With UFC 275 on the horizon in June, it’s yet another UFC card in this jam-packed year for MMA.
It can be hard to pack excitement into that many cards over the years, but Dana White has succeeded in building a global phenomenon that attracts attention from fans, the media, and increasingly in the betting world with UFC Vegas Odds becoming more readily available.
The more and more of these pay-per-views that get stacked up it’s also impressive to look back on just how it all began.
With the amount of pay-per-views getting stacked up in 2022, it’s astonishing to see how far UFC has come since it’s humble beginnings.
UFC 1 was held in 1993 at the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, and the organizers picked Colorado because they had no athletic commission – thus there would be fewer hurdles to clear to holding this one-of-a-kind competition.
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How Did Ultimate Fighting Championship Get Started?
This was the first official mixed martial arts tournament for what would eventually become the UFC, but the idea stemmed from the Gracie Garage Challenge where the first family of fighting would take on fighters of different backgrounds from California.
Rorion Gracie and co-promoter Art Davie originally wanted to have a 16-man tournament to help determine the most dominant fighting style in the world. Less than a dozen fighters responded though, so an 8-man tournament was settled on.
Popular video games of the time like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter were inspirations for this tournament-style event promoted as a ‘live-action fighting game.’
This is the reason the chain-linked octagon was used to make it look more brutal although the idea of lining the top of the cage with razor wire was rejected.
UFC 1 Format and Results
Looking back the tournament format of the first few Ultimate Fighting Championship events was insane.
This was a bare-knuckle event that was set to have unlimited five-minute rounds meaning nobody was going to hold off for a decision (none of the fights at UFC 1 even lasted five minutes). There were three rules – 1) no biting, 2) no eye-gouging, and 3) no groin shots.
The 8-man tournament took place over one evening, so if a fighter made it through the quarterfinals and semifinals, the championship would be their third fight over the span of just a couple of hours.
No training for individual opponents and styles – just good old fashion fighting.
6 of the 8 fighters at UFC 1 were Americans, Patrick Smith, Ken Shamrock, Art Jimmerson, Zane Frazier, Kevin Rosier, and Teila Tuli. Their styles ranged from Taekwondo (Smith), Shootfighting (Shamrock), Boxing (Jimmerson) to even Sumo (Tuli).
Ultimately it was the two non-Americans that advanced to the Finals, Gerard Gordeau from the Netherlands and Brazilian Royce Gracie. Gordeau rolled through the first two rounds pretty easily, scoring a KO of Tuli in 0:26 and Rosier in 0:59.
Gracie served up two submissions including against Ken Shamrock in 0:57 in the semifinals in what would set up a trilogy of fights between the two.
Gracie finished off Gordeau at 1:40 with a submission in the Finals which propelled him to international notoriety as well as a $50,000 payday.
UFC 1 Legacy
90,000 pay-per-view buys were reported for UFC 1, tripling internal projections. The event made thousands more with a VHS release back when video rental stores were still a thing and more importantly exposed a wider audience to this developing sport.
The success of UFC 1 enabled there would be a UFC 2 and UFC 275 and so on.
