SPORTING PASSIONS/WAYNE MCCULLOUGH: The former world champion boxer talks to Mark Roddenabout his passion for one of America's fastest growing and most controversial sports

I WORK for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) which is a mixed martial arts organisation. Most of the mixed martial arts are in Japan and places like that, but in 2001 the UFC came along and it was legalised as a sport. They got all the top commissions on board, brought their own doctors in, and the sport has just gone through the roof since.

I'm a boxer so I love contact sports. In the UFC, they get into a cage and they lock it. It's just you and the other guy. The referee is in there too, but the cage is massive and you can't really see out like you can see through the ropes in boxing. I just think it's like the old gladiator days - you go in there and focus and just fight each other until it's over, by knockout, submission or by tapping out to let the referee know you want out of the ring.

A lot of people think it's just a blood sport, but when they get on the canvas they're doing a lot of technical stuff. They do boxing, they do wrestling and they do Jiu-Jitsu. So it has combined sports together and these guys work hard in the gym as well.

They were in Belfast last June and they got the biggest gate ever in the Odyssey arena. Last year they were in London, they were in Newcastle in January and then in June they're going back to London to the O2 Arena.

It's going to become more popular over there. In England they go crazy for the tickets and when I was in Belfast in January people were asking me, "when's the UFC coming back"? They're talking about coming to Dublin as well so that's going to be good.

It would amaze you the way tickets go - they're on the market one day and they're sold out the next. They have a fight card in Canada in April, a guy called Georges St-Pierre is fighting, and the tickets sold out in 24 hours. The first 12,000 tickets sold out in something like one hour.

It's hard for me to take in because I've never really seen boxing tickets go like that at all - it's like a rock concert almost.

In boxing, if you look at Ricky Hatton-Floyd Mayweather, De La Hoya-Mayweather, they focus on the main event. Nobody could even say who's on the undercard because nobody really cares. But the UFC build up their fan base for the small guy on the card right through to the main event, so they all get a big following.

Usually, you have nine fights on the card and from the first fight the fans are packed in. In boxing the arena's empty until just before the main event.

I think boxing could take a leaf out of the UFC's book and promote everybody. But the problem is there's so many greedy promoters. They care about the main event making $100 million and they don't really care about the undercard.

All the sponsors are jumping on board because they market the UFC right. The UFC's on TV almost every night. But it comes down to one thing, it has one promoter. Dana White is the president of it and he came from a boxing background. So he watched what boxing did wrong and is doing it right now.

I've been watching the UFC for about five or six years. I've been asked by so many people if I'm going to fight in it. But I'm 5ft 7in and I weigh about nine and a half stone. One of the guys is about my size, but he fights at 11st 1lb - 155 pounds is the lightest weight. But the guy is massive, he's dropping 20 or 30 pounds to get to that weight.

I'd have to eat in McDonalds breakfast, lunch and dinner to get up there. I'm 37. I'm not saying I'll never try it, but as a career, it's way past my sell-by-date.

Wayne McCullough won a silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and is a former WBC bantamweight champion. He has worked as a spokesman for the UFC since June.