The UFC at 30: From Royce Gracie to Conor McGregor, top fights, huge KOs and how Dana White shaped the MMA world
THE Ultimate Fighting Championship celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend.
And to say things have changed since that cold November night in Denver, Colorado – which forever reshaped combat sports – would be an understatement.
The promotion’s inaugural event introduced Americans, and indeed the entire world, to a unique and previously unseen blend of combat.
Eight men from different disciplines vied to prove their respective craft was the most effective and become the Ultimate Fighting Champion.
The combatants didn’t know at the time, but they laid the foundations for what would eventually become one of the most popular sports on the planet.
The landscape of mixed martial arts, and indeed the UFC, have drastically changed since that historic Denver night.
So with that in mind, SunSport thought it’d only be right to relive the ten most pivotal moments in the the MMA leader’s history.
UFC 1
The event that unknowingly changed the face of combat sports forever.
The eight-man tournament – which included former WWE star Ken Shamrock – captivated a pay-per-view audience of over 86,000, which, at the time, was an incredible number to pull in.
The pure spectacle of watching martial artists big and small trying to utilise their crafts to incapacitate each other was a major selling point.
Many thought musclebound man-mountain Shamrock would be the surefire winner.
But they were left stunned when the then-unknown and undersized Brazilian jiu-jitsu icon Royce Gracie proved that muscles don’t win fights with back-to-back first-round submission wins over Shamrock and Gerard Gordeau to win the tournament.
Zuffa purchase and Dana White’s appointment
The UFC’s former billionaire owners Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta purchased the then-struggling promotion in January 2001 from SEG for a cool $2million.
The BJJ fans were convinced to do so by their good friend and fellow martial arts aficionado Dana White.
The Fertittas handed the reigns to White shortly after acquiring the promotion, installing him as president of the company.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
The Ultimate Fighter 1
Despite being popular among martial arts fans, the Fertittas’ $2m investment was looking like being a major flop.
They’d spent a whopping $40m to try and legitimize and make the UFC a mainstream entity but had little success.
The brothers contemplated cutting their losses in late 2003 and early 2004.
But after coming up with the idea of a reality TV show pitting UFC hopefuls against one another to win a six-figure contract, they injected what proved to be a crucial additional $10m.
The iconic Ultimate Fighter was born and captivated audiences on Spike TV.
But it was the epic finale between former light-heavyweight champion Forrest Griffin and the late Stephan Bonnar which catapulted to the sport to new heights.
Their three-round war was so entertaining that thousands of viewers who happened to stumble on the fight called their friends to tell them to change the channel and tune in.
There was a massive spike in live viewers during the bout, which ended up being watched by over THREE MILLION people.
Many of them ended up becoming followers of the sport and indeed the UFC itself, so much so White has repeatedly dubbed the Hall of Fame slugfest as the fight that saved the promotion.
Chuck Liddell vs Tito Ortiz II
Hall-of-Famer Chuck Liddell was undoubtedly the UFC’s first superstar.
The former light-heavyweight champion’s combination of brutal knockouts and his badass mohawk made him a cult phenomenon.
He even appeared in the hit HBO comedy Entourage and the MTV show Punk’d.
Liddell carried the UFC on his back during the early 2000s, with his rivalry with former team-mate Tito Ortiz being a driving force in the promotion’s mainstream success.
Their 2006 rematch was watched by 929,000 people, who saw The Iceman score a second-successive TKO victory over his friend-turned-rival.
The signing of Ronda Rousey
Believe it or not, there was once a huge stigma about women competing in mixed martial arts.
The general public couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the concept of female martial artists wanting to test their skills inside the cage like their male counterparts.
That changed in November 2012 when former Olympian Ronda Rousey became the first woman signed to the UFC after the promotion’s 2011 acquisition of Strikeforce.
Although the now-defunct Strikeforce had put on plenty of female fights, none of them had crossed over into the mainstream.
The pay-per-view platform the UFC had, however, allowed them to do so.
Dana White and Co decided to give Rousey the chance to show the world what women’s mixed martial arts was all about at UFC 157 against Liz Carmouche.
A star was born just in just under five minutes as Rousey defended her bantamweight title with her signature armbar.
The cover-model-looking assassin’s popularity exploded and continued to grow with each passing win, so much so that she crossed over into the mainstream.
Her career may have ended with a whimper, but her contribution to the UFC and indeed women’s MMA in general cannot be overstated.
Conor McGregor’s coronation
Retired Rousey may have been the big crossover star of the Zuffa era, but that changed in 2015 when a certain Conor McGregor reached the pinnacle of the sport.
The Irishman came in like a wrecking ball in 2013 and transformed the sport with a previously unseen brand of trash talk – all of which he backed up.
With McGregor came a cult-like support from his countrymen, which, again, had never been seen before.
December 12, 2015, proved to be the date McGregor went from a popular mixed martial artist to a global icon.
His viral 13-second one-punch KO of Hall-of-Famer Jose Aldo saw him claim the featherweight title and catapulted him into superstardom.
He would further cement his legacy in the sport three fights later by becoming the promotion’s first-ever simultaneous two-weight world champion with a second-round knockout of lightweight king Eddie Alvarez in 2016.
That would pave the way for a shock crossover into boxing for a multi-million-dollar showdown with Floyd Mayweather, which raised his and the UFC’s profiles to new heights.
Sale to WME-IMG
In the summer of 2016, just days after a historic UFC 200 card at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, the MMA leader quietly completed a whopping $4billion sale to WME-IMG.
The promotion has gone from strength to strength under the stewardship of the powerhouse talent agency and CEO Ari Emmanuel, with the company being valued at $12.3 billion prior to its merger with the WWE and the recent formation of the TKO Group.
UFC 205 in New York
Madison Square Garden is undoubtedly one of the meccas of combat sports. The Garden had been graced by the likes of Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson and Rocky Marciano.
Not long after taking the reigns, White envisaged holding an event at ‘The World’s Most Famous Arena’. The only problem was the long-standing ban on mixed martial arts in the state.
That ban, however, was lifted in March 2016 – paving the way for the UFC to host its inaugural event at MSG – UFC 205 – and make further inroads to becoming a mainstream entity.
Khabib Nurmagomedov vs Conor McGregor – the biggest pay-per-view in UFC history
The groundwork for the biggest grudge match in UFC history was laid the very night McGregor captured his second world title at MSG.
A frustrated Khabib Nurmagomedov called for his crack at the Dubliner after wrongly being stiffed of a title shot.
But it wasn’t until the infamous UFC 223 media day nearly two years later that their feud boiled over.
McGregor, 35, infamously attacked a bus carrying the undefeated Nurmagomedov with a dolley after seeing his former pal Artem Lobov slapped by his fellow Russian.
The incident went viral and prompted the UFC to pit their pair against one another in October 2018.
A whopping 2.4 million people parted with their hard-earned cash to watch the rivals do battle in the main event of UFC 229.
And they got their money‘s worth as they saw a huge post-fight melee take place after a fired-up Nurmagomedov submitted McGregor with a fourth-round neck crank.
ESPN Deal
When he accepted the job from the Fertittas nearly 23 years ago, White had a vision of putting the UFC on the biggest platform sporting platform known to man – ESPN.
It seemed like a pipe dream at the time and many shot down the prospect of the worldwide leader in sports ever getting in the MMA business.
But in 2019, after seeing the immense popularity of the sport and the UFC, ESPN bigwigs decided to give the promotion a game-changing five-year broadcast deal.