My love of MMA began on November 12, 1993 with the first pay-per-view titled “The Ultimate Fighting Championship: The Beginning,” and later titled UFC 1.
I grew up watching boxing with my dad. It’s something we shared together and continues to bring back fond memories. But we became disillusioned with boxing due to the priority of money, the alphabet soup of all the feds, and the unsavory characters who were running the events.
The came the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I was already a fan of martial arts in general (I really enjoyed watching kickboxing, and I sought out “exotic” martial arts in television, movies, and magazines… remember, this was before the internet took off).
What I saw with my friends in that first event was a wild combination of extremely divergent weight classes and martial arts styles.
What became the UFC would offer crazy mix-ups where a sumo wrestler would get defeated by a head kick from a much smaller guy. The Ultimate Fighting Championship was a tournament-style bracket event, where only one person won. It was a crazy experiment and it was exciting.
Royce Gracie
The guy who won that first tournament (and many more) was Royce Gracie.
What was amazing about Royce Gracie is that he was an average-size man. If you saw him walking down the street you wouldn’t assume that he was a martial arts master, much less the type of person who could defeat someone like Ken Shamrock.
Royce Gracie was the poster-boy for Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu and his success in the octagon was an amazing advertisement for how effective it was.
It’s been 25 years and the UFC (and MMA in general) has changed radically, but you have to realize how revolutionary the Ultimate Fighting Championship was at the time. And Royce Gracie was a major part of that revolution.
I was dazzled by the success and efficiency of the wins by Gracie. His ability to take on bigger, stronger, and highly-skilled opponents, and beat them, was thrilling to see and made me a lifelong fan of MMA.
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