I was taking Judo as a class in college in 2000. We were discussing ground game/real life uses and BJJ was brought up as a ‘kissing cousin’. We watched some ‘underground’ videos of the Gracies beating up on TMA’ers that wanted to test their techniques against BJJ. According to my instructor, only a Judo player was able to draw at the Gracie camp (I have no idea if its true, but the Judo player in the video faired ok).

From there, we watched one of the UFC fights from the early days, featuring Royce Gracie…but I’m not sure which one it was, only that that guy in the gi was whooping up on some much bigger dudes.

After that, I moved and wanted to train Judo again, which led me to find a club that taught MMA in general…classes in Judo, BJJ, and muay thai were offered and most the group got together for the UFC’s as they came around…this was UFC 52 or so…I remember seeing Chuck drop Randy. I don’t remember many of the other fights, but I did have fun. I’ve been watching UFC fights pretty consistantly after that. I suppose this makes me a TUF n00b, but I never watched the first or second seasons, nor did I realize it was a show until later… I don’t and didn’t have cable, so I missed out on that fun

Yeah, Yeah. I know, but I’m old and I really did see it on tv. Funny thing was, it was a total accident. Denver has had some interesting martial arts history, including teh first UFCs and the Sabaki challenge. I was with a friend and we went to a party a girlfriends house, where they had UFC 1 on tv, even though it was happening just across town. It was definitely interesting and the visual of a skinny guy in a gi beating much larger fellows was very intriguing. As much as I had no clue as to what was happening, I couldn’t get over the physical mismatch.

My interest had peaks and valleys over the years, but the Liddell/Couture days of the UFC got me into it at never miss a show level.

We were watching a card one night and my friend noticed a BJJ school opening across the street. The rest is history, lol.

While I have vague memories of UFC commercials as a kid (Oleg Taktarov is a name is remember from the ads), I was too young to buy the event and never heard about it again. None of my friends were into it, and it never occurred to me to try to find a store to rent them. And then came Spike TV, with its UFC and TUF.

So basically, I’m a TUF noob…

The first season of the Ultimate Fighter. I’m a proud TUF noob.

 I was your quintessential pro wrestling fan turned mixed martial arts obsessive superfan. In high school I was glued to pro wrestling and enjoyed the athleticism and the spectacle presented on my TV every Monday night. All the big names who really made the show enjoyable were quickly leaving the industry, seemingly all at once, and as I was getting older the campy, contrived, predictable formula was growing old on me. For most people, the mythical appeal of pro wrestling doesn’t have the same appeal when you start growing up as it does when your 14 years old.

I got into college and when I occasionally tuned in Monday nights to see if Stone Cold would show up for a surprise stunner, I saw ads for this Ultimate Fighting reality show and decided to plant my ass on the couch with my leftover beer from the weekend and give it a shot. I had heard of this “ultimate fighting” but never really knew anyone who was into it or where to even look. I had an idea that it was an outlawed form of barfighting that Ken Shamrock used to do. I knew Tito Ortiz was a person. That was it.

Immediately, I was hooked. The characters presented were real guys, plucked from real life, many with legitimate athletic backgrounds. These weren’t pro wrestling personalities but actual people with a dream – a dream that just so happened to be beating up other people for money. But the first time I saw a fight, the technical aspect grabbed me. This was so raw, so real, and sometimes so brutal, but it took unbelievable work to be able to do and so many ways to win.

I watched all season and I spent most of my class time freshman year sitting on sites like Sherdog trying to learn as much about this sport as I could and get acquainted with the history. I wanted to immerse myself in the sport as much as possible but was having a tough time finding other people who enjoyed my newfound passion. Then came Bonnar vs. Griffin – and all my friends started jumping on board.

I haven’t missed a UFC since I started watching it. I started getting into old PRIDE shows before the company’s demise. I began training in Muay Thai for a while and have since started BJJ. I have played sports all my life and I’ll tell anyone – this is the greatest sport in the world.

I’ve watched UFC 1 but i wasn’t one of the 99% who watched it live. MY first UFC fight was Pedro Rizzo vs. Josh Barnett. Once I seen that fight, I was hooked. My younger brother just recently started watching MMA. I’m pretty sure the fight that got him hooked was the Karo Pariysan vs. Diego Sanchez match. Ever since then he’s been at my house For every PPV.

My parents were extremely badass, and even though I was only twelve or so at the time, the rented it so we could watch it during one of our frequent weekend getaways at the beach. We were all hooked instantly (except my mom, of course, who was simple tolerant of it..likely aware that fighting the tide would produce no lasting results).

After that, I think we rented #2 on video, then found out how to get the PPV’s for #3 onwards. I’ve gotta say that UFC is responsible for my desire to learn wrestling and other combat sports, and it’s also a big part of my self-confidence formula. After rolling with guys who practice 3-4 hours per day and being able to effectively nullify them at will, I just don’t worry about altercations at all. I’d guess the same is true of most avid readers of this forum, since most of the readers here reference their own training at some point.

So no, I’m not one of the original PPV’ers, but we were the first to rent the copy of UFC 1 when it hit our local video store, and I know we saw it well before early 1995, so I’m guessing it was mid-’94. Real life-changer, cheesy as that may sound.

I’ve been watching MMA since late 1994, when my family took in a Japanese exchange student who told me stories about Pancrase when she saw me watching wrestling on TV. Her brother was into Japanese pro wrestling and as such followed the new upstart Pancrase. I found the idea interesting but being 11 at the time I didn’t have access to anything outside of the early video tapes of the UFC that I could rent at the store down the street. So I basically just hit the tapes of the early UFC’s as they came out and as I got older got into a bit of old school tape trading to get fights from Japan.

During this time I was developing as a huge boxing fan, I had just met Muhammad Ali (for the first of three times) which cemented my early interest in boxing. So MMA was just kind of an “every couple weeks I’ll watch” kind of thing to supplement the boxing that I watched.

Then UFC 14 (1997) happened and I became hooked. Maurice Smith was exactly what I needed to see. Being a boxing guy I wanted to see that a real, pure striker could succeed in the sport, I appreciated what Royce did…but hey…I’m a striking guy at heart. “Tank” Abbott never really appealed to me because of my love of boxers like Roy Jones Jr. I suppose I wanted a certain degree of elegance to my strikers.

In 2000 I watched the PPV broadcast of the Pride GP and then every PPV the company put on thereafter until it folded. Around this time I also got into good ol’ fashioned Internet tape trading to try and get other events from around the world. In 2001 I began to attend live events in the Hammond, IN area such as the Ironheart Crown. My first live show was IC 3 which included 4 man tournament wins by Miguel Torres and Stephan Bonnar as well as a win by Jay Buck.

So I have been a fan of the sport for a long time and could run down a pretty good list of the fights that cemented my fandom. But I can say with all honesty that Cro Cop vs. Nogueira (I may be a striking guy but Big Nog is my favorite fighter ever) at the 2003 GP was the fight that made it so that I will never NOT love this sport.

Watched UFC 1+ when I was in gradeschool… loved it.

Then I stopped until The Ultimate Fighter 1 on Spike and was hooked again. So yes, you can call be a TUF n00b.

I watched Royce Gracie submit his way through everyone in UFC Unleashed, when they were building Hughes Vs Gracie. Up to then I had thought the UFC was just a bunch of roughnecks slugging it out, but Royce was really skilled.

I stopped paying attention for a while untill I saw a Mirko Crocop HL reel. Hooked!

After I wanted to find more, I found Cagepotato, and became an “informed” fan.

…I’m a Kimbo Slice newb. Yeah. I’ve only been following MMA since May/June. I used to regularly watch the afternoon ESPN shows, and they started talking about Kimbo and it piqued my interest enough to check it out that Saturday. I found it very exciting even though I only watched the main event.

The next day (Sunday) I just spent hours researching the sport. i checked my cable schedule and saw that this thing called World Extreme Cagefighting was going to be on that night. …it was fantastic. This was the Faber v Pulver night. Since then I’ve been hooked. Have pretty much stopped watching team sports alltogether. This sport is so much more compelling to me. Quickly replaced my ESPN viewing with time spent on MMA sites, eventually settling in here.

I don’t know why i never checked it out before. I mean I had heard of Chuck Liddell and everything, but i guess it took the mainstream coverage to get me to really look at it as a real sport.

Kimbo Slice newb, is that gonna be the next big thing?

And btw, my first fight I ever saw was Couture/Liddell I, but I didn’t watch them live till TUF.

I live in Australia so I’m pretty sure there was no access to the early UFCs when they came out.

For Christmas a couple of years ago my brother saw the Smashing Machine documentary on TV and liked it. So my dad found a DVD of what they were talking about on the show and gave it to Paul for christmas. Turned out to be UFC 53. I was oblivious to all this and I walked down into the living room when Paul was watching it.

He said, “Take a look at this.”. First footage of MMA I ever saw was David Loiseau spinning back kick Charles McCarthy and follow it up with a flying knee. I was intrigued by it from then on.

From there, Paul started renting UFC DVDs. He had heard on boxing websites that Chuck Liddell was hot shit, so Paul hired UFC 43, and watched Liddell get man handled by Couture. Just grew from there.

Currently in our house we have UFCs 1-31, 38-90, plus PRIDEs 1-31, 33, plus the tournaments except for the heavyweight tournamnet.

So in short I guess you could say Mark Kerr’s drug addiction started it off, and Loiseaus spinning back got me hooked.

It was during one of the yearly runs of The Godfather or Bond movies on Spike TV that I happened to have seen a preview or commerical for a UFC event that featured a BJ Penn fight. Not sure but it may have been UFC Unleashed. The fight shown was the fight when BJ knocked out Caol Uno and Din Thomas. I have been a die hard – never say never – BJ Penn fan ever since. During that fight there was a commerical for TUF 3 – Spike TV was going to do a marathon leading up to the Finale. I watched and was hooked – it has become like a drug. That was maybe 2 years ago.

I started renting all the UFC and Pride fights. I rented a few of the Rumble on the Rocks and King of the Cages – what I could find that is. I started going to all the mma websites, and I can say that I know so much you’d think I’d have been watching since day one.

I used to have a friend who was a huge Tank Abbott mark, so I saw a couple of early UFCs in high school. I particularly remember Gary Goodridge brutalizing Paul Herrera with elbows. But I didn’t really get into MMA until I saw Extreme Fighting 1, particularly the fight between Igor Zinoviev and Mario Sperry. Man, Zinoviev really looked like something special before Frank Shamrock ended his career.

Initially my godfather showed me UFC 3, which I really enjoyed. Keith Hackney’s pummeling of Emmanuel Yarborough has stuck with me to this day.

I was young, though. Too young to pay for the UFC shows on a regular basis. I saw UFC 4 and witnessed the ground battle between Royce Gracie and Dan Severn. Despite not understanding the ground game, I was intrigued. And yet, that would be that last time I watched a full UFC event until The Ultimate Fighter.

In fact, I had no idea The Ultimate Fighter was on. Call it coincidence, serendipity, dumb luck, but I happened to watch pro wrestling for the first time in years and after it went off the air, this UFC reality show came on. “Oh, cool, the UFC has a show,” I thought. That was the night Bobby Southworth called Chris Leben a “fatherless bastard.” Good timing out of me.

I didn’t watch the rest of the season religiously. In fact, I remember really paying attention to it when they ran the marathon leading into the season finale. Good timing for me again, as on that show I got to enjoy one of the all-time exciting fights in the history of the sport. Griffin v. Bonnar was all I needed to be hooked again for the first time. Well, that and financial emancipation.

I vowed on that day that I would buy a UFC pay-per-view whenever they rematched Griffin and Bonnar. I did just that, purchasing UFC 62. Though the rematch didn’t live up to expectations, I was hooked. I’ve seen ever UFC even since, and I’ve seen almost every UFC event prior to 62 at this point.

Long story short, I watch it all now. All of it. If it can be watched, I watch it. I’m also one of two people in the world not named Bob Meyerowitz who owns a YAMMA shirt.

For me it started back in 1995 I believe. I was in grade 12 and I was skipping out on a lot of classes that year just for the heck of it. I remember seeing the cover of one of the videos for rent at the video store and my friends and I picked up a couple and headed over to his place. I was hooked from the first fight. What sticks out was Royce Gracie beating all these guys bigger than him. Being a small guy myself, I was really intrigued. Unfortunately, those long ground battles sort of got boring to me and like any uneducated MMA noobie, my buddies and I were mostly just renting the videos for the blood and gore.

Then I went to University and drinking got in the way of MMA and studying. A few years pass and then I see Matt Hughes fend off a rear naked choke and slam Frank Trigg to the matt in their rematch and I remember thinking, “WTF was that?” I was hooked after that.

Unfortunately, my friends don’t see the same entertainment value in the sport as I do. They’re still stuck on the whole “It’s boring when it goes to the ground.” Admittedly, I was like that as well. It took me a year to really appreciate the ground game, so I feel it’s necessary for me to try to educate my friends as much as I can.

For the longest time, I could never understand why guys would get so crazy about sports (eg: football, hockey, etc). I was never really into watching sports, as I’d much rather be out there playing them, but MMA is the first sport to really hook me. When you see a flash KO like the one Rashad laid down on Chuck, or you see a flying arm bar, everything else is boring after that.

Been hooked ever since. I guess my Wrestling addiction also helped. lol

My MMA obsession started at UFC 59. I believe I was watching something on SpikeTV and I kept seeing commercials that hyped up Andrei Arlovski as the world’s most dangerous fighter. I was fascinated by how quick the guy looked and how much of a beast he was.

This was not my first taste of MMA though. Years earlier I was at my cousins house and they were watching off their illegal satellite some Ultimate KOs. All I could think at the time was that it was so brutal and I couldn’t force myself to watch it. Some of the KOs made the guys look like they were dead on contact. Man I was a little bitch back then.LOL Some time later my brother showed me a highlight video of this guy they called the Axe Murderer. I watched in shock as this guy stomped people unconscious and just destroyed everyone in his way. This was another instance where I watched, but kept turning away because of the brutality. My brother wasn’t even into MMA. He just stumbled upon the video on youtube, or some similar site.

buzzed

I was at the right age to buy into the early UFC hype of it being THE NO-HOLDS BARRED SPORT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE. There was a little rental place in town called The Movie Zoo, and I rented what I could from there. I missed what I guess you might call the Frank Shamrock years, but I got back into the sport around 2002, ordering (or watching at someone else’s house) every PRIDE and UFC show. Nowadays I watch what compels me and follow the other happenings via blogs like this one.

To be honest, my attraction MMA owes more to my earlier love of pro wrestling than it does to my love of boxing.

I started watching around UFC 3 or 4 – the first fight I remember vividly is Hackney vs. Joe Son. I was 10 and my dad and his buddies (gamblers) would order the PPVs and let me and my brothers watch. Moms probably wouldn’t have liked that but she worked on the weekends. To this day, the smell of beer spilt on a shag carpet brings back fond memories. Fell out of watching when pops split, but my little brother reintroduced me to PRIDE about six years ago and I’ve been re-hooked ever since, especially on the Japanese promotions. I didn’t start watching TUF until season 3 or so.

ALSO: a certain MMA file-sharing website which certain members of the BE community are probably aware of has been instrumental in my continued appreciation of / education on the sport. God bless the interwebs.

My introduction to MMA came about just before Yarennoka almost a year ago (I remember because of the Misaki vs Akiyama fight blew me away). I was sitting at my desk in University procrastinating and got an overwhelming lust for violence (anyone who has ever worked on a research degree may understand where this kind of misplaced rage could come from). I went onto youtube and searched around for some boxing knockouts. Then out of nowhere an episode of friends popped into my head that I had seen many years before. A boyfriend of one female character decided to join the UFC and subsequently had the shit bet out of him. I wanted to see someone get the shit bet out of them so I searched for some UFC. Due to the copyright issues on youtube all that came up were fights from PRIDE FC.

From then on I was obsessed (and nearly dropped out of University as I neglected work watching so many videos and fell far behind on my deadlines). The submission side of it fascinated me as I never thought that kind of thing possible in a real fight, I always chalked it off as Kung-Fu movie bullshit. Over the past year I have watched whatever I could get my hands on and am working my way through the old UFC and PRIDE shows, although I have already seen most of the significant fights. It has taken over as my number one sport now I have almost no idea what happens in rugby and soccer, all free time is devoted to the sport.

I’m Irish and there is almost no coverage of MMA here. You will find a few DVDs in bigger shops, there is the odd gym where you can train in MMA, and there are one or two small promoters putting on events but that’s it as far as I can see. Although I don’t know many people involved in the scene so I may be pleasantly surprised in the near future. I want to train bjj but there is nowhere in my city, that’s how small scale it is over here. I suppose enough people know what ‘ultimate fighting’ is to sell out a show over here.

Am I the only friends noob here? It’s kind of ironic. I despise the show but at the same time owe so much to it!

My college roommate loved pro wrestling, but settled for TUF if he had to. The fights looked cool, so I tuned in to the finale, where I saw Kenny Florian completely dominate some guy (Kit Cope) and was hooked right there. Then the main event was Diego Sanchez/Nick Diaz, and I’ve been an addict since then.

I drank the UFC kool-aid for a bit, but then I watched “Best Damn Sports Show’s Best Damn Beatdowns” knockout highlight special, where they showed guys like Cro Cop, Quinton Jackson, Fedor Emelianenko, and Wanderlei Silva in something called PrideFC beating down poor guys. I looked them up online, found a bunch of websites dedicated to MMA news & fight vids, and now hear I am, several years later

I can honestly say UFC 9(maybe) retarded my appreciation of MMA for about 10 years. I had heard from friends that the UFC amazing and that this “super-fight” was going to be the be all and end all. I stumbled across TUF 1 finally and was hooked.

I remember as a kid watching the preview channel waiting to see if any interesting cartoons were coming on and periodically seeing these ads for “THE MOST BRUTAL SPORT…IN THE WORLD! NO HOLDS BARRED!” or a PRIDE ads and thinking “Wow. That looks hardcore.” But since it was on pay-per-view there was no chance of me watching it anyway, I simply clicked away to Nickelodeon or WWF Raw/WCWNitro.

A few years later watching an episode of the Best Damn Sports Show Period, I witnessed Tito and Ken Shamrock hyping up their third fight and how it was a big deal since it was on “free tv”. “Holy crap!” I thought. “Ken is still doing this ultimate fighter stuff after wrestling? He’s so crazy he must be great at it.” I remember tuning in and out of the actual event changing channels every time a fight went to the ground (heh). I took away from it “This ultimate fighter stuff isn’t as bloody isn’t as bloody as that guy on the ads a few years ago said it was.”

Later on, after watching an episode of RAW on SpikeTV, this “Ultimate Fighter” reality show comes on. “Hey, this might be good,” I thought. After Griffin-Bonnar at the finale I was hooked. After hours and hours of researching the UFC and other orgs online I became familiar with the name Mixed Martial Arts and the rest is history.

There were two new guys at work who had been friends since they were kids. It was all they could talk about once you got to know them. I was literally given multiple 45 minute lectures on the history of Pride where they expected me to remember all the Japanese (and other) names and who fought whom and when, etc. It was intimidating to say the least but I think of myself as a good listener and friend so I always listened and did my best to remember everything.
Eventually they got me to come out to one of their houses so we could watch dvds. The first fight I ever saw was Aleksander Emelianenko v James Thompson. And really, I still think that fight aesthetically represents a lot of what MMA is as a sport in the same way that Royce’s early fights did.
From that night on I became more obsessed than they ever were. To the point where I am today: I train BJJ roughly eight hours a week (starting muay thai in January), have about 700 gigs of MMA events and spend at least an hour a day checking nine blogs/sites and three forums multiple times. They (BE actually) are the first things I do when I wake up and the last thing I do before going to bed.
Unlike most people, it took me a long time to get caught up on UFC since all of my influences came from two guys who loved Asian MMA, didn’t own a single UFC dvd and looked down on the cage, elbows on the ground and stand ups. I still hate almost all standups but the cage and elbows have grown on me some.

In early 2000s I was ‘acquiring’ satellite signal and happened to catch a fight with Tito Ortiz, he smashed his competitor pretty quickly and looked scary as hell but for whatever reason I didn’t find enough draw to persue watching MMA. Later on I saw Cote and Ortiz clash again on satellite and I watched the event from start to end and was impressed. I used to watch boxing a lot with my old man and this seemed similar but a lot more exciting.
I didn’t actually purposely start following the sport until TUF2, when SpikeTV made it on ‘peasant vision’ here in Canada (after I stopped acquiring satellite).
I missed the Pride era so a lot of that nostalgia is lost on me.

I didn’t see UFC 1 on PPV but I rented UFC 2 at the local video store in ’94 and I can honestly say that Ive been hooked ever since.

One of the guys I watched with went to school the next day and almost killed another kid with a guillotine choke! I started training a few years later and Im still training today at 31.

Happy birthday UFC!

got frustrated with boxing politics…started watching TUF 1 and never looked back. now i get really bored watching boxing. in boxing if you don’t have hand speed or power in your punch..you’re screwed. they’re is just so many more ways to win in MMA..

I watched the first 10 UFCs (and Ultimate Ultimate) at college. Then didn’t pay any attention to the sport until about 2001 when I got back into it and started buying and renting the DVDs. A couple years later I was thoroughly hooked and had to watch every pay per view and was filling in the gaps of my collection from 1 till now.

These kids in my shop class used to watch it, and thought they were the shit because they took karate at a local McDojo, and one of the knew how to do an armbar. I went home saw some fights on Spike, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Now the McDojo doesn’t even teach karate. The instructor doesn’t show up half the time, and I’ve heard when he does he’s half drunk anyway. They basically just fight like rednecks once a week in the school, and talk shit about every other school they hear about, even though they won’t actually participate in an actual MMA event.

Buddy of mine and I were huge pro wrestling fans. Eventually we had rented all the old tapes at our local video store, and we had seen these UFC tapes in the same section. So, one day we grabbed a bunch (I think something like UFC 1-5 or something), and immediately were into it. Unfortunately, being 15 or 16 at the time, we didn’t have the money for PPVs and for some reason I never thought to follow up on the internet.

Flash forward to late 2006 and I somehow rediscovered the sport. I really don’t even remember how. Ended up just youtubing tons of fights and I’ve never looked back.

Been down since day (UFC) one.

The End.

Saw 2 guys hugging on the video cover at my local video store. I thought was gay porn. Much to my surprise, i found that the men were not hugging, but in fact practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I have been hooked ever since, and have stopped watching gay porn.