Whether you're a sports fan or not, you've probably heard of the following acronym: UFC. Also known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship, this wildly popular competition in which mixed martial artists — athletes who study and train in various martial art forms like Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu — restricted by a set of rules, a referee, a cage and a pair of 4-ounce gloves, engage in combat and fight until there is a knock-out, a submission, a corner-stoppage or the referee's intervention.
The hottest ticket in Las Vegas, it has found a place in the heart of athletes around the world. It was deemed "human cockfighting," brutal and uncivilized, but the UFC and the sport of mixed martial arts has persevered. Come Nov. 13 at the Ioka Theater in Exeter, N.H., a new league, the Global Fight League (GFL) created by a group of local friends, will soon introduce itself.
The president of the GFL is 32-year-old Amesbury native Scott Millette, a former professional snowboarder who has seen nearly every angle of sporting business.
Millette left for Lake Tahoe, Calif., after high school, exploding into his new life of snowboarding. Along the way, Millette built snowboards, fixed snowboards and became a technical representative for Airwalk. He was sponsored by popular companies like Burton and Nidecker. But after residing there for the better part of three years, he decided to come home to his girlfriend and a job at the Amesbury Sports Park.
Once home, he became an agent for a variety of talented snowboarders (for example, Seabrook's Scotty Lago) and surfers, created his own innovative snowboard company, Kapital Snowboards, that specialized in making boards for younger riders, and eventually was hired as the freestyle snowboarding coach at the Carrabassett Valley Academy in Maine.
While working at the Flatbread Co. in Amesbury and thanks to the support of friends Joni Jackman, Jay Gould and Kevin and Shane Pine, Millette came to the decision that he was ready to give snowboarding a temporary rest, and went to Northern Essex Community College, where he earned an associate's degree in business.
Though the majority of Millette's life and time has been spent on the slopes, his other love, a sport he has been pushing since its earliest pay-per-view inception, will be his biggest venture to date.
"Scott always has ideas," said 44-year-old New Market, N.H., resident Kevin Pine, a friend of Millette who runs a Flatbread restaurant in Portsmouth. "He's definitely a go-getter. He's motivated and he's very passionate about what he wants. He made good friends and some very intricate connections over the years, and he's in the right position to make this work."
Along with friends Rob Hewitt, Graham Suorsa, Mike Makiej and Pine, they have formed a business partnership that will bring Southern New Hampshire a new brand of mixed martial arts — one that will bring back the nostalgia of 1920s boxing with its stylized and high-quality atmosphere.
"We're going to help these kids grow as athletes, and whether they stay with us or move on, we'll be proud of that because that's our aim," stated Millete, whose obligations toward the new mixed martial arts league spread from the maintaining the right vision for the league to the treatment and comfort of the fighters. "As much as we want to entertain our audience, we want to build the reputation of our fighters to the highest degree possible.
"We want to show people who are fighters are, what they've gone through, and how far they've come," he said.
Hewitt, a 29-year-old Newburyport resident who runs a marketing company called the Alpha Group, couldn't agree more.
"We've studied and looked at many organizations and promoters and noticed that more often than not, the fighters, who are getting their faces and bodies pounded in training and during fights, aren't being compensated enough," said Hewitt. "We want to change all of that and put the fighters before everything else.
"I can't explain my excitement for this league," said Hewitt. "There are a lot of fighters in our area that are world class and we're very eager to show the region just that."
Getting the league started was never an easy proposition. Millette and his gang needed to obtain a license from the boxing commission, find a suitable and large enough showcase for the event, a caged enclosure and mat, attract sponsors, and then begin the search for the best of New England's many mixed martial artists.
In an area that has produced such great mixed martial artists as Kenny Florian and Jorge Riviera, and boxers like Mickey Ward and John Ruiz, the task of finding talent remained difficult. But Dan Bonnell, GFL's matchmaker, has suddenly made the undertaking that much easier.
"I'm looking for the most competitive of fighters," explained the 28-year-old Bonnell, a Haverhill resident who has a 5-4 mixed martial arts record and is currently on a four fight win-streak that has spanned two undefeated years. "Someone who is exciting to watch and who is fighting for a reason beyond money. A competitor who is going through the motions to earn a paycheck is not what I'm looking for. The GFL will have an assortment of passionate fighters," he said.
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