The UFC was founded in 1993 by Art Davie, Rorion Gracie, David Isaacs, Campbell McLaren, and Bob Meyrowitz. The league was sold to ZUFFA in 2001 for $2 million and the assumption of debt, and sold again to WEM-IMG in 2016 for $4 billion, the largest sale in sports history. While each of the founding figures deserves eternal thanks from fans, Davie deserves recognition as the singular visionary.
In an interview with Sean Keeler for the Denver Post, Davie discussed UFC 1, which took place 25 years ago today, in Denver, Colorado.
I had a Denver accountant, a Denver lawyer, and I had a Glock 17 in a safe deposit box in Denver,” recalled Davie. Colorado had a loophole in the law that permitted bare-knuckle boxing and bare-knuckle fights.
And no athletic commission. And the McNichols Arena was free as the Nuggets had an away game; the group got it for $4,000.
Got it for a song, said Davie. You didn’t have an athletic commission that would’ve come down on my back, telling me I couldn’t do it. And with the LLC, I had that legal entity. It all lined up.
The first guy I had to sell was Rorion. Their family had been doing mixed-match fights in Brazil and they were doing it in gyms in California — they were the first bouts you had where you had karate guys coming in against the jiu-jitsu [exponents]. Lou DiBella at HBO turned me down. He said, ‘When you’ve got marital arts and not martial arts, give me a call.’”
Eventually, Davie found a home for the project with Bob Meyrowitz’ Semaphore Entertainment Company, under the direction of SEG head of programming Campbell McLaren. And what we now know as mixed martial arts was born.
(We) ran out of EMT ambulances to ship fighters to the hospital, said Davie. We didn’t anticipate how much injury there would be and what would be done. (Semaphore managers) had come to the first show, and they were horrified at all the blood.’ They said, ‘This is brutal. This is uber-violent.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s going to be big.’
UFC 1 did 86,492 PPV buys, a huge leap from the expected 30,000-40,000.
It was a big shock, Davie said. The following week, I got a call from (then-WCW executive producer) Eric Bischoff, and he said, ‘Where did you guys come from?’ We did almost 300,000 on UFC 2 and UFC 5. The pay-per-view people were f***ing ecstatic. The audience went wild for it. I knew it would work. Milius and I knew it would work, because martial arts is everywhere. When you go to a game and see a fight break out in the stands, where does everybody look in the stands? At the fight.
Although much later in life Sen. John McCain (RIP) mused he would have tried MMA as a young man, at the time he called it “human cockfighting” and made it a personal mission to keep MMA off the airwaves. Commission after commission banned the sport.
But the fans stayed with us, said Davie. When we basically lost pay-per-view, it was the fans on the bulletin boards, those fans, who stuck with us as the politicians and the media tried to kill us. The fans and the fighters made the UFC.
Now the sport is mainstream, bit Davie long ago sold his equity.
I’m like a divorced father but the kid is doing well, said Davie, laughing. That’s how I feel about it today. Other than our family, most of us don’t get to create something that outlives us. What I did 25 years ago will be going long after I’m gone.
Davie chronicled the birth of the sport in ‘Is This Legal?‘ co-authored with Sean Wheelock. This is a must read for everyone that loves mixed martial arts.
