How MMA survived - and thrived - when the old UFC imploded
BJJ got exposed and the original UFC business model died, but that couldn't stop this new sport.
Earlier this month I wrote about the Gracie Con and how Rorion Gracie and Art Davie ended up accidentally inventing what we now call mixed martial arts but back then was fondly referred to as “human cockfighting.”
Today, I’m going to explain what kept the sport going — and growing — even while Royce Gracie took a five-year hiatus and Art Davie got UFC chased off 90% of the American pay-per-view market.
The TL;DR is that the sport kept evolving and entertaining like no one’s business. The genie was out of the bottle. Seemingly every backwater fight event held in the middle of nowhere (and I’m talking everywhere from the Texas Panhandle like Steve Nelson’s USWF to Wallid Ismael’s Jungle Fight in the Brazilian jungle city of Manaus) produced a fighter or two that fans clamored to see more of.
And the fights in the big towns like Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo sent shockwaves through the brains of the emerging global fight cognoscenti who communicated through fanzines and bootleg VHS tapes.
In Case You Missed Part One, Read This and Catch Up
Rorion Gracie wanted nothing more than to sell his family’s martial arts system the same way guys like Ed Parker had been selling kenpo karate for decades prior — in the back of comic books and on the covers of cheesy martial arts magazines.
Art Davie wanted to answer the age-old question of “what’s the toughest fighting style” and make a killing selling pay-per-views.
They came out of the gate strong in late 1993 and built to a mutually beneficial crescendo by early 1995. Thanks to the effectiveness of the Gracie system against opponents who had little-to-no concept of submission grappling and the sheer grit and guts of Rorion’s little brother Royce, the Gracie Myth had been fully established and cemented by UFC 5.
As for Mr. Davie, he was selling hundreds of thousands of pay-per-views back when the profit margins were much higher and the only piracy they faced was from illegal set-top cable TV boxes.
But in May 1995, Ken Shamrock, an American jock who’d been doing both worked and shoot matches in Japan’s Pancrase promotion, figured out how to not lose to Royce — even if he still didn’t manage to beat him under the promotion’s extremely limited rules set.
What Shamrock did was exploit his 30-plus-pound weight advantage and edge in takedowns (in the 1990s, just as in the 2020s, the Gracie system was limited to the most rudimentary takedowns) to rest in Royce’s guard for 30 minutes and land just enough punches to bust up Royce’s eye.
That was enough for Rorion Gracie to do what any good carny does when the rubes in a market start to figure out the con — bail. Royce packed his bags, sat out a two-year exclusive contract with Davie’s UFC, and wouldn’t fight again for another five years.
In my previous piece, I jumped ahead to the year 2000 and discussed what happened when Royce met Kazushi “The Gracie Hunter” Sakuraba. What I managed to skip over in that five year time period was one hell of a rise for No Holds Barred.
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