NO folks, I’m not doing a column on the ketchup brand.
Less than 30 days from today, the UFC (Universal Fighting Championship) will be staging UFC Fight Night 66: Edgar vs. Faber here on our shores on May 16 at the Mall of Asia Arena. The featured bout will be former UFC lightweight champion Frankie Edgar going up against former WEC (World Extreme Cagefighting) lightweight champion Urijah Faber.
UFC Fight Night 66 will also feature UFC middleweights Gregard Mousasi and Costas Philippou going at it for three rounds. Our very own Mark Muñoz will be trading punches, holds, kicks and takedowns with Luke Barnatt as part of the fight card.
According to a mixed martial arts web site I stumbled upon, the UFC “The Ultimate Fighting Championship is the largest mixed martial arts promotion company in the world featuring most of the top-ranked fighters in the sport. Based in the US, the UFC produces events worldwide. The organization showcases nine weight divisions and enforces the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts. The UFC has held over 300 events to date. Dana White serves as the president of the UFC, while brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta control the UFC’s parent company, Zuffa Llc.
The first UFC event was held on November 12, 1993, in Denver, Colorado. The purpose of the early UFC competitions was to identify the most effective martial art in a real fight between competitors of different fighting disciplines, including boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Sambo, wrestling, muay thai, karate, judo and other styles. In subsequent competitions, fighters began adopting effective techniques from more than one discipline, which indirectly helped create an entirely separate style of fighting known as present-day mixed martial arts.
With a TV deal and expansion into North and South America, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Asia and new markets within the United States, the UFC as of 2015 has gained in popularity, along with greater mainstream media coverage. As of 2015 viewers can access UFC programming on pay-per-view television in the US, Brazil, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Italy. UFC programming can also be found on Fox, Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports 2 in the US, on ESPN in the Caribbean, on BT Sport in the UK and Ireland, as well as in 150 countries and 22 different languages worldwide. The UFC plans to continue expanding internationally, running shows regularly in Canada, Brazil and the UK, with an office established in the UK aimed to expand the European audience.
The UFC has also bought and absorbed rival promotions Pride, World Extreme Cagefighting, as well as Strikeforce and EliteXC.”
I remember when the UFC wasn’t mainstream yet. I used to rent video tapes of the fights so that I can watch them. Back then, fights had no weight classes so it was a martial art vs another martial art despite the weight advantages and disadvantages one fighter had over the other. There were no rules and no referees at the time. The rule was until your opponent could no longer stand up. I remember the early successful UFC fighters like Dan Severn, Don Frye, Tito Ortiz, Mark Coleman, Pat Miletich, Frank and Ken Shamrock, Tank Abbott, Royce Gracie and the rest of the Gracie Family, I think their whole family went through the UFC.
To make the sport safer, Senator John McCain and the respective state rules and regulations governing sports forced the UFC to instill and offer weight classes for its fighters and to make sure nobody is at a weight disadvantage. Very soon, the UFC joined boxing and other combat and full contact sports in adding weight classes. Everything else followed, three three-minute rounds if it is a non-title fight, but if it is a championship fight then you have five five-minute rounds. There are weigh ins before each fight to make sure neither fighter is at a weight advantage and disadvantage.
To celebrate its 20th year in the Mixed Martial Arts industry, the UFC came out with a documentary “Fighting for a Generation: 20 Years of the UFC”. According to the web site IMDb, the film is about “an oral and visual documentary on the two-decade rise of the UFC. Over 60 interviews were conducted over a 4-month period to let the viewer truly understand how the UFC has become what it is today. From the early days, dealing with political pressure and financial hardships to successfully building a worldwide brand, the UFC has gone through struggles that no other sports franchise has faced only to come out on the winning end. With the 20-year anniversary of UFC 1 occurring in November 2013, the UFC wanted to celebrate in a way that would give the fans an inside look at the meteoric rise of one of the top sports franchises in the world.”
I’d say meteoric is an understatement, the UFC has grown by leaps and bounds since its infancy in 1993. What used to be just renting video tapes to watch UFC fights is now pay-per-view. The Fertita brothers, Frank and Lorenzo, currently head the UFC’s parent company, Zuffa Llc., while Dana White is the UFC President. All three men are into mixed martial arts, so they know first-hand what they are doing and the product they are selling. The UFC have set up shop in the UK as part of their market-entry strategy into the European market.