Marc Ratner: UFC HoF announcement was 'surreal'

Marc Ratner is the current UFC Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, and the former Executive Director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission. He led the long drive towards mixed martial arts being legalized and regulated everywhere in North America; that culminated in 2016, when New York became the 50th U.S. state to legalize and regulate MMA, after the sport had been banned there in 1997. He continues to regulate UFC events worldwide in nations without a government commission. Ratner is a member of the World Boxing Hall of Fame, the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame, and will now be inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame.

During a recent appearance on MMA Junkie Radio, Ratner described how he found out about the latest honor; it happened during UFC 255 last month

I was just siting there as we do, monitoring the fights, getting ready for the Valentina [Shevchenko] fight, said Ratner. And one of our guys, Hunter Campbell, said, ‘Take off your mask for a minute.’ All of a sudden, on the screens around, there was this video and I see a whole bunch of credentials and I thought, ‘That looks like my credentials.’ And I heard the announcers say something about the Hall of Fame and I was shocked.

The most amazing thing is that somehow, sometime my wife and children left in the morning and went to go to breakfast and got COVID tested without my knowledge, and so after the video, there they were. The whole thing was surreal. And the video, I don’t know where they got all the pictures from – some in my office I guess, but [others] somewhere else. That made it special.

Ever humble, Ratner declined to take the credit he is due for getting MMA legalized.

It’s much more than me,” he began. “There were other people who traveled with me, including Dana [White] and Lorenzo [Fertitta], and my lawyer who was working with us at the time, Mike Mersch. I don’t want to take the credit for it because it was a team, and I want to let people know that. I might have been the face, but there were a lot of people involved.

As I look back on it, and certainly when we finally got approved in 2016, it made those eight years go by in a second and it was all well worth it. New York is one of the biggest markets for us and it’s still a thrill when we go to [Madison Square[ Garden or even Barclays [Center]. You can’t be a major sport unless you have New York, and I’m really happy we can go there.

Massachusetts was a tough one, Connecticut. But New York was by far the toughest. Toronto, I think it was more the commission there. They didn’t believe in it, even though the director was a martial artist. Maybe they didn’t want to work as hard. And finally when we got it approved and we went to Ottawa and met with the senators and those types, the first fight was 55,000 [fans] with [Georges] St-Pierre. There was pent-up demand, and what a great start there.