(piano music)
- [Narrator] 1976 saw two abortive attempts at the future.
The first was Ronald Reagan's strong,
but ultimately unsuccessful,
primary attempt on then-President Gerald Ford.
Reagan surged from Ford's right flank,
attacking the amiable establishment choice
for losing Vietnam and kowtowing to collectivist forces
everywhere else in the world, especially at home.
The two fought tooth and nail,
but Reagan faltered down the stretch.
Ford ended up retaining his title
to the Republican Party's nomination
en route to a loss to Jimmy Carter.
Around the same time in the same year,
boxing legend Muhammad Ali took on
Japanese pro-wrestling icon Antonio Inoki.
You couldn't call it a fight,
so we'll say it was a contest.
How it came to be, no one can quite agree on.
Inoki spent most of the 15-round competition
in the butt-scoot position,
and Ali threw six punches,
so it's understandable that no one wants to claim
the rule set that allowed this.
Inoki versus Ali ended in a draw,
and was largely un-entertaining,
and Ronald Reagan was a joke outside of hardcore,
conservative Republican primary voters.
A world where the elderly actor was a threat
on the national stage and proto MMA existed
outside of gymnasiums in Brazil
both seemed pretty unlikely in 1976.
- I must tell those who fail to report
for duty this morning, they are in violation of the law
and if they do not report for work within 48 hours,
they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.
End of statement.
- [Narrator] The 1980's were spent destroying the
breakwaters that the West once felt protected its people
from the worst excesses of their own systems.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan broke the backs
of unions, ripped the spines out of their
respective nation's welfare states
and used a series of banana republics
as punching bags in their succession of small wars
meant to heal the wounded pride caused by Vietnam
and the tumultuous 1970s.
Social safety nets, higher wages
and other cushions the West was obliged to have
in order to draw its working classes away
from communism were ripped away.
We were naked to the winds of an uncertain world.
Ali and Inoki were a bit too early and a bit too weird.
But it was now a great time to destroy
our cultural ideal of martial arts.
(modem transmission buzzing)
(electronic piano music)
There were many champions in the Gracie family.
Rickson excelled at Vale Tudo.
Royler dominated in pure Jiu-Jitsu tournaments.
But lawyer and businessman Rorion
was the best at marketing, which was the language
of the new world that the Gracies found themselves in.
After spending the tail end of the 80s
getting the Gracie name out through Playboy,
street fight videos and everything else
he could think of, Rorion finally linked up
with Marketing Director Art Davie.
Seeking to monetize the mythical family from Brazil
who said they could kick the shit out of anyone,
the two settled on Pay Per View.
It almost ended in Gracie civil war.
One faction wanted the telegenic
and athletic Rickson to compete
but Rickson and Rorion were both too large in personality
to come to any agreement.
After near inter-office fights, the slighter in frame
Royce Gracie was selected.
(electronic piano music)
In 1993, no one knew anything and most people
still thought that if you did karate the right way,
you could blow up somebody's heart.
The call was: we're looking for people
to fight in a tournament where the only real rules
are you can't bite someone or gouge their eyes out.
We want to figure out what's the best kind of fighting.
Winner gets fifty thousand dollars.
Who would answer a call like that?
(electronic piano music)
- The eight constituting the tournament
included an insanely dirty kick-boxer,
a massive sumo wrestler, a respected but bewildered boxer
who ended up wearing one glove to the octagon
and two guys who stood above the rest.
We already know Royce, the diminutive scion
of grappling royalty, but his eventual counterpart
and partner in fate was Ken Shamrock.
Shamrock was a street tough, taken in by an adoptive father
whose last name he ended up taking.
A standout athlete who ended up in pro wrestling in Japan.
There he materialized in Pancrase,
a weird pro wrestling/ real fighting hybrid
where fighters had to wear thigh high boots
and could only strike with open palms.
Shamrock looked like he was chiseled out of rock
using the sharpest needles filled with the finest Anavar
and seemed intense and cool
in a now embarrassing 1990s way.
Shamrock and Gracie tore through their first opponents
before meeting in the semifinals.
When they met Shamrock and his bowling ball deltoids
outweighed Gracie by 40 pounds of pure muscle.
Though Shamrock was just an inch taller than his opponent,
the musculature difference was the kind you see
in political cartoons making a point about an underdog.
He and Shamrock entangled on the floor
where Gracie used his gi to his advantage,
cutting off Shamrock's windpipe and carotid arteries.
Shamrock protested but then admitted that he tapped.
Gracie went on to fight notoriously dirty
Dutch fighter Gerard Gordeau.
Gordeau bit Gracie's ear, to pay him back,
Gracie held onto his rear, naked choke
just a little longer than he needed to.
To the tens of thousands who had watched it,
the cultural image of martial arts was altered forever.
The men with coolly named East Asian techniques,
the yoked pro wrestler, the boxer,
they all fell to a man who dragged them to the floor
and turned their lights off by touching their necks.
(electronic piano music)
Fighting was evolving at previously unseen rates.
Ultimate fighters who were thought to have solved
the puzzle of martial arts fell again and again,
downed by new champions,
these were men like former elite college wrestler
Dan Severn, Russian standout Oleg Taktarov
and one of the first fully versatile fighters
in Marco Ruas.
Ruas, a Luta Livre fighter, won the UFC 7 tournament,
chopping down Paul Varelans
with a ruthless series of leg kicks
so thunderous that they eventually
sent the 300-pounder to the mat.
No matter who would walk away with the prize,
the sport resonated with outsiders in a world
now filled to the brim with them.
Why then? Why did all these unwashed masses
now clamor for these weird men brutalizing each other?
To paraphrase Inspector Javert to Jean Valjean,
"I'd only known a straight line before I'd met you."
Let's look at the culture at the time.
(saxophone music)
- Yeah, I found me a saxophone player.
- [Narrator] As America had just begun to survey
the rapid destruction of the 1980s,
the new professional culture of the 1990s had arrived.
It offered yoga and smoothies
but retained the same bloodlessness.
NAFTA made goods cheaper for some, the Clinton Crime Bill
took all those nasty super predators off the street.
There was a new set of platitudes about tolerance
that everyone could feel good about
as the lines between their professional
and personal lives blurred.
Or they were just totally dislocated in this new world
they were told they'd love.
The term politically correct
and then the backlash against it
started taking hold at this time.
We usually hear complaints about PC
when someone's told they can't shout racial slurs
at a little league game.
But it betrays something to think about.
This all started becoming a thing
when our corporations began coalescing
into state-like entities that could fill all our needs.
Their human resources departments, afraid of backlash,
instituted standards that often protected
vulnerable employees, but at other times
enforced standards and beliefs, outside activities
and anything that would make one too different
for the workplace through fear of being fired.
Since we have such little recourse against our employers,
it was a culturally significant tool.
There were obviously good outcomes.
It's good to take people's feelings into consideration,
but it was never PC culture, it was HR culture.
The main point is not to protect the individual now,
but the company.
We never really stopped doing things because
we cared about the feelings of others,
we did them because we'd be shoved out of the window
with no net to catch us.
Seeing a bunch of insane men with dumb tattoos
cover one another in blood
was a release from the bloodless brutality of life.
As everyone in power swept up the macho,
posturing violence of the Reagan years
with the reserved, sanitized, new violence,
it was stark to see men who said,
"We're fucked up, we dOn't fit in anywhere
"and we will beat each other to death
"if it means we can survive."
Of course, MMA had a very un-diverse audience at this time.
WhiLe as a spectacle it was noticed
by many different types of people,
its core fan base was overwhelmingly white and male.
There were a great deal of suburban petit bourgeois
who could afford to buy those pay-per-views consistently.
Then there were a lot of guys
who were lower on the totem pole.
Among the latter there were those who felt
their prestige in society had taken a hit
and blamed that on whatever group
they already hated the most.
And then the others who were just checked out.
Regardless who their bitterness was directed at,
the unambiguous nature Of the combat portrayed
was a cultural reprieve
from an increasingly confusing world.
The one-two path of a punch to a guy
snoring on the ground was still the same.
Unfortunately for the sport,
the wrong people also took notice.
Senator John McCain who spent his early adulthood
dropping explosives and napalm on a tiny agrarian nation
until he was shot down
famously likened it to human cock fighting.
Of course, McCain was also a huge boxing fan,
a sport that offers a similar degree of brain damage,
in addition to being a market competitor
for the then nascent UFC.
And his wife, Cindy McCain, inherited a large distributor
for Anheuser-Busch, a beer company
that spent untold millions on boxing sponsorships.
But it's not like John McCain had some
documented history of abusing his pull for personal ends.
Anyway, McCain was so shocked and appalled by the trashy
violence of the cage that he could probably barely watch B-roll
of Huts bursting into flames in Hanoi that night.
So he initiated a campaign to effectively
ban mixed martial arts.
UFC 9 was right after McCain's assault
on the freedom to consensual violence.
The main event saw a super fight
between former tournament champions
Dan Severn and Ken Shamrock.
With new rules in place, the two men could not strike
each other with closed fists, lest they be arrested.
What happened next was an interminable affair.
Shamrock immediately moved to the UFC logo
in the center of the ring.
He didn't leave that spot for 10 minutes.
And did nothing but pivot toward Severn and stare.
Severn, for his part circled around Shamrock
and stared back at him.
- [Announcer] And neither one willing to take a shot.
- [Narrator] He circled him again and again and again.
- [Announcer] Still nothing happening.
- [Narrator] Neither fighter even attempted a strike
save for a single half-hearted jab every minute or two.
- [Announcer] And you gotta keep your strategies,
maintain your poise.
- [Narrator] This went on for 10 full minutes
until referee John McCarthy temporarily stopped
the fight.
By that time, Severn had made 35 complete orbits
around Shamrock.
By a rough estimate, Severin had danced about 2,900 feet,
a little more than half a mile.
- [Referee] You can't just stare at each other.
- [Narrator] The half hour fight ended in a split decision.
Although it's hard to imagine anyone who paid $19.95
for the pay-per-view sticking around until the end.
- [Announcer] These are two of the greatest fighters
in the world but they're not fighting.
- [Narrator] The damage was done.
SEG, the UFC's parent company
suddenly had trouble finding places to fight.
Within a matter of months, revenue had sharply declined.
Despite their best efforts
to work with athletic commissions,
it was taking its toll on the promotion.
Until an angel came in and saved the sport,
a seedy, depraved angel.
Let's dig up it's bones.
(upbeat piano music)
It's the 1950s in Galveston, Texas,
a hotbed of organized crime.
The Maceo family operates a racket that rakes in millions
though gambling, prostitution and the oil business.
Joseph Francis Fertitta marries into the family
and soon the Fertittas and Maceos
find themselves in the paper together.
In 1960, the law finally comes down in Galveston
and the Fertittas scatter.
Some resurface in the desert
including Frances Fertittas' son, Frank Jr.
Frank spends 15 years working in Las Vegas casinos
before founding one of his own
with a business partner, Carl Thomas.
It's called Bingo Palace.
And in a few short years it becomes the sole property
of Fertitta when Thomas is convicted by the feds
for illegal skimming practices.
Fertitta changes the name
and launches the Station Casinos empire
and it makes the family very, very rich.
So rich that, in 2001, Frank's sons Lorenzo and Frank III,
also known as Frankie Three Sticks, not making it up,
team up with their childhood friend Dana White
to buy the UFC.
Dana was a boxercise instructor who had to evacuate Boston
because according to him, feared New England mobster
Whitey Bulger tried to extort him.
It's a very normal company.
Previously the UFC had cleaned up its rules
and tried everything it could to lobby state governments
to sanction their fights.
But none of those politicians seemed to listen.
But in the year 2000, the New Jersey State Athletic
Commission established some common sense rules.
This set of prohibitions and standards
was known as the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts.
It established mixed martial arts as legitimate.
How did Dana White and the Fertittas push this through
so quickly after years of futility on SEG's part?
Well, the Fertittas were very well connected
in republican politics and as for Dana White, well,
- Good evening everyone, my name is Dana White.
I am the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Thank you.
I'm sure most of you are wondering "what are you doing here?"
In 2001, my partners and I bought the UFC
and it was basically considered a bloodsport.
State athletic commissions didn't support us.
Arenas around the world refused to host our events.
Nobody took us seriously, nobody.
Except Donald Trump.
Donald was the first guy that recognized
the potential that we saw in the UFC
and encouraged us to build our business.
He hosted our first two events at his venue,
he dealt with us personally, he got in the trenches with us,
and he made a deal that worked for everyone.
On top of that, he showed up for the fight
on Saturday night and sat in the front row.
Yeah, he's that guy, he shows up.
Donald championed the UFC before it was popular,
before it grew into a successful business
and I will always be grateful, so grateful to him
for standing with us in those early days.
So tonight, I stand with Donald Trump
and let's be honest folks, we need somebody
who believes in this country,
we need somebody who's proud of this country
and who will fight for this country.
(crowd cheering)
- [Narrator] The dark age of the UFC was over.
Those forgotten years, though, saw some new stars:
Guys like Bas Rutten, Tito Ortiz, Chuck Liddell,
these were people who specialized in styles
like their predecessors, but were well-rounded enough
that they could implement their malice far more artfully.
But still, if a juiced to the gills man takes you down
and smashes your head in, but you're banned in
a bunch of places and you can't get on the air,
did it really happen?
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