A Brief Reflection on 15 Years of the UFC

To say "things changed" with the advent of “The Ultimate Fighter” reality TV series would be painfully basic. Prior to the show, people's idea of this whole "ultimate fighting" thing was much in the same vein as the public understanding of things like trans fats, zone blocking and the economic crisis. They know these phrases and understand them in some superficial but wholly inadequate way. While we still have an unfortunate under-a-rock fraction that thinks MMA is some sort of “Beyond Thunderdome” bit of mayhem, we do owe much to the show.

Dana White will tell you he hated the idea of a reality show. Many MMA fans did, too. However, the prospect of this sport, which was once a few gasps from an untimely death, being on such a prime platform was too good to pass up. While it is easy to groan and eye roll at the exploits of Junie Allen Browning now, and scoff as though TUF has always been about puerile delinquency, I submit there are very few people passionate about this sport who were not at least partially sucked into the drama of bed spritzing and door smashing.

And of course, Stephan Bonnar vs. Forrest Griffin. It's the proper thing for aspiring elitists to dismiss the fight as overhype and artifice, and to be fair, there's some merit in that. While it does have the necessary excitement to give it replay value, it hardly has the technique and aesthetics you'd hope for out of an honest-to-goodness MMA pitched battle.

The April 2005 bout really is every bit the Trojan horse it is mythologized to be, though. Whether or not Bonnar-Griffin captivated you in particular, it made people grab their phones and tell their comrades to turn on that CSI channel. I watched a drunk and lethargic house of high schoolers magnetized to the television, seemingly suspended in space with only the slightest inch of their bodies still attached to the chair as Griffin and Bonnar did their best and bloodiest windmill impressions.

If you ever talk to people in the Japanese fight game, ask them about when Rickson Gracie fought Masakatsu Funaki, and you're more than likely to hear their MMA origin story. They saw Rickson choke Funaki's eyeballs halfway out of his skull and knew they had to be a part of this sport, some way, somehow. Granted, Rickson-Funaki reached some 30 million people, and Bonnar-Griffin peaked at about 3.3 million, but the UFC, and MMA in North America, hadn't been water cooler talk for a decade and certainly not as a real sport instead of a spectacle. And as a fan -- regardless of whether you ached and pained through the SEG days or hoped and wished through Zuffa -- if you weren't galvanized afterward, dying to discharge the millions of electric thoughts you had, you weren't there. You weren't.

The infomercial worked, and the change was immediate. I'd long since given up harassing my hombres into piling over to my crib for UFC pay-per-views. I can only say "You don't know what you're missing" so many times in a day. Instead, my Saturday afternoon alarm clock was a frenetic cell phone, rattling out of control on the hardwood floor. Missed calls and multiplicities of text messages: "hey man is that ufc tonite?"

You know it, baby. I'll even let your poor texting grammar slide.

UFC 52 raked in a $2.57 million gate and an estimated 280,000 pay-per-view buys, smashing North American MMA marks at the time. But no number was quite so amazing to me as nine, which was the amount of other people gathered around my television, roaring at Matt Hughes' powerslamming Frank Trigg and Chuck Liddell's dirtnap right hand on Randy Couture, with no provocation and prodding from me. They were there because they honestly wanted to be.

I couldn't convince any of them to take the trip to Atlantic City with me two months later for UFC 53. Yet 30 UFCs later, it was some of these same folks needling and nagging me to make the trek to Montreal amidst a major exam week as Canadian quasi-superhero Georges St. Pierre sought revenge on Matt Serra in April. The crooked claws of academia cut me deep, but there was an unmistakably gratifying irony that was not lost on me.