LAS VEGAS – There are no seats on the ground level of the coffee shop on this bright, beautiful Saturday morning so, without hesitation, Sam Chinkes bounds up the steps, two at a time, to find a seat on the second floor.

He hasn't even sat down when he beams, as he often seems to do, and asks, "What do you think of that kid, Jon Jones? Something, isn't he?"

Jones, the UFC light heavyweight champion, is indeed something, and Chinkes is right on the money with his opinion about the sport's pound-for-pound best fighter.

Chinkes is a serious mixed martial arts fan and plans to attend the World Series of Fighting card on Saturday with his buddy, Sidney Graber. He describes himself as "a very big MMA fan," but the WSOF card at the Hard Rock will be his first live event.

Chinkes and Graber, though, aren't your average fans of MMA, a sport in which the target demographic is 18-to-34-year-old males. The men are no less passionate about MMA than the target crowd, but they're a wee bit outside of the demo.

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They're each 90 years old, one-time boxing fans who turned to MMA when they became disillusioned by what they viewed was happening to boxing.

"There's a lot more happening, a lot more action [in an MMA fight] than in boxing," Chinkes said. "And they give you more evenly matched fights in [MMA] than they do in boxing."

Chinkes came first to MMA. A former advertising executive who grew up rooting for the many Jewish boxing stars in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, he found MMA almost by accident while channel surfing.

It was about 2008, he said, and he was sitting in his chair, looking for something worthwhile to watch. Nothing could keep his interest.

"I don't like those daytime dramas, because they're written to go on forever," Chinkes said. "I like to watch courtroom dramas. I like all that criminal stuff, I guess, because I'm from New York. … But this one day, I was trying to find something to watch and there was nothing. Just nothing. It was all terrible. And finally, I came across this fight and wouldn't you know it, I loved it."

He'd found a UFC fight card, and was intrigued by the pace at which the bouts were fought, as well as by the seemingly nonstop action. He long had been a boxing fan, and recalled in his youth sitting in front of the radio listening to Max Baer fights, but he was blown away by MMA.

The athleticism and the conditioning of the MMA fighters really impressed him.

"Boxing has three-minute rounds, and this has five-minute rounds and they're still able to fight hard for all five minutes," he said. "That was amazing to me."

Before long, he was hooked. He developed into such a full-fledged fan that his wife of 63 years began to roll her eyes when she walked past and noticed him watching MMA again.

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