How did Rep. Alice Bordsen end up promoting mixed martial arts?

The Mebane Democrat said she originally wrote a bill that would make it more difficult to hold Toughman matches, a form of amateur boxing banned in 24 states. She said regulating the matches was putting a financial strain on state enforcers.

Rather than ban it outright, Bordsen said House legislators decided to make it more difficult to get insurance, hoping that would reduce the number of matches. But insurers said that would put a burden on them to write policies no one would buy.

She said she then heard about mixed martial arts as an alternative.

"It is tightly regulated, has real standards of sport and athleticism, has a low injury rate, is exciting but not as violence-craving as Toughman, and brings significant revenues to a community," she wrote in an e-mail to Dome.

But the Senate added Toughman fights back to the bill and sent it back to the House. Bordsen said the bill is now the opposite of what she originally intended.

A Senate bill would create an advisory commission to oversee boxing.

The bill, which passed 44-4 this afternoon, would create a state boxing commission to oversee prizes, the integrity of the matches and health of the boxers.

The commission would have no regulatory power or funding.

But Sen. Ellie Kinnaird said that it was just the first of several pieces of legislation aimed at the 40 or so boxing matches in North Carolina each year.

The Carrboro Democrat said another bill would outlaw so-called "toughman matches," which she said are amateur boxing matches which feature "two people with very few morals or integrity just going at each other."