Mohawks and headphones

June 17, 2008 – 12:17 pm by fightlinker

For a sport with so few rules, we all sure have a hard time figuring out what’s illegal and what’s not. First there was the big debate on what a ‘downward elbow’ meant. And still in a grey zone is the definition of ’spiking’ and when that applies. Now we’ve got another debate: what constitutes as “the back of the head”.

For those of you who like to read in circles and get frustrated, Sherdog has an article which basically says no one agrees on what the fuck the back of the head is. Big John McCarthy, who was around and helped define a lot of the rules when they were made, says the back of the head is a ‘mohawk stripe’, while Herb Dean says the NSAC and CSAC made a verbal change to the rule (because who needs to write this shit down, right?) to the ‘headphones’ definition.

But wait! It gets better: some of the refs in Nevada and California apply the mohawk and some use the headphones. So depending on which ref you get, you’re fighting under different rules. Awesome.

The silver lining in all this is that there’s a conference in Montreal next month to clarify a lot of the rules. Whether anything will actually get done there, I dunno. But it is my best chance to spike Armando Garcia with 10 hits of acid, so you better believe I’ll be there to see what happens.