One could argue that no single living person has done more to shape the rules and officiating of mixed martial arts than John McCarthy, the man who began his career as an MMA referee all the way back at UFC 2 in 1994.

One could also argue — as McCarthy himself would — that he had no idea what he was getting himself into back then, and might have reconsidered if he had.

The first fight he refereed ended in less than 30 seconds. The second was only slightly longer than that.

“I go, 'This is easy!'” McCarthy told a room full of referees, judges and commission officials at the 2026 Combat Sports Officials Summit in Las Vegas last month. “And from that moment, my life was a living hell.”

What he means is, there were some bumps in the road. Obstacles, you might say. Mistakes from which everyone must learn and grow. You set up a cage and organize some fights around the promise that there will be (almost) no rules, and then something happens that makes everyone think, 'Well, actually maybe there should be a rule about that.'

Like how there was a time when no one in the UFC thought twice about letting fighters grab and cling to the chainlink fence of the cage. Then, McCarthy said, “Jerry Bohlander grabbed it so hard he bent the metal.”

Next thing you know, the UFC had a rule against grabbing the fence. It’s still there today, along with a bunch of others that arose through a process of trial and error. After UFC 14 in 1997, for instance, McCarthy and other officials sat down and created 18 new rules. This gradual and sometimes painful process is how the modern version of MMA took shape — and McCarthy was there for it all. Through both his advocacy and his example, he formed the basis for how MMA should be officiated.

It’s a little strange for him now, at age 63, to look back on his place in the history of this sport. He initially accepted a role as referee for UFC 2 mostly as a favor to Rorion Gracie, whom he met through his own martial arts training. (Fun bit of trivia: Many people mistakenly think McCarthy began refereeing at UFC 1. In fact, he was present at the event, but he stuck close to Gracie with a gun concealed on his person, just in case family squabbles among the Gracie clan caused trouble.)

The instructions he was first given as a referee were simple: Don’t stop the fight until someone taps out or gets knocked unconscious. This is actually how he came to be hired for that second event. A referee named João Barreto disobeyed those instructions when he stopped a fight at UFC 1 after seeing blood and teeth sprayed across the canvas, so Gracie went looking for a replacement.

According to McCarthy, he didn’t think those instructions were practical or smart. If he was going to referee, he told Gracie, he needed to be able to stop a fight once one of the fighters could no longer intelligently defend himself. Gracie resisted for a while.

Finally, McCarthy said, Gracie told him: OK, you can stop a fight if … whatever you said. And so it began. Rules. Guidelines. The vague shape of an actual sport forming. The process was, according to McCarthy, a “real pain in the ass.” But he believed in it, so he kept at it.

That was a few decades ago. He never thought this would be his life. Certainly not this long, or to this extent. Now there’s a whole generation of referees and other officials who’ve come up under his guidance, seeking out his advice. He’s happy to give it. He sees it as his primary way to contribute to the future of the sport at this point, doling out wisdom and warnings in that gruff big brother way he has, where it almost feels like he’s bullying you in a weirdly positive way.

According to longtime commentator and Uncrowned contributor Sean Wheelock, who helped organize this summit, McCarthy is the kind of person who, when you meet him, turns out to be “exactly who you want him to be.”

McCarthy will gladly admit that he’s a person of strong opinions, never one to sit back quietly and watch others screw up. That helps explain why he’s stuck around so long in this sport, and also why he’s been such an important part of shaping it. As much of a pain as it might have been to fight against the current for so long with this sport, he didn’t have it in him to just give in and float downstream.

“I have a big mouth and it's gotten me in a lot of trouble,” McCarthy said. “Throughout my time in the sport, I've pissed a lot of people off and that's OK. I accept it. I accept that I'm not going to make everyone happy. I accept that not everyone's going to like me, and I'm OK with that. But I would rather be honest and tell you, ‘Hey, this is my opinion and this is why.’ And if you don't like it, that's OK.”

Not unlike the fighters who stick around in this sport across multiple eras, McCarthy has lived many lives in MMA. From those wild early days to the growing pains of the modern era, all the way to a later period that came with difficult questions about how to manage his own physical decline, McCarthy has had to repeatedly reassess his role in MMA.

The biggest change for him came after a neck injury suffered on the mats about a decade ago.

“I got hurt,” McCarthy said. “I got hurt bad. I got paralyzed. … It got to the point where I couldn’t lift my arm. … I couldn’t put my backpack, even though that’s all I had, into the upper tray of an airplane.

"I couldn’t take a potato chip and lift it to my mouth. So that was a concern. I was like, 'S***, I’m not safe to go in there and do this job.'”

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When he realized he needed to step away was after UFC 217 in 2017, McCarthy said. He was working a title fight between Rose Namajunas and Joanna Jedrzejczyk, but when he went to stop the bout he realized his physical limitations were impacting how he did it.

“In the older days, I would [have] just grabbed [Namajunas], pick her up away from [Jedrzejczyk], and stop the fight,” McCarthy said. “And I realized at that moment, I’m not sure I can pick her up.

"In my mind, I looked at it and went, ‘I can’t do this. I’m going to end up being the cause of someone getting hurt, because I’m not 100%.’”

Around this time, McCarthy got offered a job doing on-air commentary for Bellator broadcasts. It was a fine job, one he never felt entirely comfortable in, McCarthy said, but it wasn’t the same as officiating. As a ref, he reminded the attendees of the officials summit, you have a team. You have the other refs, the judges and the athletic commission officials, a community of people to support and help and guide you.

When he took the commentary gig, McCarthy said, his old team was gone. “You have no idea how much you miss it until it’s gone,” he added.

In 2025, McCarthy got back in the cage as a referee. Neck surgery helped — first a disc replacement, then a fusion, making him the rare person to get both. His schedule isn’t nearly as packed these days, and he’s fine with that. What means more to him, he said, are these opportunities to help the next generation of officials.

Some of them — guys like Chris Leben and Frank Trigg — he first got to know when they were fighters. He watched them make a difficult transition from that life to this one, learning all new ways to be a part of the sport. Some of the people he’s mentored are mentors themselves now. It’s a satisfying feeling, and one he never expected when he first said yes to this gig.

“I'll tell you, I got a text from one of these [referees]," McCarthy said. "I'm not going to say who, but I got a text from him today where he did fights yesterday and said, ‘Hey man, I want you to know that in my head, I was repeating the words that you told me the last time that we worked together.’

"And I was just like, ‘Dude, you know how good that makes me feel?’ I mean, that's like hitting a home run. That's like me having a great fight where everything goes right. The fact that, you know what, he went out and he used that little bit that I gave him and now he's able to put that into his toolbox and make the right decision on a fight and feel good about it? Dude, there's nothing better for me.”

LAS VEGAS — In the middle of a debate over the differences between a 10-8 round and a 10-9 round on boxing scorecards, California State Athletic Commission executive director Andy Foster stands up to put an end to the argument.

“Let’s not make boxing into MMA,” Foster tells the room full of experienced judges, referees and other officials. “Because MMA is hard to score.”

This gets a laugh out of the attendees at the 2026 Combat Sports Officials Summit, where both judges and referees have gathered to sharpen their skills. They recognize the truth of the statement.

Boxing is a relatively simple sport for judges. Two fighters. Each with two fists. All they’re permitted to do is punch each other above the waist throughout a series of three-minute rounds. A knockdown means a 10-8. Most other outcomes result in a 10-9 in one direction or the other. That makes it easy on the judges. There’s only so much to watch for.

But MMA? Over the course of any five-minute round you might see the full spectrum of the combat sports rainbow. One guy lands some good leg kicks. The other takes him down and punches him a few times before getting snared in a submission attempt that forces him to go from offense to defense. One guy bloodies the other’s nose. The other keeps kicking that lead leg until it’s bright red and its owner limps off to his corner at the end of the round.

Quickly now, who won? And by what score? You have a few seconds to mark it down on that card and sign your name. The name part is important because, if your score differs from those of the people scoring (in their own heads, at their own leisure) from home, they need to know who to yell at. Maybe you cost their favorite fighter a win. Maybe you cost them actual money they bet on the other guy.

They would now like to question your qualifications, your intelligence, your entire existence. They know your name and your judging history and they have questions, you see. These questions include “how did you ever get this job,” but also “what is wrong with you,” and let us not forget the classic “are you stupid or something?”

Between them, the people in this room have scored hundreds if not thousands of rounds of MMA and boxing. In the eyes of the public, they have sinned and been forgiven and then sinned again. One will later recount, almost fondly, the guy who still occasionally sends him Facebook messages about a 29-28 score he turned in for a UFC prelim fight four years ago. (The guy thought it should have been 29-28 the other way, and is apparently still heated about it.) One tells me that judging MMA fights is the way he learned, through necessity, how to turn off the messaging function on Instagram. Another will recall the hardest round he ever had to score, an entire frame in which neither party landed a single strike.

When the fans on the internet learn your name, things are about to get rough. Any judge who sits in that chair long enough is going to find out eventually. You turn in a scorecard the masses disagree with and suddenly "you're the flavor of the week," veteran referee “Big” John McCarthy says. They'll tell you that you're the worst ever. They'll ask you: Do you even know what MMA means?

"It gets worse than that," says judge and referee Nick Berens, and the whole room chuckles.

To call judging a thankless task is to understate the situation considerably. It is, as longtime boxing referee and judge Jack Reiss says, “a part-time job with a full-time commitment.”

He means this more literally than you might think. He means that judges ought to be doing it even when someone else is getting paid for it. And they should make sure they're doing it well even then.

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That's because judging fights is, as famed MMA official McCarthy will say more than once this weekend, “a perishable skill.” If you don’t use it — and use it regularly, whether you’re technically on the job or not — you’ll lose it.

“The best people who do this,” McCarthy says, “they’re judging fights online with other judges, they’re on group texts, they’re always watching fights.”

This isn’t exactly a rule for judges, though there are plenty of those. There are also strong suggestions, best practices, tips for staying gainfully employed. For example, never talk to the media unless your commission gives you the go-ahead. There’s one rule. Don’t write down a running a score of a round; keep it in your head and remember that the scorecard is a legal document. Don’t give “sympathy rounds,” awarding a round to one fighter simply for doing better than he did in previous rounds.

Don’t be seen chewing gum during a fight. Don’t wear earbuds or take notes, since both can distract you from the action. Matter of fact, go to even greater lengths to avoid distractions. Any urgent news from home that can wait until the day after the event? Best to avoid it until then, so as not to have it weighing on your mind.

Don’t give 10-10 scores unless it is absolutely impossible to avoid. If you can watch an entire round of fighting and still conclude that you can’t pick a winner, Foster says, “We’ll find someone who can.”

The best people who do this, they’re judging fights online with other judges, they’re on group texts, they’re always watching fights.John McCarthy

And while he’s doling out advice, Foster adds another that he didn’t think he’d ever have to come out and say.

“You know how on a can of paint it’ll say, 'Do not eat?’” he says. Yeah, this is one of those. Obvious to some but apparently not all: Don’t get into a backstage argument with a fighter trying to explain why he lost.

One reason why, Foster says, is because “people have phones.” The video of your altercation will end up on the internet, and your local commission head will end up talking to high-ranking state officials about you, which is never good.

But the judging fights with peers thing? It’s not quite a rule. But yes, when you start talking to the judges gathered here for this summit, you find out it’s something they adhere to. Often, in fact. Many will tell you that if fights are on it means their phones are buzzing with constant message alerts. This is a conversation that starts with the first prelim and runs through the last fight of the card.

“Ask my wife,” McCarthy says, referring to how often his own phone lights up when there are fights happening anywhere in the world. “It’s constant.”

But it’s not just about watching fights on TV and coming up with hypothetical scores for each round. For the exercise to serve its purpose, judges need to be offering that score to others who will push back when needed. They need someone on the other end of the exchange who’s willing to hold them accountable.

“You have to have people you can count on to tell you when you’re wrong,” McCarthy says. But the circle should be small and dependable — never random strangers on the internet.

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Dan Furse, a longtime judge with the state athletic commission in Utah, says his colleagues use the Marco Polo app for these conversations. There they offer up for group discussions a “round of the week” to score and discuss and debate. The thinking is, if you can’t sit on the hot seat and explain yourself to fellow judges, you don’t have any business judging actual fights.

How Furse got roped into this world was, from the early days of local MMA in the state of Utah, he attended as many fights as he could. He also fought a couple times — Tapology confirms that “Tabasco Dan” went 2-0 in the span of one month back in 2005 — and eventually got asked to be a judge when a promoter needed someone to fill in on extremely short-notice.

“I figured, as a fair-minded person who’s reasonably intelligent and knows this sport, I could do about as well as anyone,” he says. “I think the things all these other judges share is that they love this sport but they also want to continue to learn. They have a thirst for knowledge.”

This gets at some questions we don’t often bother to ask about MMA’s judges. What kind of person wants to perform this essential but much-maligned task — and why? The pay isn’t great. No one thanks you when you get it right. Most of the time no one except other judges even notice when you get it right. But when you get it wrong, or at least are widely perceived to have done so? Then everybody hates you. Who would sign up for that?

Answers may vary, but the core commonalities seem to be this: These are people who genuinely love this sport and can’t stand to see others mess it up. They’ve gotten as frustrated as you have by fights that resulted in baffling scorecards. They believe there is a right way to go about this. They also are not content to sit at home and shout at the TV about it. That’s why they’re here, trying to sharpen their skills further.

I think the things all these other judges share is that they love this sport but they also want to continue to learn. They have a thirst for knowledge.Dan Furse

It’s stuff like this that gives McCarthy a sense of optimism about the future of this aspect of MMA officiating.

“People that are judging right now are doing a better job at this moment in the sport than it's ever been done,” McCarthy says. “They're doing an outstanding job, and it is a difficult, difficult job. And I'm telling you, when you're here and you're putting your score and your name on a thing, it's enough to where there's pressure because I could pull it out and say, ‘What the hell, Ben? What were you thinking?’ It's a whole lot more when it's a real one that affects someone's livelihood. And everyone takes it super serious.”

It’s never going to be the kind of thing that’s appreciated by all. If you can’t stand being the bad guy sometimes, this is not the job for you.

But somebody has to do it, don’t they? And here those people are, on a rare weekend that’s free of all combat sports, gathered together in a hotel conference room to try to get better at it. That alone ought to give us some hope.

This gets at something essential about the judging experience. From the outside, this doesn’t seem like a difficult job. You’ve watched a lot of fights, right? You can tell the winner from the loser. Your math skills are competent enough to handle the 10-point must system. You could totally do this better than a lot of these idiots who apparently end up cageside at UFC events, messing up entire careers — not to mention parlays — with their incompetence.

But it starts to feel very different the moment there’s any hint of accountability. For instance, when you’re sitting there in a room full of judges, watching and scoring rounds from past MMA bouts, and then you have to mark your scorecard and sign your name on it before handing it in. You don’t get to sit there and think about it, either. You better have your score ready as soon as the round ends, because McCarthy will be coming around to collect them immediately, just like the commission does at an actual MMA event.

And if your scorecard puts you out of alignment with the other judges in the room? Then McCarthy is going to hold it up, call out your name, and ask you to explain yourself. At various points during this summit, everyone from retired UFC fighter Chris Leben to longtime boxing and MMA judge Adelaide Byrd will be asked to explain their scores. And they’ll do it, just as they have become used to doing it in their own group chats and text threads.