Issue 173

December 2018

Few men have shaped MMA more than Art Davie. The new Hall of Fame inductee remembers how it all began.

Would the world have mixed martial arts today had you guys not been reading Playboy back in 1992?

I was just thinking about that today, how so many of our decisions in life have profound implications. It’s like the film It’s A Wonderful Life, you wonder if you didn’t do this what would have happened? The truth of the matter is, if I had not found Pat Jordan’s article and if companies hadn’t been willing to listen to a pitch about an alternative sport, it’s quite possible that mixed martial arts as we know it would not be here today.

The original name of the event was going to be “War of the Worlds.” How did the idea come about to change the name to The Ultimate Fighting Championship?

Early on that was a working title. Like the film business, you have a title for a project and you know as the project evolves that the name is probably going to change. I came up with the “War of the Worlds” name and using that show name we formed the company, War of the Worlds Promotions (WOW) as an LLC in Colorado because Colorado had no restrictions on bare-knuckle fighting. When we went into partnership with Semaphore Entertainment Group in the spring of 1993, we began to look at different names and test them.

War of the Worlds, while on some level it explains the karate versus judo styles, it was closely associated with the original film title, radio broadcast and H.G. Wells novel, so that title didn’t hold up. “World’s Best Fighter” had a small run for our attention for a while. Then the name “Ultimate Fighting Championship” was proposed.

The feeling was, while it was three words and we were really looking for two, for brevity and to be able to work with the name in a number of different contexts, it tested well. There was nothing beyond “Ultimate”. You could say something was the toughest but when you said something was “Ultimate Fighting” then you were positioning it in such a way that boxing and everything else was positioned south of that.

How difficult was it to create this sport from scratch? What were the biggest challenges in getting the events off the ground?

My initial difficulty and the first hurdle I had to overcome was Rorion Gracie. Rorion is still a close friend and a great associate. His family’s jiu-jitsu had been a kind of pioneer in their willingness to engage in mixed matches in the back of their schools. On the other hand, when I first met Rorion, after reading Pat Jordan’s Playboy article in September 1989, I went out to meet Rorion and he had been approached by so many people, so many folks had pitched to him. He himself had been promoting The Gracie Challenge.

The great difficulty I had initially was getting Rorion interested. In doing the research I found that while there were other promoters promoting kickboxing and other traditional forms of martial arts, I had not found anybody until I found Rorion Gracie in the Gracie Academy in Torrance that was doing these types of fights on an improv basis. I had to create a direct-mail ad campaign for Rorion as a favor. I did it to show him, “This is what I know how to do. I know how to pull in various talents that will be able to help.” It created a tremendous return on investment. Now I had his attention. Now I could get him to sit down and listen to what I wanted to do.

By that point I had started rolling around on the mat, learning Gracie jiu-jitsu. The same evening I had classes, the screenwriter and director John Milius had classes. John and I got to know each other. John was a great student of martial arts and we used to sit around and talk after class in Rorion’s office. That’s where I began to broach the idea with both men of doing a tournament.

"There were two essential elements that I came up with. Number one, it was a tournament, it wasn’t the Gracie Challenge. We had to do a tournament because we had to open it up and make it broad. I told Rorion, “It could be a situation where your brother doesn’t win, whichever brother you choose.” It has to be done as an open tournament. I had gone to the Torrance Library and began to research different types of tournament formats. Single elimination, in my opinion, made the most sense. I asked Rorion at one point, “Do you think anyone in your family could do three bouts in one evening?” That was what we began working backwards from. It was either two or three bouts, so it was going to be a four-man single elimination or an eight-man single elimination tournament.

The second idea I had was to make it a pay-per-view event. I had already decided on the distribution. People had already approached Rorion about doing a video that you might be able to get Blockbuster to put in their stores, people were talking about doing lives events solely. Others had talked about taking it to network or cable. I knew that was a dead end. I knew there was no way that a spectacle of this magnitude and this controversy was going to be accepted on network or broadcast TV.

I began to research pay-per-view. I put out feelers for cable. I have rejection letters from ESPN, from Showtime, from HBO, and I realized pay-per-view is where we needed to be. I put together a business plan around that and I was able to get John Milius’ support, he lent his name. Then we had to go out and present it to a number of our friends, family, and fans and see if we could get the capital to sit down at this poker game and play for real.

How much of a challenge was it to have your hands in everything and have responsibilities in so many different areas?

I knew what it was going to take at that point. I had quit my job at an ad agency and I convinced Rorion that we should open up an office, that we should establish an LLC in Colorado, which my research indicated would be a state that would be favorable to allowing us to do this. It was a state that had the LLC format/structure because of gas and oil drilling before a lot of other states in the country did. We had to open up an office. Rorion had to continue running his school, he had a full-time operation with hundreds of students.

It was my job to be able to open up the office, get in there and you could say I did most of it, if not all of it. I had to recruit fighters, I had to incorporate us, I had to get us an accountant, I had to find us a business partner, I had to write the business plan and sell the business. Ken Shamrock, Kevin Rosier, I brought in Gerard Gordeau, and I was negotiating to bring in Ernesto Hoost, who I couldn’t get. He was a great K1 Fighter, of course. I wanted a boxer and I reached out to a number of people including James “Bonecrusher” Smith, Leon Spinks, through boxing cutman Leon Tabbs I was talking to boxing managers from Philadelphia, New York down to South Carolina. I had a friend in martial arts in St. Louis who was close to Art Jimmerson, who six or seven weeks after the UFC event in November of ’93 was set to fight Tommy “Hitman” Hearns and we brought him (Jimmerson) in.

I was fortunate to get someone who had been thrown out of sumo in Teila Tuli. I wanted it to be very broad. I think the first event, even though I didn’t get everyone I wanted, we did get an interesting assembly of talent to put it on the line. Quite frankly, that was the difficulty early on, you had a number of people that were protective of the business they built and some of them weren’t willing to put that on the line. I have to give a lot of credit to a lot of guys who did. Guys like Scott Morris, Ron van Clief “The Black Dragon”, there were a lot of guys that had the guts and willingness to step up and say “I want to see how I can do in something like this.”

When were you closest to throwing in the towel?

During the middle of 1993, we were still negotiating the deal with Semaphore Entertainment. We were still negotiating that deal and there was a point where Bob Meyrowitz and his brother, who was also his attorney, came out from New York and we spent a day or two in my office wrangling over viewpoints and it looked like we might not get this thing done. There was a point there when I thought this might not come together.

At one point we considered doing the show in Brazil on Halloween in 1993. That kind of fell through, not that it had anything to do with the promotion company; it was just the fact that the more we investigated the more we realized we were not prepared to move an event offshore that early on. It was too complicated; it was enough of a job to get this done here in the United States.

There were times when it got to be pretty crazy. There were days when after a few guys would turn me down and I would just put down the phone, put my head in my hands and say, “How in the hell did I ever get started with this?” (laughing). I remember wondering how I ever got started in this and also wondering if we would ever get to the goal line. I remember the night we did the event, Rorion and I were down in the bowels of the arena and the two of us just looked at each other and said, “We made it!” We hugged each other and it was a very emotional moment. It had been a long and winding road.

What would you want me or any fan to take away from the early days of the UFC?

It was a dream. We were all pursuing a dream. It was one that drove us. We all had a clear vision that this would be a big hit. This is the one thought that I would want everyone to remember. We all knew we had grabbed the tiger by the tail. That tiger might at some point turn around and kill us or it might pull us all the way to the top of the mountain. That is the one thought.

Do you still keep in touch with any of the guys you worked with back then?

I hear from fighters from the old days such as Don Frye, Dan Severn, and Cal Worsham, who has become a close personal friend. He helped me out a number of times when we needed somebody at short notice. He came from a hospital bed once and came to an event and fought Tank Abbott for me. I run into Big John McCarthy every now and then.

What is your fondest memory of your time spent with the UFC?

The end of the first UFC was truly the highest point. We had a tremendous cocktail party after the fights. Being there with the managers, the fighters came up from the dressing rooms and we partied there for a while. We ended up back at the hotel where they had organized a masked ball. Kevin Rosier came in a tuxedo; Rorion and I were already wearing tuxedos. We masked everybody. Teila Tuli wouldn’t come at first because he didn’t have anything to wear but someone went upstairs and got him and we put a mask on him, too.

We stayed partying until three or four o’clock in the morning and I remember at one point that I was leading a conga line and I remember the fellowship, the camaraderie that we all felt. We all knew we had been on an incredible journey together. I don’t remember it ever being as sweet or as distilled as it was that night. It was magic.