Issue 107

November 2013

Dave Meltzer, One of the few journalists to cover UFC 1, looks back on one night in history.

I’d heard about the first UFC through a friend in Denver, Dane Bresloff, who was a promoter for the World Wrestling Federation and he was involved in promoting the first live event. He told me very early on about this no-holds barred, no-rules fight night with sumo wrestlers, jiu-jitsu guys, karate guys and boxers. 

I didn’t really know what to make of it. They had never really had anything quite like it in the United States, although things like it had taken place in Japan: a one-night winner-takes-all-style fighting tournament.

When the names were released we had Ken Shamrock, who I knew as he was a star in Japanese pro wrestling, and Gerard Gordeau who had been in Japanese pro wrestling as well. He wasn’t a big star, but we knew him.

I had vaguely heard of the Gracie family but it wasn’t like they were something big. To me, they became mythical after the first UFC. I don’t remember too many wrestlers talking about them before that, even when they went to Brazil, but after the first UFC we all started studying them.

We didn’t get press releases about UFC 1; Dane just told me about the guys who were in it. Actually, there were hardly any media there for the first few events. There were times when I may have been the only media there at all. It was only after a couple more events that there became three or four of us. 

I can remember being seated next to David Hasselhoff, and with John Wayne Bobbett a couple of rows behind at a very early UFC event. At the early shows, they would put me with a celebrity or a media person, figuring I would start talking and explain what was happening.

Me and Hasselhoff talked for three straight hours; he was a great guy. I’ve read how much later on he hated the show and maybe he did, but he was having a great time nonetheless. We were talking back and forth, he was asking me about this background and that background. He came across like he was a fan who wanted to learn more and I sensed no ‘turn-off’ or revulsion or anything. Maybe he said it after, maybe he never did. 

The big thing about UFC 1 was that you didn’t know what it was and when you saw it, it was not what you thought it would be. I think people thought it would be wilder and with more striking. And actually, what you imagined it would be is maybe more like it has actually turned into nowadays.

 What it really came down to was they would take the guy down and they would submit them because the other guys had no submission defense. And that was the game then. People who bought it on pay-per-view didn’t have any idea what was going to happen, so one of the things that sold the early UFCs was the fascination of learning what happens in a real fight because nobody had ever seen a real fight involving top guys representing different fighting arts under mixed rules.

They’d seen boxing matches, and thought they were real fights; wrestling people had seen wrestling matches and thought that was the closest thing to a real fight without fighting. But as it turned out, wrestlers didn’t have the finishing ability.

 Again, jiu-jitsu was not big in the United States. I’d heard the term jiu-jitsu, but it wasn’t till UFC 1 that jiu-jitsu got popular and people started taking classes.

With the UFC you got to see what really worked. And another surprise on the opening night was the cage: they didn’t tell me about the Octagon. I was expecting a ring and I was amazed when I saw it. Then the cage was being talked about as favoring grapplers, but it allows you to do anything.

We were just fascinated by these secret moves, like the leg triangle choke. Nobody knew what it was outside the jiu-jitsu community, so that was a real big one when Royce Gracie beat Dan Severn at UFC 4.

That really put me on to him because in the early days when Royce was winning, I kept thinking, ‘Well, what about when we get the big strong heavyweight wrestlers?’ Obviously I was thinking about some guy out of the NCAA tournament, who he wouldn’t be able to take down, and would take Royce down and put him on his back.

But we didn’t realize submissions from the back existed until Royce proved it. That impressed me.

And then we’d heard the Rickson Gracie vs. Mark Schultz story when they worked out in Utah. Schultz was a gold medal winner in the Olympics and Rickson went in there, tapped out all the guys in the team, then in came Schultz. Mark kept Rickson from doing anything for 20 minutes and stayed on top of him.

It was obviously a grappling match, not a UFC fight, but Rickson eventually got him; and to me, that was a really big deal, because Mark Schultz was the cream of the crop when it came to wrestling. It meant that jiu-jitsu really had to be taken notice of. That really was the talking point from UFC 1 and the next few events.