Lord of the ring

Ultimate fighting champ seeks faith-based credibility for blood sport | Mark Bergin

Face swollen and body battered, 43-year-old Randy Couture delivered an improbable victory speech on the heels of his Ultimate Fighting Championship title bout last spring. Captain America, as he is widely known, declared his allegiance to "Jesus Christ, who stood up and died for our sins."

Unlike the post-game deference to God common among Christian football or basketball stars, Couture's statement of faith hailed from a stage many Christians consider unsavory. UFC is the world's leading purveyor of mixed martial arts, a bloody and brutal sport that combines wide-ranging fighting styles from kickboxing to jujitsu to Greco-Roman wrestling.

This month, the cable television network Spike TV debuts season 6 of its reality show The Ultimate Fighter, which has helped launch the once fledgling sport into the mainstream. Just two years ago, UFC's pay-per-view offerings garnered few more than 100,000 buys. But in 2006, the UFC drew more than a million customers for one event and broke the pay-per-view industry's all-time record for a single year of revenue with $222,766,000.