Issue 107

November 2013

UFC’s founding father, Rorion Gracie, on how the promotion might have never come to be if his plane ticket home hadn’t been taken.

If Rorion Gracie’s plane ticket had not been stolen while he was on a month’s vacation as a teenager he might never have spent an entire year in the United States in 1969. He was only meant to be there for a couple of weeks. But those 12 months convinced him of his mission to establish jiu-jitsu in North America. 

Initially, Gracie started teaching from his garage in Torrance, California, and his reputation grew so quickly that he could soon name Hollywood director John Milius and advertising executive Art Davie among his students. It was the coming together of these three very disparate characters, in part, that led to the boy from Brazil, now 61, creating the Ultimate Fighting Championship. 

Gracie, a ninth-degree red belt, had returned to the USA in 1978 after graduating law school with the objective of establishing jiu-jitsu on a new continent. “I put some mats in my garage and every person I met from anywhere, from buying watermelons to putting gas in my car, every time I ran into someone I invited them to a free class. They would come to the class in my garage,” Gracie explains to Fighters Only.

“Soon people from other disciplines started to come and challenge me. There was a lot of interest,” recalls the eldest son of Helio Gracie, the creator of the family’s own brand of jiu-jitsu, which was becoming increasingly known worldwide as Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

But it was a chance conversation with Milius, who directed the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Conan The Barbarian, that was the real curtain-raiser for the UFC. 

Gracie recalls: “I came to the USA to share this information with the rest of the world. ‘I’ve got to go and find a way to promote this to the world,’ I can remember telling John Milius. To which he replied, ‘Rorion, you can’t do it in a school in a garage, you’ve got to go to television.’ Then Art Davie, who was a great salesman, came in to see me. Fate.”  

He adds: “John and I started discussing the possibilities and coming up with ideas for an arena that would be different to the regular boxing matches, because I had participated in no-holds-barred fighting myself within a ring and when a guy gets in trouble, he slips out of the ring and between the ropes.”

Their plans went from the sublime to the ridiculous. “We thought of a moat with alligators. We thought of an arena with sharks around. We seriously thought about an electric fence. But we couldn’t in case one guy pushed the other into the moat and he’d get chewed up. We laughed at it, but in Hollywood your mind travels and we just thought of every different possibility.”

It was Mel Gibson’s movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome that provided the final inspiration. “They had a huge cage. We thought of something like this, being brought down by a crane, so they couldn’t run away.” 

They also considered a thick plastic glass bubble. “We thought about all kinds of stuff. Eventually I settled on the Octagon,” he explains. “I wrote a business plan explaining the concept of this new tournament between different styles of martial arts. At that time there was a popular video game called Mortal Kombat. It involved fighters from all over the world battling it out. So we explained our idea as, ‘Mortal Kombat for real.’ 

“We had six months before the first UFC took place. We handed out a whole bunch of business plans to all my students and on one night we raised the funds to make the first show happen. They all bought a little piece of the action. We created the company, WOW Promotions, and then we raised the money with our TV partners.” 

He continues: “Once we had the approval and the money to make the first show happen, we were determined to have the show with the toughest guys. So we put ads in world-renowned martial arts magazines that said, ‘Show us your résumé with pictures and videos.’ We then put together the eight-man tournament, so the winner would fight three times in the same night.

“For the first event I got about 50 or 60 applications. We looked at the titles they’d won; heavyweight champions would be priority over middleweights. So I had the biggest, the meanest, the toughest guys I could get. Art Jimmerson was a middleweight boxer, ranked 10 in the world at the time. He had one glove, thinking he could hit someone with one hand and grapple with the other. He had no idea, but nobody did.” 

But underpinning it all was the concept of a real fight. “I couldn’t create the tournament and say, ‘Hey, you can’t punch to the face, you cannot kick to the groin, you cannot do this…” 

The idea was that you could do whatever you wanted. Two men walk in, one man walks out. It was very simple. 

“It had to be a method that allowed no-holds-barred fighting. My thing was to keep it bare knuckles. I wanted to take away the myth about two guys fighting on the street punching each other in the face,” he explains. 

“I wanted them to know the reality that if you punch someone in the face with your bare knuckles you’re going to break your hand, not his face. The bone structure of someone’s head is much harder than the little frail bones we have in our hands. I knew that, but the world didn’t. They were watching Bruce Lee in the movies beating up 20 guys and then saying, ‘My gosh, I need to learn that.’ 

“I wanted to educate the masses in the reality of what a real fight is about. A knockout punch to the face is a myth.”

Ground fighting had to be stressed, as 95% of fights ended up there. “The real fights are going to end up on the ground, which is what I’ve seen all my life for the last 50 years in Brazil. So for me, the idea was to create a forum where people could see what a real fight was about. My dad was 140lb soaking wet, but he had a method of winning fights. That’s what the first four UFCs were about.” 

Rorion was delighted by the reaction to UFC 1. He explains: “Now the world is saying what the heck is this? Royce wins and everyone is asking, ‘Who is this little guy from Brazil who isn’t punching anybody or without getting hurt and chokes everybody out?’”

With around 40,000 pay-per-view buys they knew they would break even, but the numbers far surpassed that. “We sold to 85,000 homes in the first show,” he recalls. “Then for the second we got 120,000, and on the third show 150,000 and then 250,000.” 

But holding on to the UFC was never his aim. “It has become an entertainment game now,” he states. “My purpose has been accomplished, because the whole world at that time became aware of jiu-jitsu, and every new fighter wanted to learn it. And, if you take jiu-jitsu out of mixed martial arts, what’s left?” 

Now, 20 years on, Gracie thanks Dana White, the UFC president. “He’s done amazing work. I could not be happier; I’ve found someone who can take my dream on. I knew it was going to be big but I had no idea he’d have the vision, the capability and the financial back-up to do what he’s done with it.”