by Doug Merlino
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there were stabs at pitting various martial arts against one another. In 1963, “Judo” Gene LeBell took on boxer Milo Savage in Salt Lake City, choking out the pugilist after four rounds. In a bizarre 1976 event, Muhammad Ali fought Japanese catch wrestler Antonio Inoki in a match in Tokyo. Inoki, handcuffed by limitations insisted upon by Ali’s camp, spent the fight on his back kicking up at Ali’s legs. Ali, who failed to land a punch, ended up in the hospital with severe bruising.
In the 1980s, varying styles were in competition at the multiplex. The Karate Kid waxed on and waxed off. Steven Seagal, a black belt in aikido, snapped the arms of Jamaican drug runners. In the 1988 movie Bloodsport, Jean-Claude Van Damme played a ninjutsu master fighting an array of challengers in a Bangkok tournament.
In comparison to Van Damme’s spinning head kicks and Seagal’s steely-eyed bone breaking, the disciplined groundwork of Gracie Jiu Jitsu—which, to an outside observer, simply appeared to be people rolling around on mats—was a bore. Rorion fell back on the old family tradition of issuing challenges to masters of other martial arts. He beat a few kickboxers, but not many people were interested in taking up the offer.
Eventually, though, his relentless promotional efforts paid off in the form of a flattering 1989 profile in Playboy that heralded him as “the toughest man in the United States,” ready and willing to take on all comers in “fights to the finish with no rules … street brawls in a ring bounded by ropes.”
Art Davie, a Los Angeles advertising executive, read the story and took interest. He saw the potential in televised Gracie Challenge-style fights to definitively answer the nagging problem of which martial art was the best. The pair developed a business plan to bring the Brazilian vale tudo tradition of no-holds-barred fighting to American television, and finally got traction with a company called Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG), which was trying to break into pay-per-view cable.
Boxing and professional wrestling had been successful on the format, and Campbell McLaren, an SEG executive, saw promise in Gracie and Davie’s idea. The pair flew to New York City and sealed the deal by showing a vale tudo match rife with head butts and blood. McLaren thought it was exactly the type of thing he could sell.
The name they came up with, Ultimate Fighting Championship, was meant to evoke the extreme nature of the undertaking. And the UFC acronym had a nice ring to it, similar to NBA, MLB, and NFL. In marketing they emphasized violence and unpredictability, coming up with the tagline “There Are No Rules.”
They brainstormed with John Milius, one of Rorion Gracie’s students and a Hollywood veteran who had directed Conan the Barbarian, and decided the fights should take place in an octagonal cage fenced with chain link. They wanted it to look brutal on television, though Davie’s idea to top the cage with razor wire was rejected.
McLaren wanted people to consider ultimate fighting a live, televised version of the popular video game Mortal Kombat, in which victorious fighters got to “finish” their opponents through moves such as ripping their spines out of their bodies.
The first UFC was scheduled for November 12, 1993, at Denver’s McNichols Sports Arena, chosen because Colorado had no athletic commission and thus no governing body from which they would need to get approval for bare-knuckle fighting. Davie placed ads in martial arts magazines to recruit fighters. He found seven, representing sumo, kickboxing, tae kwon do, savate (a French form of kickboxing), karate, boxing, and shoot wrestling. Rorion Gracie picked his younger brother Royce as the flag bearer for Gracie Jiu Jitsu. They would fight in an eight-man, single-elimination tournament.
The broadcast cost $14.95. It started with announcer Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, a karate champion, burping in the middle of his introduction. The camera panned back a bit to reveal broadcast partner Jim Brown, the legendary NFL running back. Brown had the most reasonable thing to say of the evening, when Superfoot Wallace asked him if he would ever consider ultimate fighting: “Not a chance.”
With little further explication, the first two fighters walked to the cage: sumo wrestler Teila Tuli, six foot two, 420 pounds, and Gerard Gordeau, a six-foot-five, 215-pound savate player.
As it began, the sumo rushed the kickboxer, backing him into the cage. Gordeau stepped to the side and Tuli fell over. As the sumo tried to get up, Gordeau kicked him in the mouth. One of Tuli’s teeth flew into the crowd; two more lodged in the top of Gordeau’s foot. The referee stopped the fight while a doctor checked out Tuli—a move the announcers questioned, given that the fights were supposed to go to knockout, submission, “or death.” Tuli stood, dazed, blood running from his mouth. His corner threw in the towel. The inaugural fight in UFC history had lasted twenty-six seconds.
In the next match two huge kickboxers, Kevin Rosier and Zane Frazier, battered each other. In a move from the playground, Frazier grabbed Rosier by the hair and punched him in the face. After five minutes, both men were exhausted. Frazier ended up huddled on the mat, Rosier stomping him in the head; his corner threw in the towel.
In the third fight, Art Jimmerson, a boxer, faced Royce Gracie. At six feet tall and 176 pounds, Gracie was hardly physically imposing compared to some of the other fighters on the card. Rorion Gracie said he had picked Royce because, as his family had often sought to do, he wanted to show that Gracie Jiu Jitsu was so superior that a smaller man could use it to defeat a larger opponent. Jimmerson, for his part, realized at the event that he had no clue what was going on. He entered the cage with a boxing glove on his left hand but his right hand wrapped only in tape. Gracie took him to the mat and got full mount. Jimmerson gamely hung on for a minute before tapping out.
Next up, Ken Shamrock, a muscled catch wrestler who fought on the Japanese professional wrestling circuit, defeated Patrick Smith, a kickboxer, by submitting him with a heel hook in less than two minutes.
That left Gordeau, Rosier, Royce Gracie, and Shamrock in the semifinals.
The two kickboxers faced off, and Gordeau finished Rosier in less than a minute, backing him to the cage and stomping and kicking him into a lump.
Gracie and Shamrock’s fight went immediately to the ground. Within a minute, Gracie got behind Shamrock and put him in a choke hold, forcing him to tap.
Before the finals, Rorion Gracie, flanked by his brothers, entered the ring to present a plaque to his father, Helio. The crowd, apparently not there for touching family moments, booed as Rorion read a salute. But the Gracies, in the end, commanded the crowd’s respect with what they did best.
In the championship fight, Royce Gracie finished Gordeau in less than two minutes, taking him down, working to his back, and choking the Dutchman until he frantically tapped in submission.
In addition to the 7,800 who watched in person, the pay-per-view sold 86,000 buys, enough to ensure there would be more UFCs. It ignited jiu jitsu in the United States. And as with any invention that comes along at the right time, there were thousands of people, mostly young men, who knew when they saw it that no-holds-barred fighting was just what they’d been waiting for.
The Snowman
In 1996, Jeff Monson was back living in Washington State. He’d gone to college and had wrestled at Oregon State. When his coach got a job at the University of Illinois, Monson transferred with him. When he was twenty-one, he married Jen, whom he’d met in high school. They had a son in 1993 and a daughter a few years later. In 1995, he earned a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
The family settled back in the Olympia area, ninety minutes down the freeway from Seattle. Monson worked for the county as a mental health case manager, looking after a group of men diagnosed as bipolar or schizophrenic. He checked that they were taking their meds, made sure their landlords got paid, took them to the grocery store—whatever they needed to get through their lives.
Monson dreamed of making the Olympic wrestling team. Most top prospects in the sport trained at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, as Steve Mocco wou
ld several years later. Monson, with a job and a family to support, worked out at a local high school. He went to the open trials and failed to make the squad. Still looking to compete, he joined a gym in Seattle’s eastern suburbs and stumbled into the epicenter of the Pacific Northwest’s budding fight scene.
AMC Pankration was run by Matt Hume, the son of a Seattle police officer who in the 1960s had for a brief time taken martial arts lessons from Bruce Lee. Lee moved on to Los Angeles and global stardom, but the community of assistants and students he had built remained, establishing their own schools and holding to Lee’s Jeet Kune Do philosophy. Hume grew up studying with them and believed in taking the best aspects from all martial arts. In the early 1990s, he fought in Japan on “shoot” wrestling cards, forerunners of MMA that allowed for legitimate fighting though the final outcomes were usually fixed.
Nicknamed “The Wizard,” Hume was a martial arts intellectual—he remains one of the top trainers in MMA—and his gym attracted legends such as kickboxer Maurice Smith and future UFC fighters Dennis Hallman, Josh Barnett, and Ivan Salaverry.
Hume introduced Monson to catch wrestling and submission grappling. When the coach suggested that he try fighting in an amateur cage-fighting event, Monson was game. Closed-fist striking was not allowed, so it was basically grappling with some slapping thrown in. But Monson won, giving him the old feeling he craved.
In Vancouver, in August 1998, he fought his first professional bout, an unsanctioned event in a warehouse complex with vale tudo rules: Only hair pulling, groin shots, and biting were prohibited.
Monson’s opponent was John Renfroe, a six-foot-three, 225-pound fighter. When the bell rang, Monson took Renfroe to the mat, pounded him in the face, and submitted him. It was over in the first round.
He was paid $260 for the fight, but the money didn’t really matter. All his life, Monson felt that he’d missed his potential. In high school, he’d failed to win the state wrestling title. In college, he hadn’t placed in the NCAAs. He hadn’t made the U.S. national wrestling team and the Olympics.
There had always been excuses—his bulimia and personal problems in high school, his family and job commitments later on. He was a good fighter, though, and now he had access to great training at Matt Hume’s gym. If he kept at it, he thought, maybe he could really succeed at this.
. . .
In the years following the 1993 UFC debut, “no-holds-barred” fighting picked up viewers on television but was still a fringe pursuit considered a deviant activity by the mainstream. Like early punk rock, cage fights were raw and violent. They touched something primal that many regarded as repellent. Fans of no-holds-barred fighting were called “cretins.” The New York Times labeled it a sign of the “decline of Western Civilization.”
Senator John McCain was the most powerful foe. A former Navy boxer, he found the sport barbaric and coined the notorious label “human cockfighting.” He sent a letter to all state governors asking them to ban no-holds-barred fighting. By 1998, McCain had used his position as acting head of the Senate Commerce Committee, responsible for regulating cable television companies, to pressure them to drop UFC pay-per-views from their offerings. He succeeded, and the UFC verged on bankruptcy.
The promotion responded by adding some rules. Timed rounds were introduced. Instead of fighting bare-knuckle—one of the images that had shocked people—fighters were required to wear light, four-ounce fingerless gloves. Kicking an opponent who was on the ground was prohibited. “No holds barred” was rebranded as “Mixed Martial Arts.” Public opinion, however, had been formed—in part thanks to the UFC’s attention-seeking early marketing efforts that sold the prospect of violence—and the alterations were too little, too late. Cage fighting was banned in states across the country. Die-hard fans kept it alive on Internet discussion boards and by trading VHS tapes.
But even then, something surprising was happening. While the UFC had started as a violent spectacle—either entertaining or grotesque depending on your point of view—it was now developing into a new form of combat sport. Royce Gracie dominated the early UFCs with jiu jitsu simply because no one knew how to counter it. As other fighters learned defensive moves, wrestling and striking grew in importance. It evolved away from fighters skilled in only one martial art toward those who were proficient in all.
Monson got his break in 1999. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, a grappling enthusiast, had started a submission wrestling tournament in Abu Dhabi. Matt Hume had flown to the Middle East to train the sheikh, and the sheikh invited Hume to take a team over for the competition.
Hume slotted Monson at light heavyweight, a division that included two of the world’s best Brazilian jiu jitsu practitioners: Rigan Machado and Saulo Ribeiro. Monson didn’t even know who they were. He had learned submission holds from Hume but had no jiu jitsu training.
But Hume excelled at preparation. In the months before the tournament, he drilled Monson on a handful of moves over and over until they became automatic.
Which is how Monson advanced through the tournament: methodically, getting takedowns, breaking his opponents’ control, scoring points, avoiding mistakes. The Brazilians waited for him to lose. When he didn’t, they nicknamed him “The Snowman,” because once he started going he just picked up steam like a snowball rolling downhill. Monson shocked the tournament, defeating the best in the world and winning the championship.
On the flight home, he felt he’d finally gotten the monkey off his back: If this plane crashes, I have no regrets, my demon is gone, I did it.
The euphoria lasted a couple days before the doubts returned: Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe I lucked out into the right position. Maybe next time I’ll lose and everyone will know I’m a fake.
A few months later, in November 1999, the WTO riots broke out in Seattle. Monson, down the freeway in Olympia, heard that many of the people on the streets were anarchists and decided to check it out. He found a website called An Anarchist FAQ, which offered an exhaustive explanation of the philosophy, and started to read.
It all fell into place. As a child, Monson had suffered under the repressive authority of his stepfather. Anarchy offered the opposite: It suggested that people at base were good, and that coercion, in the form of hierarchy—government, business, religion, laws, capitalism—had turned them away from that true nature. If left alone, people would form their own associations and work out their own, more equitable social structures. Anarchy, to Monson, wasn’t an ideology, it was an absolute truth, the system that offered the most freedom for people to be who they wanted to be.
. . .
Monson landed his first UFC fight in September 2000, at UFC 23. After a falling out with Hume sparked by an argument about religion, he started to train in his off time in Portland, Oregon, where two former Greco-Roman Olympic wrestling teammates, Randy Couture and Matt Lindland, had started a gym they called Team Quest. They attracted talent such as Dan Henderson, another former Olympic wrestler, and Chael Sonnen, who in coming years would become one of the UFC’s biggest stars.
Monson, seeing his chance, quit his job so he could train full time. But he still needed money. The gym shared space with a used car lot. Monson drove down early in the morning, trained, then tried to sell cars in the afternoon.
It wasn’t working out. Monson, who loved to spend time with his family, found himself gone from home fourteen hours every day. He was broke and struggling to hang on. “It was,” he remembered, “probably the lowest point in my life.”
ATT
In 1992, Dan Lambert placed an ad in the “Readers Pages” of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, then and now the industry bible of pro wrestling fans, stating that he was “looking for copies of Beach Brawl and the Great American Bash,” a couple of professional wrestling events. It ran next to another reader’s request for “clear cassette dubs” of Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne songs.
Lambert grew up in South Florida, the son of a pioneer in the time-share i
ndustry, entranced by the story lines and larger-than-life characters of professional wrestling. The only way to see foreign wrestling shows in that pre-Internet time was to trade tapes. Pro wrestling had been elevated to an art form in Japan, so Lambert made pen pals there, sending them American wrestling in exchange for their copies of events by promotions such as New Japan Pro-Wrestling.
These contacts exposed him to shoot fighting, the pro-wrestling/real fighting hybrid that launched in Japan in the late 1980s. When the UFC debuted in 1993, Lambert, who had just graduated from law school and gone to work in the travel industry, was an immediate fan.
In November 1995, Lambert bought the pay-per-view of the first Battlecade: Extreme Fighting, an early UFC competitor backed by Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione. It featured a four-man, one-night tournament. Conan Silveira, who had left Carlson Gracie’s gym in Rio to move to the United States in 1989, was the winner of the evening.
On the broadcast, Silveira had been identified as fighting out of Miami. Lambert looked him up, discovered that he ran a gym in South Beach with his brother Marcelo, and drove down to check it out. Conan had him roll with a teenage kid who twisted him backward and forward. Lambert was sold: It was exactly what he wanted to learn.
As he trained at Conan’s gym, Lambert became interested in the business side of the sport. In the late 1990s, he invested in World Extreme Fighting, a promotion that operated throughout the South and was then the second-largest MMA operation in the country after the UFC. He started to think about building a pro team. In 2001, he went to a UFC fight in Las Vegas, where he met Ricardo Liborio, there to corner his teammate Murilo Bustamante. Liborio was also looking to make a change.
After quitting his job as a banker, Liborio had become the de facto head coach of Carlson Gracie’s team. By the late 1990s, Gracie had opened a gym in Beverly Hills, where he started spending most of his time. His fighters in Brazil became disgruntled at the 30 percent training fee they were expected to pay to the absent Gracie from their fight purses. They met with Carlson, telling him they would continue to pay only if he signed a contract stipulating that he would be around to train a fighter for the thirty days prior to his bout. If he couldn’t do that, they told him, they would pay him 10 percent out of respect. Gracie was incensed.
