officials to crack down on the situation before it becomes an actual problem in a fight. But that hasn’t really happened, and for this McCarthy blames some of the people in the room today.
Extended fingers and eye-pokes — it’s a fricking problem. And it’s your fault.John McCarthy to a room of top MMA officials
How many of them have ever taken a point for outstretched fingers in a fight, McCarthy asks. Only a couple hands go up. Berens, who’s worked everything from UFC fights to local midwest promotions, says he’s done it on multiple occasions.
“Good,” McCarthy says. “It needs to be more.”
Once people get started talking about this topic, you get a sense for why meaningful change on the eye-poke issue is so hard to come by. For one thing, there’s the fact that much is still left up to referee discretion. In general, they like it this way and even insist that it needs to be this way. When one commissioner requests more prescriptive language about other fouls in the rules, it sets off a discussion about what happens when the rigidity of the rules insist on outcomes that seem neither fair nor helpful, making absolutely no one happy.
“You’re limiting your referee’s choices,” is how McCarthy puts it.
Jack Reiss, a longtime boxing referee and co-organizer of this summit, along with McCarthy and former Bellator commentator and Kansas commissioner Sean Wheelock, puts it this way: “The rules are black and white, but we referee in the gray.”
That approach has left a lot up to individual refs. But those refs are also looking at how other refs approach things like eye-pokes. In this business, McCarthy points out, one thing you don’t want to be is the outlier who’s doing things differently from everyone else. Several refs here say they want to be proactive about penalizing eye-pokes and extended fingers, but if they go it alone they risk being seen as too quick on the trigger.
“Consistency in our actions helps the sport,” McCarthy says.
In other words, if refs collectively make it clear that they aren’t kidding about deducting points — if they set those expectations in the locker room before fights and then actually follow through in the cage — they can shape fighter behavior together and change the sport for the better.
But that’s not to say there aren’t changes to the wording of the rules that would help. Andy Foster, executive director of the California State Athletic Commission, knows that as well as anyone. As a member of the ABC rules committee responsible for tweaks to the unified rules, he thinks there are improvements that can and likely will be made to the guidelines referees receive.
He’s one of several state commissioners to attend this summit. When I reach him by phone a few days later, he’s unequivocal in his agreement that MMA officials aren’t doing enough to penalize and prevent eye-pokes.
“I don’t think the way we’re doing it right this second is the way to go,” Foster says. “ … I think one of the things you may see coming out of the rules committee this cycle is we’re going to get rid of this intentional vs. unintentional foul language. It’s very rare that you see someone just come out with a foul on purpose and intentionally try to do something egregious to harm their opponent. Intent is not the point. The fact is the foul happened and we’ve got to do something about it.
"So we’re looking to get rid of that language, because it’s antiquated. It’s not what’s actually happening and we’ve got to adapt.”
That’s part of what these gatherings are about, to hear the officials tell it. These conversations about the state of the sport are ongoing. There may be a perception in the minds of fans and media — even fighters — that the refs and other officials have made up their minds and head into the cage on autopilot, but it’s hardly the case.
In fact, if there’s one thing that becomes clear over the course of these few days it’s that, regardless of how despairing many fans are about the state of MMA officiating, there really are people out there trying hard to make it better. They are trying. On this, the rare weekend with no fights scheduled in any major promotion, they are here in this room trying together.
Over the course of three days, their conversations will range from big-picture issues, like fouls and stoppages and point deductions, to the most minor details you can imagine, like why you should always push a fighter’s hand up rather than down when trying to get him to release an illegal grip on the cage fence. They’ll go over strategies and best practices for pre-fight instructions in the locker room.
They’ll talk about why you shouldn’t lift a fighter’s arm to check if he’s still conscious in a choke. (“That’s so exciting” when Hulk Hogan does it, McCarthy points out, “but why are you doing it in a real fight?”) They’ll discuss why referees should stay on the mats in fight gyms, training on their own, especially in the grappling arts when possible. (“There’s new stuff happening all the time, and if you’re not up on it, you’re going to make a mistake.”)
They will especially drive home the point that this is not a job for those who need to be universally loved. Referees get criticized. Loudly and often. This is the way of the world. It’s why they shouldn’t even bother having social media accounts, McCarthy says, because “you’ll get eaten up.” Instead, he tells them, look at your right hand and count the fingers. If you’re taking advice and criticism from more people than that, you’re screwing up.
“Find the people in this community who you can trust to tell you when you’re wrong,” McCarthy says. “And listen to them.”
The important thing to remember is that, while a referee might become “the flavor of the week” for the latest call, you’re never as good as anyone says or as bad as — and here Reiss, the boxing referee, interjects: “ … or as bad as the other 50,000 say you are.”
It doesn’t mean there won’t still be a job to do next weekend — and fighters depending on you to do it right.
Category: General Sports
