The way Casey Oxendine tells it, he was at the Association of Boxing Commissions’ annual conference in San Diego last month, getting ready to explain to the directors of various state athletic commissions why they should sanction a 2-on-2 fighting event known as Arena Combat, when he ran into veteran MMA referee John McCarthy.

They got to talking, and “Big” John, who was just getting ready to leave, asked what Oxendine’s presentation was about.

“I kind of explained it,” Oxendine told MMAjunkie, “and he looked at me sort of funny. He said, ‘You’re about to get torn to shreds trying to get this thing passed.’ I just smiled and told him, ‘Well, that’s the kind of thing I live for.’”

Oxendine did not, as it turns out, get torn to shreds. Which is kind of amazing, when you consider that what he was proposing was a brand of 2-on-2 fighting in a giant, obstacle-strewn arena, an event that at times resembles a small gang fight spanning some sort of demented playground. Somehow, according to Oxendine, when he explained this to the people responsible for keeping the world of combat sports safe and sane, “It actually went over extremely well.”

That claim is backed up by Andy Foster, the executive director of the California State Athletic Commission, who was in attendance when Oxendine made his sales pitch.

“I thought he was well-prepared,” Foster said. “His video was quite good. And I thought it was almost comical watching it. I mean, have you ever seen this thing?”

I have, as a matter of fact. So have many MMA fans, thanks to the passing weirdness of “The Hip Show,” a Russian phenomenon that briefly captured the attention of fight fans when it showed up on AXS TV last year. It was one of those things people didn’t so much watch as gawk at, a bizarre spectacle that seemed too strange to be real, yet too realistic to be fake.

Oxendine was part of the crew that added English commentary to those “Hip Show” events for the benefit of American consumption. Now, as the CEO of Arena Combat, he’s trying to get an American version off the ground, which is a task that requires a certain kind of salesman.

It’s difficult to tell if Oxendine is the perfect man for the job, or just the only one willing to accept it with such optimism and enthusiasm. Then again, maybe that eager willingness is exactly what makes him the right person to do it.

Over the course of our 30-minute phone interview, he compared Arena Combat – favorably – to the game show depicted in the dystopian future world of “The Running Man.” He also compared himself and his organization to the first astronauts to land on the moon – another idea that some people thought of as crazy at the time, he pointed out.

“That was monumental,” Oxendine said. “We are monumental in the exact same way.”

During his time in MMA, Oxendine has been everything from fighter to trainer to referee to promoter. Like the guy who “starts out in the restaurant industry as a dishwasher and is an owner by the end,” he said, he’s worked his way through just about every aspect of the fight business.

He also made a few missteps along the way, including one infamous incident when, in his capacity as a referee, he got involved in an argument with a fighter’s cornerman that ended with Oxendine knocking the man out with a surprise left hook. That didn’t go over well with officials considering MMA regulation in Oxendine’s home state of Tennessee, nor did it make him many fans in the local scene.

Still, to many fighters in Tennessee and the surrounding area, Oxendine’s been a powerful influence. Not only is he a jiu-jitsu black belt who taught many of them the finer points of the ground game, he’s also the kind of guy who, for better or worse, goes out and gets things done.

Blake Grice, the head referee for the South Carolina Athletic Commission, took his first jiu-jitsu class from Oxendine, he said. He would later wind up refereeing events that Oxendine promoted in Tennessee, and eventually dedicating 12 years of his life to MMA officiating.

Grice remembered watching “The Hip Show” on YouTube back when it became a viral sensation.

“I thought it was crazy at the time,” Grice said. “These guys were tackling each other off of obstacles, and it just looked super dangerous. Then I agreed to ref it and learned that that’s against the rules.”

What Grice didn’t realize upon first seeing the events on YouTube was that, before long, his friend Oxendine would convince the South Carolina Athletic Commission that Grice worked for to approve an Arena Combat event in the state.

It wasn’t a quick or easy process. According to Oxendine, it took roughly a year, beginning with an amateur Arena Combat event in Virginia last summer. Oxendine chose Virginia, he said, partly because the state had no sanctioning requirements for amateurs. Therefore he needed no official approval to hold the event as long as there were no professional matches. He recruited local fighters, matched them up in teams, and invited representatives from nearby athletic commissions to come and see it for themselves.

Jonathan Pearce was one of the fighters who competed at that event. He didn’t know much about it at the time, he said, but he knew Oxendine, had trained with him on occasion, and thought this sounded like fun. When he explained to his family that he’d be participating in an event that could potentially see him fighting two opponents at once, he said, they didn’t exactly approve of the decision.

“But then they don’t approve of me doing MMA anyway,” Pearce said.

Pearce didn’t know who his teammate would be or who the two of them would be fighting until a couple hours before the event, he said. That didn’t stop them from winning, however, and it also didn’t stop Pearce from being the event’s highest scorer, according to the complex system of points Arena Combat awards both for techniques employed and obstacles controlled during the course of the match.

“I really liked it,” Pearce said. “You do have to work with your partner a lot more. It’s a team sport, not an individual sport, and you’re only as strong as your weakest link.”

Grice was one of the referees who worked those matches in Virginia. Although he wasn’t sold on the idea right away, he said, the more he learned of the rules and the safety precautions, the more convinced he became that it was a workable idea.

“It’s not as dangerous as it seems, with the rules that are in place and three good referees,” Grice said.

Grice’s stamp of approval would prove to be an important piece of Oxendine’s push for regulation in South Carolina. According to Diana Williams, administrator of the South Carolina Athletic Commission, the commission met in April to discuss the prospects for approving Arena Combat, and it was there that Grice, the commission’s head referee, told the commission that “2-on-2 and standard MMA bouts are about 95 (percent) the same except for the obstacles and different scenarios involved with the team strategies.”

“The biggest concern the commission had was the safety of the fighters,” Williams wrote in an email. “To ensure safety for all participants of the event, the commission increased the number of event doctors from one to three and referees from two to three. The commission also doubled the number of commission staff members to be at the event based on the amount of participants on the fight card. Additionally, the head referee will have a microphone, and the other two officials will have football whistles to stop the fight. The (heavyweight) and super-heavyweight classes have also been removed from participation.”

Approval from the South Carolina commission cleared the way for Arena Combat’s next event, scheduled for September 26 in Myrtle Beach, S.C. The main event of that show, according to Oxendine, will include a team made up of former UFC fighter Rodney Wallace and local fighter Marvin Skipper, taking on former Bellator competitors Amaechi Oselukwue and Adrian Miles.

But even with regulation in South Carolina approving the event, it’s hard to know how to classify the action that will take place there. According to Oxendine, Arena Combat is its own sport, known as “team mixed martial arts.” In the eyes of the South Carolina Athletic Commission, according to Williams, “2-on-2 combat will be classified as MMA bouts.”

But what will that mean for regulators with other commissions that don’t recognize Arena Combat as MMA? According to Foster of the California State Athletic Commission, that’s the tricky part.

Ask Foster if he’s open to the idea of team MMA in his jurisdiction, and you’ll get a very clear answer.

“Casey’s a good guy, a great grappler, but he and I just have a fundamental disagreement on this Arena Combat thing,” Foster said. “I think it’s fair to say that our position here in California is that Arena Combat does not conform to the rules of the California State Athletic Commission. The commission will not be regulating these events. And we’re really not open to discussion. We’re saying no, and there’s a period behind the no.”

At issue for Foster is how entirely different the rules are from anything his commission recognizes as an official combat sport. It would take a change to existing laws in order for Arena Combat to fit the CSAC’s definition for MMA, he said.

But at the same time, with MMA fighters participating in these events in other states, then potentially fighting in sanctioned MMA bouts elsewhere later on, it’s not like state commissions can turn a blind eye to Arena Combat and pretend the events aren’t happening.

“I think we’ve got to look at that,” Foster said. “That’s why it becomes important at least for the event to be recorded on our databases so we know how to appropriately assess whether someone got knocked out, so that they’re not coming back too soon. I mean, a hit’s a hit, whether it’s in boxing or mixed martial arts or Arena Combat.”

There’s also the question of Arena Combat’s potential impact on the perception of MMA. When “Hip Show” events first showed up on American TV, they were greeted with a sort of derisive glee by sports websites like Deadspin. It looks enough like MMA and uses enough of the same rules and terminology that viewers almost can’t help but connect the two, and yet they are not the same sport.

With its obstacles and point system, Arena Combat is more game than fight, something even Oxendine acknowledged when he described it as what “American Gladiators” was supposed to be “before it got watered down and turned into guys fighting with Nerf sticks.”

Yet Oxendine maintains that Arena Combat isn’t a joke or a sideshow so much as an evolution in combat sports. And the promoters who tell fighters to stay away from it, lest it hurt their careers? What they’re really worried about, according to Oxendine, is competition.

“I hear this all the time, that it hurts the sport (of MMA),” Oxendine said. “How does it hurt the sport? … If it hurts mixed martial arts, it’s the same way that mixed martial arts hurts boxing. The people that are saying this, they’re not people who were born into this like I was. It’s an excuse, is what it is.”

According to Grice, who will serve as head referee for Arena Combat’s September event in Myrtle Beach, some of the safety concerns are well-founded.

“Don’t ever let anyone tell you that 2-on-1 is as safe as 1-on-1, because it’s not,” Grice said. “But, with that being said, the rules of the 2-on-1 make it relatively safe.”

The way Grice sees it, the MMA fans who are against Arena Combat aren’t so different from the people who were against MMA in the beginning. He insisted that the conversation the combat sports world is having about 2-on-2 fights isn’t so different from the conversations that swirled around early UFC events.

“Looking back to UFC 1 until now, look at what it’s done,” Grice said. “I think it’s because people gave it a chance. People go to MMA shows every weekend. This is a little something different. It’s refreshing.”

And according to Oxendine, whatever MMA fans might say about Arena Combat, they’ll watch it when given the chance.

“But we’ll also get the people who watch stuff like ‘American Ninja Warrior,’” Oxendine said. “This is like how you’d see stuff in movies or on ‘Star Trek,’ people walking around with little computers in their hands, and that stuff was sci-fi then but it’s reality now. This is the same thing. It’s futuristic, and it’s awesome. The people involved in this now are pioneers.”

That’s something that even Arena Combat’s opponents might not necessarily argue with, said CSAC executive director Foster.

“I mean, look, they’re pioneers,” Foster said. “I don’t want to take that way from them. But a lot of pioneers died on the way out West.”