Issue 196

December 2022

The 14th Annual Fighters Only World MMA Awards saw the great and the good converge on the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas to celebrate the best of mixed martial arts. Among the award winners was Kirik Jenness, a man whose contribution to the sport outside of the cage was hugely valuable in the early days of the sport. Fighters Only’s Simon Head caught up with him on the night to take a trip down memory lane with “The OG of The UG.”

While the sport was growing and evolving inside the cage, fan awareness followed suit outside of it as MMA gradually grew from a niche attraction to a mainstream sport in just a few short decades. 

One of the men who was there at the beginning was Kirik Jenness, whose passion for martial arts soon transitioned to MMA, and then to the internet as he launched 

"I was indeed there in the beginning," he told Fighters Only.

"I had a kickboxing studio in a little town, a little college town, in Massachusetts – Western Massachusetts. I got a mailer saying 'is there anybody in your gym that wants to fight?' And there was an ad in Black Belt magazine (saying) 'We're gonna have a no-rules fight.' 

“I didn't think it was anything. I thought it was professional wrestling because there have been things like that going. Actually, there had been MMA-like events in the 70s. Count Dante had the death matches, Fred Hamilton had no-rules fights. It'd been going on for a while, but at a low level. It was nothing new to me.”

Jenness recalled the night he first saw the UFC, as he joined a group of friends to watch the show that started it all, UFC 1, on November 12, 1993. 

“When I first saw that thing, I'm like, 'I'm not going to pay any attention to this,’” he said.

“But it was $14.95, and we gathered at a rich friend's condo, we watched the show, and I realized I'd wasted 20 years of my life. That was the beginning of it.”

With his interest piqued, Jenness soon became an integral part of the martial arts scene in his native Massachusetts, only for the mainstream rejection of the unregulated, unrefined version of mid-90s MMA to threaten to shut things down as quickly as it had emerged.

“I'm proud to say I opened up the first MMA gym in my home state of Massachusetts, and then the sport died,” Jenness recalled.

“John McCain – may he rest in peace – for whatever reason, was not friendly about the sport. And I have to say, I get it. I was originally a boxing fan. I could get how a boxing person would think, ‘It’s fighting on the ground. It's dirty fighting. It's not good.’

“Again, Joe Frazier – rest in peace – was interviewed. He goes, 'I don't like it, it's dirty fighting.' I would get that a boxing person thinks it's dirty fighting.

“The thing that connected me hardest to that 'dirty fighting' thing was in the late 90s there was a challenge fight between Enson Inoue and some huge Brazilian, and the Brazilian spat. You can't spit, that's disgusting. It's horrible. It's two guys elbowing each other in the head!

“Spitting is not inherently dangerous at all, but they didn't like it, so the sport was despised, for reasons I understand and, essentially, almost died.”

But, despite the battle for the hearts and minds of the lawmakers, and the mainstream media, interest in MMA was growing among a small, but dedicated fanbase, and, while the likes of Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie were becoming pioneers inside the cage, Jenness became an MMA pioneer of a different kind outside it, as the owner of The Underground, an online forum where fans of MMA could gather and chat about the sport they loved. It became so popular that even fighters, coaches, and promoters would hop on and share their views on the sport. In a time long before social media, The UG was the hub for MMA discussion, and it grew alongside the sport as MMA exploded in popularity through the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“I never believed this would happen,” admitted Jenness.

“I think there were other people smarter than me that knew the sport was gonna be big. (But) Dana White didn't even know it. They bought it, they acquired $20 million in debt, plus an extra $2 million. They lost 10s of millions of dollars more. Dana White said 'I knew I had the right idea, but it might have been at the wrong time.' So maybe nobody knew it was going to be big! I sure didn't! 

“When the sport was at its lowest, my plan was to try to build it up kind of from the high school level, try to get into high schools across the country, and over a generation, over 30 years, it might turn into something. But The Ultimate Fighter Season 1 really sealed the deal for the sport, and it's done nothing but ascend and ascend and ascend. And now, again, thanks to Rob Hewitt, we've got the equivalent of the Academy Awards right here.”

Those “Academy Awards,” are Fighters Only’s World MMA Awards, where we were chatting for this very interview. Kirik was one of hundreds of esteemed guests at the event, but his night would be capped off by a surprise as he was announced as the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Fighters Only has grown with the sport over the years, too, and Jenness paid tribute to the brand’s staying power during the at-times turbulent journey from UFC 1 to the present day.

“There was a time – people reading this are not gonna believe it, but it's a stone fact – there were 13 MMA magazines, and I had subscriptions to all of them, and I still have all of them,” he said. 

“It started with Vale Tudo News. That was the first one. Vale Tudo News was about 1994. It was made from pieces of Xerox paper, stuck together. That was the very first one. Full Contact Fighter became really big for a while. And then the publishing industry just got hit, and hit, and hit.

“Now there's one survivor. There's one company that didn't just make it through, it soared – and that's you guys. And the proof is right here in this extraordinary event that you're putting on.”

Fighters Only is still here, and Jenness, now a successful part of the Brave Combat Federation broadcast team, as well as the “Mayor for Life” at The UG, is very much still here, too. The MMA world today may be very different to how it was when Jenness first got started, but his legacy lives on, and his contribution will be a crucial chapter in the growth of MMA as a fan-driven sport.