BOSTON?True to its Pilgrim roots, my hometown was well known for banning books and movies that city fathers considered too ribald or otherwise in poor taste. The city even had its own official censor, one of whom was appropriately named Dick Sinnot.
Get it, sin not?
BANNED IN BOSTON would read the newspaper headlines when a book or a movie was not permitted in the otherwise liberal ?Athens of America.?
Five years ago, mixed martial arts was on Boston’s banned list. ?Human cockfighting,? the tag Sen. John McCain gave to the sport, was verboten in the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
How times have changed.
Last year, Gov. Deval Patrick signed a bill legalizing MMA promotions here and this week UFC 118, featuring BJ Penn against Frankie Edgar and the intriguing boxer versus UFC great Randy Couture, is a complete sellout at the TD Banknorth Garden which, as sponsors come and go, will be forever known to me and many others of a certain age as the Boston Garden.
Massachusetts even formed an MMA commission, separate and apart from its boxing board. It is one of 42 American states who now regulate MMA.
UFC 118 has taken the old Beantown by storm, it really has. The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine had a huge, glowing profile of UFC bossman and former Bostonian Dana White on its cover and The Herald sent Ron Borges out to Vegas to follow White around.
As I rode out of Boston on a Cape Cod bound bus Thursday night, I saw huge billboards plugging the event.
There are more local connections here than White’s.
His former boxing trainer, now an MMA stalwart and boxing tutor for Brock Lesnar, is South Boston (?Southie,? the mainly traditional Irish neighborhood which has produced so many priest, politicians and gangsters (does the name Whitey Bulger ring a bell, check FBI Most Wanted List for more details) resident Peter Welch.
Welch runs the F15 Training Center in Southie and has 400 members and 36 classes each week.
Hawaiian and former lightweight champ Penn has gotten into the local spirit by visiting Plymouth Rock and the Plimoth Plantation, where America’s Thansgiving tradition began.
There’s more Hub area connections among the fighters.
?Kenflo? as they call ex-Boston College soccer player Kenny Florian is from Dover.
Fighter Joe Lauzon is from East Bridgewater.
Marcus Davis, age 37, is a former area pro boxer turned MMA fighter who hails from Houlton, Me., and trains in hardscrabble Somerville.
The enthusiasm for the whole UFC circus, the Fan Expo at the Hynes Center and Friday’s open to the public weigh in at the Garden, is palpable.
Michael Ross, president of the Boston City Council, was raving in one newspaper Friday about the excitement the event has brought to the city and its economy.
With the UFC, which is quite comparable to the NL albeit on a smaller scale, no one athlete and no single bout is the whole package.
Mix in budding movie star Couture (he’s in ?The Expendables? with Stallone) and three division boxing titleholder Toney and you can see why Boston has gone gaga for this one night stand.
I say one night stand but, with this kind of reception, you may be sure that Boston, which once banned the sport, may become an annual stop on the UFC circuit.
I wonder what Myles Standish would make of all this.
Call it Pilgrim’s Progess, I guess.
