The UFC was on the verge of collapse in 2000 when Lorenzo Fertitta, his older brother, Frank Fertitta, and their friend, Dana White, put together an offer to purchase the company.
The question they had to ponder was what they would get for their money beyond the three letters and an old, breaking down Octagon.
In 1996, the late-Sen. John McCain infamously referred to the sport that would become known as mixed martial arts as human cockfighting. He became chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees cable television, in 1997 and used his influence to have the UFC banned from cable television.
UFC 12 was scheduled for Niagara Falls, N.Y., on Feb. 7, 1997. Under immense pressure from the New York Times, the state assembly voted 134-1 to reverse an earlier vote they’d made legalizing the sport.
But because it wasn’t technically illegal yet, the state athletic commission created a lengthy rulebook that, among other things, mandated a 40-foot Octagon. It was legal, thus, for Semaphore Entertainment Group, which owned the UFC, to stage the event as planned.
But the new rules made it all but impossible to pull it off. So SEG owner Bob Meyrowitz chartered a jet and flew over 200 people to Dothan, Ala., where the fight would be held the next night.
It cost $500,000 but the show went on.
Dothan is an agricultural town of about 70,000 in southeastern Alabama, but for one night in front of what had to be baffled locals at the Dothan Civic Center, it was the hub of the MMA universe.
Less than four years later, White and the Fertittas owned the UFC.
They paid $2 million for it, which many at the time thought was $1.9 million too much.
MMA as we know it began on Nov. 12, 1993, at McNichols Arena in Denver as a means of determining which fighting sport was the best.
That first show sold 300,000 pay-per-views, then and now, an excellent number.
The marketing was over the top and played upon the fears many, such as McCain, the New York Times’ editorial board, and those unwilling to understand what it actually was.
Campbell McLaren, a marketing genius, took immense glee in coming up with ways to promote the nascent sport that would scare the bejesus out of state regulators.
“Two men enter. One man leaves,” was one of the more memorable tag lines from the early days.
David Plotz wrote in Slate.com on Nov. 17, 1999, that “Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like … sex.”
The current owners were drowning in red ink. No elite athletes passing on other sports to pursue MMA.
Yet, the Fertittas and White had gotten hooked on MMA after beginning to train in jiu-jitsu. They’d met John Lewis, an MMA fighter who made side money by teaching jiu-jitsu, and he turned them onto the sport.
As everything was collapsing around Semaphore Entertainment Group in 2000, the Fertittas and White saw opportunity.
Money needed to be invested. They needed to run toward regulation, not flee from it like SEG did when it bailed on Niagara Falls.
Despite the red-hot start, Plotz wrote that by 1999, the UFC had plummeted “from national sensation to total irrelevance.”
The Fertittas, the billionaire sons of a gambling scion, bet their $2 million that their money and business acumen could rejuvenate the sport.
They worked with regulators to establish a unified ruleset. They invested heavily in broadcast production. They increased the number of shows. They signed elite fighters from other organizations.
They tried nearly everything they could for three-plus years, and it wasn’t working. They were more than $44 million in a hole.
They were baffled. No one could understand why it wasn’t catching on. And while Fertitta told White to see if he could find a buyer — and Dan Lambert, the owner of American Top Team in Florida was interested — they wanted to exhaust every option to give the UFC a shot at survival.
And so they decided to invest their money — five times more than they spent to buy the company in 2001 — to create a reality series.
They hoped it would be their Trojan horse—a reality show that introduced the fighters to the world, then ended with what they really wanted: a fight.
That allowed viewers to see that these weren’t blood-thirsty cannibals locked against their will in a cage. They were legitimate athletes who had backgrounds in Olympic sports.
“I was always very confident that if we were able to just get our product on TV, it would work, even if that meant it was in the form of a reality show,” Fertitta told me. “That’s why me and my brother decided to fund the production out of pocket.”
The anniversary has arrived
Forrest Griffin is now the vice president for athlete development. Twenty years ago, he was a former police officer who’d quit his job hoping to make a career as a fighter.
It hadn’t worked, but he was having trouble getting back into law enforcement. He was hustling odd jobs to make a living while training. He slept on his coach’s living room floor.
He didn’t have to think twice at an opportunity to compete on a reality show.
It was different. Griffin said the producers and the crew were nice, but they didn’t know anything about how to handle professional athletes.
“They came from MTV’s ‘Real World,’ and they didn’t know what they were doing, to be honest,” Griffin said.
This show had to work — not just for the UFC, but maybe for the sport itself.
White is a notorious workaholic and filming became his life. He was confident despite the lack of results to that point, but he threw himself into the production.
“There were none,” White said about doubts if this would work. “I lived on the set, pretty much. We always believed if we got the opportunity to show the sport to the world, they would love it as much as we did.”
Mark J. Rebilas/Imagn Images
Former UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta (L) and UFC CEO Dana White both say 'The Ultimate Fighter' saved the UFC.
Fertitta invested $10 million into the last-ditch effort. There were no ads, no sponsors, no guarantees of a second season.
By that point, Fertitta had become a true believer, and getting MMA to the mainstream was a matter of exposure, he believes.
“Once the first episode aired and we saw the ratings on the Monday after, I knew we were on our way to building something special and Viacom had to pay attention to us,” Fertitta said.
During filming, it was chaos.
None of the fighters knew how to act, particularly with cameras everywhere. On Day 2, Griffin found himself sparring Stephan Bonnar, a quick-witted and quirky one-time Golden Gloves boxer.
Neither wore headgear, and both knew they’d have to make weight repeatedly in a compressed schedule to accommodate the show. But that didn’t deter them.
They went at each other.
Hard.
It wasn’t light sparring to help each other. These were two guys who wanted to make a living in a sport not a lot of people cared about and who knew they’d have to impress whoever saw it.
So when they sparred, it was with intention.
“We fought each other,” Griffin said.
That early sparring session set the tone for what would become one of the most pivotal moments in MMA history.
The game-changer
Bonnar and Griffin made it to the finals, which would be held April 9, 2005, at the Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas on the UNLV campus.
The main event featured Ken Shamrock, an early UFC icon returning from a WWE stint as ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Man,’ against Rich Franklin.
Franklin would go on to win the middleweight championship, but no one cared at that point because moments earlier, they’d witnessed one of the greatest fights in UFC history.
It was held in a tiny gym with wooden bleachers that the UNLV women’s basketball team used as its home court occasionally. During the bout, fans began stomping their feet.
The fight was like something out of a Rocky movie, and around the country, people were grabbing their phones and calling friends.
“Are you watching this?” they’d ask, as the ratings surged with every round.
Griffin broke his nose in the fight and was totally out of gas. As the fighters walked in the Octagon, Bonnar reminded him that a rule had been set. If it were a draw, they’d fight a fourth three-minute winner-take-all round.
Both thought they might be going another three minutes.
Griffin, though, won the decision, the kickoff to a career that saw him become light heavyweight champion and eventually earn a spot in the UFC Hall of Fame.
Bonnar struggled after that and sadly passed away at 45 on Dec. 2, 2022.
His moment with Griffin changed the sport and allowed the many who followed them to chase dreams of riches, glory and personal success.
The bout was inducted into the fight wing of the UFC Hall of Fame in 2011.
It turned out to be the Trojan horse Fertitta and White wanted.
That night, they left the Cox Pavilion and hammered out a new contract with Spike TV for a second season of the reality show. A little more than a decade later, Fertitta sold the UFC for more than $4 billion, and it now carries a valuation in excess of $11 billion.
"Looking back. I think the finale between Forrest and Stephan really put the brand over the top," Fertitta said. "It was such a compelling and competitive fight that there was no way anyone could have watched it and not become a fan. Also, by pairing Randy [Couture] and Chuck [Liddell] as the coaches, we were able to build that rivalry over the 13 weeks and bounce right into the PPV between them the next Saturday. We ended up doing about 10 times our average buys prior to that. [It was] a massive game changer for the sport of MMA."
Bonnar, as always, managed to put in perspective in his own unique style.
“As painful as it was to lose that fight, I was so happy for him,” Bonnar said of Griffin. “He's a great guy.”
He ended by quoting President Calvin Coolidge, perhaps the only competitor in TUF history to even know of Coolidge.
“I just want to end with a quote, this one from Calvin Coolidge: ‘Nothing in the world could take the place of persistence,’ ” he said. “ ‘Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full with educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, press on, has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.”
And Season 1 of The Ultimate Fighter solved the problems of Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, Dana White and fighters and fans of MMA everywhere.
Mark J. Rebilas/Imagn Images
Stephan Bonnar passed away at 45 in 2022.