The History Of UFC

Ultimate Fighting Championship, also known as UFC, came about in 1992 when Art Davie, a sports promoter, proposed a single-elimination tournament with eight men in it with the title of ‘War of the Worlds’ to Rorian Gracie (Serafeim and Welch 1). UFC is an extremely violent sport and is not aired due to the overly aggressive nature of the sport. Gracie and his family had a series titled ‘Gracies Jiu-Jitsu in Action’, where members of the family would fight various forms of martial arts masters (1). Robert Meyrowitz and Davie in 1993 decided to call their “octagon-shaped fighting cage events” where eight martial arts fighters would participate in ‘The Ultimate Fighting Championship’ (2). Although UFC was successful initially, there was been a

The first problem occurred in December of 1994 when all television sets went blank before that night’s headliner fight. The UFC has a pay-per-view air time limit and since they did not have any time restrictions on fights, it caused those who were watching at home a “black out.” As a result of this, Meyrowitz changed the rules so something like this would not happen again. As UFC started changing more rules, the more popularity they were losing. Rorian Grace also felt as though they were not achieving their organizational goal which was to find the best world fighter. He felt they were not achieving it as a result of the additional of many new rules. A new rule they implemented after UFC 11 was weight-classes. All the fighters were put into their weight-class and fought those similar in weight. They originally became successful because of unpredictability and how someone twice the other person’s weight fought each other. There was much of an intrigue aspect. Due to the weight-classes, predictability increased as well as those interested in UFC fights. In the early development of UFC, the cable operators were influenced by the United States Commerce Committee to stop airing UFC pay-per-view events because of the amount of violence. Due to the decrease in pay-per-view sales and revenue, there were UFC fighters that moved onto other sport such as boxing, professional wrestling or mixed martial arts (MMA). Another challenge is other forms of extreme fighting entering the market like Battlecade Inc. and Pride Fighting Championships