Blood, Gold & the Octagon

The Longest Walk

There is a straight line from the McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado, on November 12, 1993, to the South Lawn of the White House on June 14, 2026. It just happens to be the most improbable straight line in the history of sports.

In Denver, a skinny Brazilian in a white gi choked out a savate fighter while 86,000 people watched on pay-per-view — and a United States senator hadn't yet decided to make it his personal mission to destroy the whole thing. In Washington, thirty-three years later, a sitting president asked for eight or nine championship fights on the front lawn to celebrate America's 250th birthday — and the biggest fight promoter on Earth said he'd deliver the best card he'd ever built.

Nobody who was in that Denver arena in 1993 would have believed you. Half of them thought they were watching a snuff film.

This is the story of how the Ultimate Fighting Championship went from "human cockfighting" to the center of American culture: the Gracies, the dark ages, the $2 million fire sale, the reality show that saved everything, the golden age, the women's revolution, the Irishman who broke every record, the $4 billion sale, the pandemic, the merger, the reshuffle — and the streaming era that finally killed the pay-per-view model the whole empire was built on.

Before the Octagon: Vale Tudo and the Gracie Challenge

Mixed martial arts didn't start in 1993. It started on the beaches and in the gyms of Brazil, where a family of Scottish-descended immigrants turned fighting into a science — and then into a dare.

The story begins with Mitsuyo Maeda, a Japanese judoka who arrived in Brazil in 1914 and taught a teenager named Carlos Gracie the ground-fighting art that would become Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Carlos's younger brother Hélio — small, frail, barely 140 pounds — couldn't muscle the techniques the way his brother could, so he refined them. Leverage over strength. Position over power. The weak man defeating the strong man became the entire philosophy of the family.

By the 1920s, Brazil had vale tudo — Portuguese for "anything goes." No weight classes, no gloves, no rounds. Just two men and a question. The Gracies dominated it for decades, and they weren't shy about saying so. In the 1980s, they took out newspaper ads — the famous Gracie Challenge — offering $100,000 to any fighter, any style, who could beat a Gracie in a no-rules fight. Almost nobody took them up on it. The ones who did regretted it.

In 1978, Hélio's son Rorion Gracie moved to the United States and opened the Gracie Academy in a Torrance, California garage. He kept issuing the challenge. And in 1991, an advertising executive and fight fan named Art Davie saw Rorion featured in Playboy magazine and had a thought that would change sports history: what if we put the challenge on television?

Davie brought in 28 investors and formed WOW Promotions. They pitched it to TVKO (HBO's pay-per-view arm) and Showtime. Both passed. Finally, Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) — a scrappy PPV outfit known for oddities like a man-vs.-woman tennis match between Jimmy Connors and Martina Navratilova — said yes in May 1993. SEG coined the name: The Ultimate Fighting Championship. The pitch to the public was simple: it was Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but real.

A film art director named Jason Cusson designed the eight-sided cage — the Octagon — because the producers wanted something that looked like nothing else on television. They got it.

UFC 1: The Beginning

Denver didn't know what hit it.

The card was a glorious mess: a 400-pound sumo wrestler (Teila Tuli), a boxer wearing a single boxing glove (Art "One Glove" Jimmerson), a savate kickboxer (Gerard Gordeau), a karate black belt (Zane Frazier), a shootfighter (Ken Shamrock), two kickboxers, and Royce Gracie. Eight men, one night, $50,000 to the winner.

The rules were barely rules at all. No biting. No eye gouging. Break either and you'd be fined $1,500 — which tells you everything about the honor system they were operating on. There were no judges. A fight ended by knockout, submission, or a corner throwing in the towel. The referee couldn't stop it. Think about that for a second.

What happened next looked like a magic trick. Royce Gracie submitted Jimmerson in under two minutes — the boxer tapped before he'd thrown a real punch. In the semifinal, Royce choked out Ken Shamrock, the toughest man in the building, with a gi choke in 57 seconds. In the final, he took down the 216-pound Gerard Gordeau and finished him with a rear-naked choke.

Three fights. Three submissions. Barely a scratch on him.

The Gracie infomercial had worked perfectly. Thousands of Americans had just watched a 175-pound man in pajamas dismantle every tough guy in the room, and martial arts would never be the same. Within a year, every strip-mall dojo in America was bolting "Gracie Jiu-Jitsu" onto its sign.

But the UFC had also just painted a target on its own back. And the man holding the bow was a United States senator.

The Dark Ages

The early UFC was lightning in a bottle, and the bottle was cracking.

Royce won again at UFC 2 in March 1994 — a 16-man tournament, because subtlety was dead — in front of around 125,000 PPV buys. But the novelty was already curdling into controversy. The fights were brutal by design. At UFC 5 in April 1995, Royce and Ken Shamrock fought a 36-minute superfight that ended in a draw and bored half the audience into a coma. The company lurched between spectacle and sport, never sure which it wanted to be.

Then came John McCain.

In 1996, the Arizona senator — an avid boxing fan — watched a tape of early UFC fights and declared the sport "human cockfighting." He called it barbaric. He said it wasn't a sport. And unlike every other critic, he had power: he wrote letters to the governors of all 50 states urging them to ban it. When he became chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in 1997, the committee that oversaw the cable industry, the pressure became existential. TCI, Time Warner, Cablevision — the big pay-per-view carriers — dropped the UFC. New York banned it outright under Governor George Pataki. For a while, Louisiana was one of only three states where you could legally hold a show.

Under pressure, SEG added rules at a frantic pace — and almost every modern MMA rule was born in this era:

By 2000, it was a legitimate, regulated sport — and it was also nearly bankrupt. SEG had bled out. The company that invented modern MMA was dying of the wounds inflicted while learning how to be legitimate.

Enter two casino brothers and their friend, a former boxercise instructor with a mouth like a foghorn.

Zuffa: Two Million Dollars and a Prayer

In January 2001, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta — billionaires from the Station Casinos empire — bought the UFC from SEG for $2 million. They formed a company called Zuffa (Italian for "fighting") and installed their friend Dana White as president.

Two million dollars. For the entire UFC — the brand, the library, the contracts, everything. It's the greatest distressed-asset purchase in sports history, and it wasn't close.

Their first event, UFC 30, went down on February 23, 2001, at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. UFC 33 in September 2001 became the first event sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commission. By the end of 2001, the UFC was back on major cable pay-per-view.

But "back on TV" and "making money" are different things. The Fertittas poured tens of millions into the company — production values, marketing, sanctioning fights state by state — and the losses kept coming. The low point came at UFC 40 in November 2002, when Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock did the biggest business in company history and it still wasn't enough. By 2004, the UFC was a critically respected, financially catastrophic enterprise. The Fertittas were reportedly $44 million in the hole.

Dana White has told the story a hundred times: they were done. Finished. The plan was to cut their losses and walk away.

Then a basic-cable network called Spike TV offered them a lifeline — a reality show. The Fertittas paid for the entire first season themselves, around $10 million, because no sponsor would touch it. It was the last bullet in the chamber.

The Fight That Saved Everything

The Ultimate Fighter premiered on January 17, 2005. Sixteen hungry fighters, two coaches (Chuck Liddell and Randy Couture), one house, zero privacy. It was The Real World with cauliflower ear — and America ate it up.

The live finale aired on April 9, 2005. The light heavyweight final pitted Forrest Griffin against Stephan Bonnar. What happened over the next fifteen minutes is the most important quarter-hour in MMA history.

They beat the hell out of each other. No feeling-out process, no game plan — just two men swinging with everything they had, bleeding all over the canvas, refusing to go down. As the fight wore on, the audience kept growing. People were calling their friends: turn on Spike TV right now. By the final round, the ratings were climbing by the minute.

A week later at UFC 52, coaches Liddell and Couture fought for the light heavyweight title in front of the biggest PPV audience the company had ever drawn.

The UFC was alive. More than alive — it was about to explode.

Bonnar, "The American Psycho," fought 16 times in the Octagon and was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame alongside Griffin in 2013. He died on Christmas Eve, 2022. Ask any fan of a certain age where they were on April 9, 2005, and watch their face change.

The Golden Age

What followed was the greatest talent boom in combat sports history. Three figures defined it — and they couldn't have been more different.

Georges St-Pierre, the polite Canadian karate kid, won the welterweight title at UFC 65 in November 2006, lost it in one of the biggest upsets ever to Matt Serra at UFC 69, then took it back in front of a rabid Montreal crowd at UFC 83 and defended it nine consecutive times. His 2011 defense against Jake Shields at UFC 129 drew 55,724 fans to Toronto's Rogers Centre — still the North American MMA attendance record.

Anderson Silva, "The Spider," won the middleweight title at UFC 64 in October 2006 and proceeded to do things that didn't look possible — the matrix-like dodging, the hands-down clowning, the front kick to Vitor Belfort's face at UFC 126. Sixteen straight UFC wins. Ten consecutive title defenses — still the record. His 2010 war with Chael Sonnen at UFC 117, where he was dominated for four and a half rounds before pulling off a miracle triangle-armbar in the fifth, remains the greatest comeback in the sport's history.

And then there was Brock Lesnar — a 280-pound NCAA wrestling champion and former WWE superstar who walked into the UFC in 2008 and broke the business model. His debut at UFC 81 ended in a submission loss to Frank Mir. Ten months later, at UFC 91, he knocked out Randy Couture to win the heavyweight title. At UFC 100 in July 2009, his rematch with Mir drew an estimated 1.6 million PPV buys — the first true blockbuster of the modern era. Lesnar didn't just bring WWE fans; he brought everyone. SportsCenter started covering MMA because of Brock Lesnar.

By 2012, the UFC was the biggest combat sports promotion on Earth. And it was about to discover that half the population had been waiting for an invitation.

The Women's Revolution

For its first two decades, the UFC had exactly one position on women's fighting: no. Dana White said in 2011 that women would never fight in the UFC.

Then he met Ronda Rousey.

Rousey was an Olympic bronze medalist in judo (Beijing 2008) with an armbar so inevitable it felt scripted — all eleven of her professional wins before the UFC had come in the first round, ten by armbar. When Strikeforce folded, White signed her in December 2012 and made her the inaugural women's bantamweight champion on the spot.

At UFC 157 in February 2013, Rousey defended against Liz Carmouche — surviving a neck crank that nearly ended the fight in seconds — and finished her with the armbar at 4:49 of the first round. What followed was a cultural detonation: magazine covers, late-night talk shows, movie roles, and six title defenses, most of them measured in seconds, not rounds.

It ended the way all fairy tales in fighting end — violently. At UFC 193 in November 2015, in front of 56,214 fans in Melbourne, Holly Holm — a 19-time boxing world champion — head-kicked Rousey into unconsciousness in the second round. It was the biggest upset in women's MMA history, and it proved the division was real: deep enough, dangerous enough, and popular enough to survive its queen.

What Rousey built, others inherited. Joanna Jędrzejczyk became a strawweight terror. Amanda Nunes — who'd knocked out Rousey in 48 seconds at UFC 207 — became the consensus greatest female fighter ever, holding two divisions simultaneously after her 51-second destruction of Cris Cyborg at UFC 232. The women's game went from a sideshow to a co-main event staple, and it never went back.

The McGregor Era and the $4 Billion Sale

Conor McGregor didn't just break records. He broke the concept of what a fighter could be.

The Dublin featherweight talked like a 1970s boxing promoter, dressed like a Milan fashion plate, and fought like a man who'd solved striking. His 2015 run was perfect theater: the interim title win over Chad Mendes at UFC 189 on two weeks' notice, and then — at UFC 194 in December 2015 — the 13-second knockout of José Aldo, the only featherweight champion the UFC had ever known. Thirteen seconds. One left hand. The loudest punch in MMA history.

What came next was chaos, commerce, and genius in equal measure. A short-notice loss to Nate Diaz at UFC 196 (choked out in the second round, March 2016). A vengeful decision win in the rematch at UFC 202 (1.6 million buys, August 2016). Then UFC 205 in November 2016 — the UFC's Madison Square Garden debut — where McGregor knocked out Eddie Alvarez to become the first simultaneous two-division champion in UFC history, draping both belts over his shoulders.

And then he left the sport entirely to box Floyd Mayweather in August 2017 — a spectacle that did roughly 4.3 million PPV buys, the second-biggest combat sports event ever, and paid McGregor something in the neighborhood of $100 million.

The McGregor era's coda was its darkest and biggest night: UFC 229 in October 2018. The undefeated Dagestani champion Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. the returning McGregor — genuine hatred, a bus attack, months of venom. Khabib mauled him for four rounds and finished him with a neck crank. Then Khabib jumped the cage and started a brawl in the crowd. The event did 2.4 million PPV buys — the UFC record, and, as it turned out, a record that can never be broken. More on that later.

Khabib, the Pandemic, and the ESPN Years

Khabib Nurmagomedov retired at 29-0 in October 2020, after submitting Justin Gaethje at UFC 254 — two months after his father's death from COVID-19 complications. He walked away at the absolute peak, the most dominant champion the lightweight division has ever seen, and he never came back. In a sport defined by fighters who don't know when to quit, Khabib knew exactly when to quit.

The pandemic could have killed the UFC. Instead, it made it essential. When every other sport shut down in March 2020, Dana White refused. UFC 249 went ahead on May 9, 2020, in an empty arena in Jacksonville, Florida — the first major sporting event of the COVID era. Then came Fight Island: a quarantined bubble on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi that hosted international cards through the summer. While the NBA was building its own bubble, the UFC had already fought in one.

The business engine underneath it all was the ESPN deal — announced in May 2018, launched in January 2019. Five years, $1.5 billion, and a fundamental change: UFC pay-per-views moved exclusively to the ESPN+ streaming platform. The PPV buyrate era was ending; the subscription era was beginning. The UFC traded the sugar high of blockbuster buys for the steady drip of guaranteed rights fees — and the money got bigger, not smaller.

The era's defining star was Israel Adesanya, the Nigerian-New Zealand kickboxer with the anime references and the Matrix footwork, who unified the middleweight title at UFC 243 in October 2019 in front of 57,127 fans in Melbourne — breaking the UFC attendance record. Kamaru Usman turned welterweight into a personal fiefdom. And Jon Jones, the most talented fighter who ever lived, spent the era as both the sport's pound-for-pound king and its most reliable tabloid headline.

The Merger and the New Kings

On September 12, 2023, the UFC and WWE officially merged under a new publicly traded company called TKO Group Holdings. The valuation: $21.4 billion — $12.1 billion for the UFC, $9.3 billion for WWE. Endeavor held 51%. Dana White's title changed from president to CEO.

The irony wasn't lost on anyone: the "real" fighting company and the "fake" fighting company, under one roof, owned by a Hollywood agency. The company that sold for $2 million in 2001 was now worth twelve billion.

Inside the cage, the torch was passing. Alex Pereira — a former two-division Glory kickboxing champion with the most stone-faced staredown in sports — became a two-division UFC champion with terrifying speed, starching Jamahal Hill in the UFC 300 main event. Islam Makhachev, Khabib's heir, took the lightweight throne and defended it against all comers, including two wins over featherweight king Alexander Volkanovski.

And Jon Jones finally did the thing everyone had waited a decade for: he moved to heavyweight. At UFC 285 in March 2023, he submitted Ciryl Gane in the first round to win the heavyweight title — youngest champion ever at 23, fourteen title-fight wins, the consensus greatest of all time. The asterisk, as always with Jones, was everything outside the cage.

The era also closed a long legal chapter: in 2024, the UFC agreed to a $335 million settlement in the long-running antitrust lawsuit brought by former fighters — the closest the company's labor practices had ever come to a courtroom reckoning.

The Great Reshuffle

If 2024 was a coronation, 2025 was a demolition derby. Eight championships changed hands. Twenty-one title fights. Five hundred twenty fights across 42 events. And two ghosts that haunted the entire year: the fights that never happened.

The lightweight division ate itself in the most entertaining way possible. Ilia Topuria — the undefeated Georgian-Spaniard who'd knocked out Volkanovski and Holloway in back-to-back featherweight defenses — vacated his 145-pound crown in February and moved up. At UFC 317 in June, he flattened Charles Oliveira to win the vacant lightweight title. The sport had a new face: 17-0, devastating power, and the self-belief of a man who'd never been wrong about anything.

Then Islam Makhachev did something nobody expected: he vacated lightweight himself and moved up to welterweight. At UFC 322 in November, he took Jack Della Maddalena's belt at Madison Square Garden — a $13.6 million gate, the biggest in UFC history. The dream superfight — Makhachev vs. Topuria — sat there all year like an unwrapped present. It never got opened.

The heavyweight division produced the year's ugliest saga. Jon Jones spent the entire year as champion and refused to fight interim champion Tom Aspinall — the Englishman who'd knocked out Sergei Pavlovich and Curtis Blaydes and was clearly the best heavyweight on Earth. Jones dodged, delayed, vacationed in Thailand — and then, when the UFC finally forced the choice, he retired rather than face Aspinall. He unretired two weeks later. Aspinall was elevated to undisputed champion without throwing a punch at the man he'd been chasing for two years.

Elsewhere: Khamzat Chimaev mauled Dricus du Plessis to take the middleweight crown. Kayla Harrison — the two-time Olympic judo gold medalist — beat Julianna Peña to win the women's bantamweight title. Joshua Van, all of 24, dethroned Alexandre Pantoja for the flyweight belt. Petr Yan reclaimed bantamweight. Mackenzie Dern won the strawweight title. And Alexander Volkanovski won back the featherweight crown he'd lost to Topuria — because the great ones always come back for one more run.

The Paramount Era

On August 11, 2025, Dana White announced the deal that ended an era: the UFC's media rights were going to Paramount+ and CBS — $7.7 billion over seven years, starting January 2026. Every numbered event, every Fight Night, streaming on Paramount+. Select cards simulcast on CBS. And the headline that mattered most to fans: the pay-per-view model was dead. No more $79.99. No more $99.99. Every fight included in the subscription.

Think about what that means. The UFC was built on pay-per-view — from 86,000 buys in Denver to 2.4 million for Khabib-McGregor. The buyrate was the sport's scoreboard for thirty years. Now the scoreboard is subscriber counts and streaming hours. UFC 229's record will stand forever, because the game it was scored in no longer exists.

The Paramount era opened with UFC 324 on January 24, 2026 — Justin Gaethje vs. Paddy Pimblett headlining in Las Vegas. The planned Harrison vs. Amanda Nunes superfight — Nunes coming out of retirement — was postponed when Harrison needed neck surgery. The early months were rocky: price hikes, thin cards, fans grumbling that the UFC was saving all its stars for something bigger.

The Scoreboard