What Was Your Path To MMA Fandom?

It’s always been boring. I’d play basketball with friends and at school…and I did like a year/season or something of youth league baseball in the 3rd grade…but that was it.

I became a fan of MMA because when I was a little kid, I watched pro-wrestling, EVERYONE did.

I heard that Brock Lesnar was fighting for th UFC heavyweight title, and was very curious to see it. I was sure he would beat ‘that old guy’, and even though I was right, in hindsight…that was a pretty dumb prediction.

That was the very origin of my fandom. The next fight I watched was GSP vs Penn…the champion vs champion aspect interested the hell out of me.

Next after that was Machida vs Evans…Machida’s performance and under tooling of the undefeated champion blew my mind…as did the fact that he was undefeated himself.

The TUF 9 finale was when I became a permanent fan who watched every event and followed the sport religiously.

Chris Lytle catching Kevin Burn’s kick at the start of the 3rd, and punching him in the face and busting him open was, I believe…the very moment that I knew I would never NOT be an MMA fan.

So yeah, to this day, I hate ‘sports’, love MMA.

I stuck around to see what it was and it turned out it was TUF1. It was a show about something called Mixed Martial Arts, and they made allusions to that old UFC thing that i remembered a while back that I thought was pure shenanigans.

There came a bunch of guys. And then there was Diego Sanchez—dude was a weirdo, and he was pissed at Alex Karalexis for swearing, and he then kicked his ass for it when they were paired in “the octagon.” It was a total trainwreck, but I loved it.

From there on, I started researching MMA thanks to the internet, which took me to PRIDE, Rings, and a bunch of other stuff like Shoto and Pancrase—all cool stuff. It was like watching real life, efficient fighting.

The drawback is that it destroyed action movies for me unless they are campy and/or stupid b/c every time there is a fight I’m like “Aw, man, that’s unrealistic.”

Long time degenerate gambler..I watched UFC 98 cause my younger brother has been a fan for years…placed some bets made some money…haven’t missed an event since.

Been a sports fan since 1983 (I was 5) cuz my stepdad got my into hockey. He wasn’t my stepdad yet at that point, and probably regretted all those hockey talks when he did actually marry my mom the next year and I insisted on skipping the wedding so I could watch the Oilers win their first Cup.

Anyway, I first saw MMA when Tito fought Frank Shamrock at UFC 22, but didn’t get hooked until GSP/Penn 1.

mainly football and baseball.

BROCKLESNAR!!!!! brought me to MMA and it is my main sports home now.

then i periodically tuned in to watch it, like ufc 111 at a family friends house. But it was only after i started working as a humble bag boy that i got really into it. a co worker of mine and my boss watched it FANATICALLY. All i needed was an outlet to discuss and muse with, and ive been hooked ever since. to this day i make bets with my boss and waste away my shifts rambling on about fighters and fights with him, and can probably list the stats of most ufc fighters.

side note: watching and following mma has done wonders for my fitness. I refused to let the guys i was watching be leaps and bounds ahead of me in terms of physical fitness, and as a result ive kept in pretty awesome shape.

While I’m ultimately a Brock Lesnar guy too as I never paid for a PPV before he started fighting, the first fight I ever saw was Cro Cop vs Gonzaga.

I tuned in because I had heard all kinds of ridiculous things about Cro Cop’s head kicks and wanted to see them for myself. But when Gonzaga nailed Cro Cop with a head kick of his out of nowhere I was pretty much sold.

Tentative steps in the early 00s with vhs tapes of the first dozen or so ufcs, around the time I started taking taijiquan/shuai chiao classes. After Griffin/Bonnar happened, it just became too easy not to keep up (thanks in large part to internet sharing technologies keeping the cost down.)

My dad got me hooked on Cleveland sports early on, going to my first Indians game when I was 6 or 7, and I loved all the major sports.

For MMA, I had some buddies watch some old tapes of the early UFC events, although I didn’t really watch them much back then, I remember Marco Ruas demolishing Paul Varelans’ legs.

I didn’t really watch MMA for another 11 years, but I tuned in randomly channel surfing on Spike TV while at college and I distinctly remember watching a UFC Unleashed special which featured the Melvin Guillard vs. Josh Neer fight. That fight had so much drama, violence, blood and an incredible comeback and I was hooked. Then I saw GSP-Hughes 2 and that was it for me.

I first watched Mike Tyson fight and Joe Montana play when I was 5-6 years old. So I have been a boxing and 49er fan for quite a while, but I didnt discover mma until I was 17 and ended up becoming a total addict.
My mom used to be enrolled in the Blockbuster mailing rental service shit, and when you return an envelope to a BB store, you get to exchange it for a rental that you can keep for as long as you want, free. After I saw a bunch of crap since it was on the house, I picked up Ufc 68. I didnt know who the fuck Couture or Sylvia were, and I am not sure what made me pick that one up, but man Im glad I did.
Watched it with my homeboy Dionta as the first fight came on, Martin Kampmann vs Drew Mcfredries. The fight looked like it was about to be an awesome KO with Drew swinging heavy leather, seemed like less than 2 mins went by and he was left sleeping after young Kampmann choked him out. My bro Ta wasnt too happy, but Martin coming back to win when it looked like he was fucked was pretty cool to me. After that, we witnessed Babalu get his head almost knocked off his shoulders by Jason Lambert. One big overhand right from Couture, and from then on I was renting ufc dvds only.

I played football and did some track and field all four years of highschool… My football coach convinced me to try out wrestling over the winter to keep in shape. To be honest I didnt really enjoy it that much and I only wrestled my junior year but there were a few guys on the team who introduced me to MMA. I don’t really remember the first fight I watched or anything like that. I just know that since 2004 I’ve been in love with this sport and I never miss an event.

When I was a kid, I was a pro wrestling addict. I also was a sports fanatic. I was regularly reading football and basketball scores obsessively when I was like 5 or 6. I memorized collegiate sports nicknames and can probably still recite most 1-A and 1-AA nicknames. Maybe even some Division II schools. In addition to this, I have a huge box of NFL , NBA, and MLB cards in my closet to this day.

I rented a UFC tape because I heard Ken Shamrock was on there and started to watch. I recall turning it off and wondering why I got the tape. So, I continued on my sports and pro wrestling fandom until Brock Lesnar left the WWE. After that, I started seeing how stale the product was becoming and tuned out of combat/scripted combat altogether. My brother-in-law mentioned that Lesnar was going to fight on this show from the L.A. Coliseum. I watched him bash some guy and I liked the sport. After ordering UFC 87 and UFC 94, I was hooked. I haven’t missed a PPV since UFC 118. I watched WEC 37 and forward.

I still continue to follow college football and basketball, as well as pro football and pro wrestling. But nothing will replace my love for MMA.

I have to thank UFC Undisputed 2009.

My MMA Fandom started while I was working. Two of my coworkers were discussing UFC fighters, arguing who was better than whom. I just listened. I had watched UFC Unleashed on Spike, and I only knew the most popular fighters. Chuck, Randy, Tim Sylvia (pretty much only because we share a first name), Arlovski, Franklin, and Rampage. I’d sit down to watch an occasional episode if I was flipping through channels.

My coworkers discussed MMA a few times per week. Then they started talking about the new UFC video game. From the way they described it, it sounded like a blast. I went and bought it. Immediately played for hours on end. Fell in love with the sport.

The thing about UFC Undisputed was that it was so easy to learn about the sport from playing a video game. I learned about all of the fighters and move. The ground positions were layed out in front of me. If I wanted to be good at the game, I had to know how the ground worked. It was an easy grappling 101. You learned about fighters and their movesets from playing and bit from the commentary. It was wonderful. In the first couple months of owning that game, I basically lived through the entire history of MMA online. I was just so engrossed in this sport. I watched hundreds of fights. It was kinda cool to learn about something that had been around for awhile from the beginning.

If people knew how much time I spent on BE, they’d be in for quite a shock. I never leave.

but I think MMA, in general, benefited from the fact that his debut also featured a great, dramatic main event in Big Nog/Sylvia. After watching two exciting fights I became somewhat of a casual fan, but Lesnar wasn’t headlining every card I wasn’t really that into it until I saw a fiery, doughy Hawaiian shit-talking a guy so jacked he was nicknamed “the Muscle Shark.” Seeing what Penn did to Sherk and looking at Penn’s fights with Hughes I was hooked. And BJ Penn is still my favorite fighter, regardless of all the bullshit.

that I used to be a pro wrestling fan (early 90’s until the "brand extension). Got hooked debating the first Tito and Shamrock fan because I was a huge Shamrock tool. I’d find what fights I could on the net and watch them (mainly via KaZaA or whatever p2p sharing was hot that week). Watched some PRIDE and TUF1. The first ppv I chipped in for (Hughes vs. Royce Gracie) set my interests in stone. I’ve always been a passive NFL fan (when Denver is doing good. needless to say, I don’t have many pro-NFL years. and no, I’m not a Tebow fan) but MMA is the only sport I follow, reading news every day. My only regret was not being a PRIDE fan while they were still in business.

My path to MMA fandom probably started when I was 10 years old and watched Kung Fu Action Theater every Saturday morning at noon on channel 20. My friends and I would memorize the terrible overdubs and shout them as we smacked each other around.

In high school I played a football (poorly); in college I fenced (pretty well); and after college I started competing in taekwondo (pretty darn well). I don’t know where I first heard about MMA, but I remember renting UFC 1 from Blockbuster and just being hooked.

I didn’t even know how to watch a PPV back then (not that I could have afforded it) so all my MMA was from videotapes.

I honestly didn’t really get that heavily into the sport until TUF Season 2, and from that point I was all in.

I had a very odd past. While being a sports fan most of my life, I never really found a sport I enjoyed playing until I started fencing. I did that for about a decade, took it all the way to a DI team in college. I had a healthy respect for combat sports because of my fencing background, and saw the parallels. I loved watching Ali fights on ESPN classic and saw some K-1 America matches on ESPN Classic featuring Cung Le. A replay of his destruction of Scott Sheely was the first kickboxing match I ever watched.

One of the my college teammates was a casual MMA fan and got me to watch a few random fights on Spike or online. I saw a Spike special on Anderson Silva, and that got me to want to watch Silva vs Hendo. But I was in Columbus and I was told by a restaurant that it was blacked out in the city. So I went online and found the fight the next morning.

Then finally my first full event was WEC 34, and once Miguel Torres and Yoshiro Maeda warpped up I was hooked 100%

I had a very odd past.

Usually stories that start this way go a very different route.

I never liked watching sports, except maybe the Olympic swimming team. I can’t remember which card it was, but it was on Spike and the first fight I saw was Melvin Guillard knocking some guy out. I dislike Melvin, but he is the reason I found MMA.

MMA has put a stop to that.

I moved to New York City in early 2007, didn’t have a job for a month or so, and my roommate had TUF season 1 on DVD. So I watched. Even though I was several years too late, it was still that season of TUF that got me. I was hooked immediately, and it became a weed that strangled my interest in any other sports.

I knew of MMA and was interested but really didn’t know much about it or how to even watch it. I had one of the ufc’s earlier games (even though they sucked bad) but didn’t become a huge fan until after Tuf.

Watched Tuf, loved it then saw Andrei Arlovski and I thought that dude was the coolest guy ever and became a hardcore mma fan. I think thats how it went down. Now its tied as my favourite sport with Hockey.

Was going to the Gracie Academy in Torrance back in the early 90’s. So, naturally we got into it from UFC 1. Lost interest around UFC 10. Got lured back in by Hughes v Gracie. Been obsessed ever since.

Being a huge boxing and Bruce Lee fan during the 70’s was probably the real path.

Like most suburban middle class kids I played rec sports so I was playing soccer, basketball, and baseball since I was 4. Was also a huge prowrestling fan. My pops was a football fan so we’d watch games every Sunday.
When I was I guess 8? we got a Direct TV dish with one of those illegal cards so we’d get all the channels including PPV for free. So I got to actually see UFC 1 live by coincidence. Watched it until I was 11 when the card blew out and I was only watching pro wrestling. I picked it back up around UFC 40? And haven’t missed a PPV since. I still watch all sports though since I like sports and competitions.

When I would catch it on at 6 am on a saturday when I was 11 or 12. Didn’t get serious by any means until I started watching Rashads fights in JUCO, and after transfering schools I really started getting into MMA and have watched every PPV since 2008. After the way the Bills season went this year and the way that I cannot watch Red Wings games very often in Pittsburgh I am slowly forgetting what other sports are.

I lived for sports as a kid. I also loved “Kung Fu Theater” every Saturday.Huge Bruce Lee fan, even saw Game of Death at the drive-in back in the late 70’s. I still am a big sports fan, but don’t follow them as much as MMA now. I also grew up watching boxing, Ali, Holmes then Tyson amongst many others.

One night I am at a partyand I see on the TV, some kind of fighting tournament. Turns out it was UFC 1 and it was going on live across town. We couldn’t stop watching. I couldn’t believe this scrawny dude with a finny name was beating these much bigger guys. Crazy! As with most, my interest waned but the Randy vs Chuck era sparked it big time, then TUF 1 just added the fuel.

Since then I’ve become a bit more of a sports fan, not rooting for any team in particular (with the exception of the NY Giants).

I actually got into MMA because my Dad was training in boxing and bjj very early on, and he was a big fan of it. I was always a casual fan, and knew hated pro wrestling for years because I knew it was fake, unlike my clueless friends who had never seen a real fight.

I became hardcore once my step mom (a former instructor) and my dad starting downloading UFC and Pride events. We would sit down by the TV and watch MMA all night long.

As a kid I would watch every Eagles game and most Phillies and Flyers games, even when they sucked. I played baseball, hockey, and football in leagues from ages 5-18.

I was also into the WWF, karate, and boxing as a kid. Me and my brother wanted to be Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior, or even Jimmy Fly Snuka. We also watched all the Bruce Lee, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Steven Segal movies. And from ages 9-15 I took Kempo Karate.

I actually saw some of the early UFCs cause my uncle would buy the PPVs back then, but I was a little kid and didn’t really know anything about it.

Fast forward to 2007 and I still loved the Phillies, Eagles, and Flyers, but I got too old for the WWE and boxing just wasn’t as good anymore. That’s when my friend told me he was training something called BJJ. He told me all about it and about the UFC, Royce Gracie, and Chuck Liddell. Then he showed me some fights on the internet, I think youtube.

After that I started watching TUF and Unleashed on Spike and I got my brother and dad into it and we started ordering the PPVs. I like to know the history of things so with the help of Wikipedia, Sherdog, and some other sites I learned as much as I could about the history of MMA and all the fighters.

And then I found BloodyElbow.com and now I’m here..

It’s pretty sweet to read about this.

Rarely cared to watch them, though. Even now, my non-combat sports interests are lacrosse, rugby, soccer, tennis, and World’s Strongest Man.

I had a douche of a college roommate in Fall ’05 who loved pro wrestling. He would watch TUF 2 when there was nothing else one and cackle at the drunken antics. I was taking judo as a class for fun, and I began recognizing some of the moves from the fights. So I set some time to watch the finale, which has the epic Diego/Diaz fight. Fan ever since.

My love of MMA hasn’t diluted my love of other sports at all. Except pro wrestling.

Luke would beardslap me for referring to it as a sport, but tough poopy MMA Fighting guy!

And to be honest, boxing is still the sport that gives me goosebumps and gets me crazy excited more than MMA, even though MMA is my “favorite sport”.

I could get in to watching some football or whatever, but was never much invested in it. Combat sports always held a particular draw for me, but aside from a short term casual viewership of HBO boxing and every once in a while catching k-1 when they showed it on ESPN 2, I never really got deep in to anything.

Then I spent an entire extremely lazy saturday afternoon (it was actually my birthday) watch the TUF 3 marathon. Got drunk and watched the Finale. I still wasn’t quite hooked but I was definitely interested. Became a huge BJ Penn fan with TUF 5 and started watching the vast majority of free shows on Spike. That led to following the PPV’s on MMAJunkie. This, along with developing some favorite fighters by watching TUF definitely kept me interested as a fan.

I also have to agree with Bernier, UFC 2009, was very influential to my future MMA fandom. You picked up a lot through the commentary in the fights and the Ultimate Fights gave a reference for fights to go check out.

After that I started following more intently and I think the first PPV I actually purchased was Penn/Sanchez. From that point, I watched most of the PPV’s but it was really BE that sent me off the cliff in to hardcore fandom. Honestly, I had started reading the comments on Junkie and they were absolutely horrible. I actually came here because someone called Nate and anti-Zuffa bastard or some such. That was right around UFC 116 and I’ve been hooked ever since. Without this site I would be no where near the fan of the sport I am now.

I was over at my aunts house chillign with my Uncle and cousin and her family.They where watching a replay of UFC 100 this was Aug 15 2009 because that was the same day Strikeforce put on Carano Cyborg. Well I ended up watching the Coleman Bonnar fight and was like ya know what this is pretty cool. So I started to learn more about it watched a bunch of fights on the internet just to watch fights. NExt thing you know I was hooked.

I don’t really like other sports they all seem kind of boring when compared to punching and twistin arms. I also love someone who goes in there with a great strategy to win the game. I make no bones about it that MMA is a game that involves fighting but MMA is not fighting. yep.

Massive sports fan my entire life.

Played hockey, baseball, soccer, basketball, and football at varying levels and lengths. (Whole thing kind of went out the window when I shittered my femur and had to go to rehab and crap.) Then one day I was watching 1000 Ways to Die on Spike (don’t hate me) and all of a sudden, when I left to grab some food, UFC Unleashed was on, and the first MMA fight I ever witnessed was Scott Smith vs. Pete Sell and needless to say, I was hooked. A few months later a buddy invited me to watch UFC 83 (Serra vs GSP II) and that definitely did it, I have missed three PPVs since then (86, 103, 139) and love MMA so much more than any other sport.

That being said, I still follow all the major sports really closely (Blackhawks, Clippers, Colts, Dodgers) and am a bit of a fantasy sports aficionado. That basically covers it.

I never watched any “Ultimate Fighting” because I’m a pretty squeamish dude (never in my life watched a slasher film because they hold zero appeal to me for that reason alone) and was of the always fun misunderstanding that broken bones happened all the time. My freshman year of college I came home from school once to find some dude there playing video games in my house, and learned it was my sister’s boyfriend. A year later I was talking with her and she mentioned how her boyfriend and his younger brother, who I remembered from high school, had started fighting, and since my roommate and best friend was a wrestler who was also into it, I started watching TUF 3 and running their web site for them. When I came home from school that summer I saw my first PPV live (UFC 60) and have been hooked ever since.

Now it’s a good five years later and I’ve seen every event since either live or in rare cases on DVR the next day and managed to catch up on nearly all of the old school UFC and Pride fights thanks to an unlimited rental plan at Hollywood Video my senior year. Additionally, since “my sister’s boyfriend and his brother” ultimately became “my sister’s husband and brother-in-law” and went from “two dudes who fight UFC” to “two dude who fight in the UFC” I’ve been lucky enough to get to a handful of live events, and even corner once, which remains by far the largest disparity in my life between “radness of thing I did” : “what I did prior to deserve the experience.”

I have had streaks of fandom for different sports to the point where I became at stat junkie for said sport.

First it was basketball since I was little in the 90s and Jordan was shitkicking everyone.

Then started watching baseball and developed a deep hatred of the yankees and their bandwagoner fans in my area.

When I was about 12 or 13 started watching football and even got to meet Ed Reed and Ray lewis in person (yes, it was awesome).

Then at about 17 I went to my friends house and they started watching GSP-Serra 1. I was amazed by it and went on the internet to find every single thing about MMA I could find. Read Sherdog religiously for a while then the guy posting above me linked bloody elbow and the rest well… I’m still here aren’t I?

Grew up watching various sports casually, big fan of Lakers though. Was in 4th grade when Shaq got traded there. Didn’t know much about MMA other than some random footage of Tito and Hughes until my buddy called during the Griffin/Bonnar fight and told me to watch it. Huge fan ever since, I immediately proceeded to watch every event starting from the beginning, which felt like a chore by the end, but worth every moment. Nowadays I’ll watch pretty much any sport if it’s something of note, but MMA-related stuff takes up the majority of my time.

tl;dr Lifetime sports fan, 5 year MMA fan.

My dad was an athlete and my granddad was part of the 1968 and 1972 Summer Olympics.

I play(ed) football and basketball, and watch football, basketball, soccer, hockey, and Track and Field.

As far as MMA goes, I grew up on boxing, I have a collection of fights on VHS, then I watched kickboxing late at night on ESPN2 when I was a little kid. Michael McDonald, Ernesto Hoost, Cro-Cop, etc.

First UFC fight that got me even casually hooked was Vernon White vs. Chuck Liddell. I was fascinated by that fight and went from casual UFC fan to fairly hardcore at around Chuck vs. Tito II.

I had a weird way to getting into MMA. I’m not lying when I say this but I actually got into because of a game. My friend told me to get UFC undisputed 09 game and I did and so we would play alot of games and just have fun. And so I was interested in the sport and decided to learn more about it. So I went out and bought a dvd(best of 2009) and I was impressed.The fight I liked the most was the Sanchez vs guida fight. So after getting into the sport and finding out what channel it was on(spike) I saw the promo for the ultimate fighter 10 and saw kimbo slice and I was excited as hell to watch the season. And even though the season was a bit lame I decided to order UFC 114( not a really a great event to become a fan) I decided maybe it’ll grow on me. After that I ordered UFC 118. I enjoyed the technical aspect of that event and then it was just growing on me. But the one event that made me love the sport for life was the Velasquez Vs Lesnar fight. And Maan was that exciting. Being a Mexican myself it was nice to know Cain became the first ever Mexican heavyweight champion.After that I pretty much ordered every UFC event. So I have ordered every event since UFC 121-143(skipped 127). Whoa thats the most I typed on this site.

But even with my lack of athleticism, I’m a freaking fanatic playing dodgeball. It’s my favorite sport to play by far, mainly because I am excellent at catching and dodging to make up for the fact that I have the accuracy of Tim Tebow.

and we had “legitimate” satilette dishes, my dad was really into Pride FC…. And there it began, actually didnt start watching the UFC till a few months later, but I rarely have missed events since

my eyes glowed with love, been hooked ever since, and now I’m a 2-1 amateur fighter. I love this shit.

Always loved martial arts movies, Bruce Lee, Sho Kosugi, all that shit. Did the usual TKD and Kyokushin experiment when I was a kid, but wasn’t hugely impressed with either. Started learning to box a bit from a buddy of mine and he and some friends got together and sparred with each other two days a week, pretty consistently for a year or two and had a good time beating on each other. Was much less of a sports fan in the 90’s as the Tigers and Pistons sucked, and I got busy getting into indie rock, smoking weed, and all the art, film and lit I love. And that point it was pretty much the Red Wings I was following, and I completely lost all interest in basketball in particular. I was aware of the UFC, of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but didn’t pay either much attention. Finally one of my friends started downloading Pride cards from somewhere in 2002 or 2003, and he’s the one who finally got me interested, though Wanderlei Silva, Big Nog, and Igor Vovchanchyn had more to do with me sticking around. I really paid little attention to the UFC until the TUF era, because I wasn’t going to pay for it, but now I’m absolutely hooked and my Detroit sports fandom plays second fiddle to MMA.

WWF fan, huge Warrior mark back in the days.
Basketball junkie when I was younger.

My brother brought VHS tapes of the first UFCs. Who the fuck doesnt want to see different martial arts going at it? It was like 7 or 8 when I first saw the tapes. From then on, I always asked for tapes or anyway I could watch UFCs.

My fighter fandom went something like this:

From Royce to Oleg to Mark Coleman to Tank Abbot to Vitor Belfort to Frank Shamrock to Tito Ortiz to Chuck Liddell to Wanderlei to Fedor to Shogun to Nick Diaz

During the Dark Ages, it was pretty hard to get copies of anything.. but we survived.

I never really cared for any sports, the only one I could stand to watch was football. I liked boxing okay, but wasn’t a huge fan of it since none of the fights I’d seen went like that.

In high school, a couple of my friends were into it and that’s basically how I was introduced. A friend of mine started telling me about this crazy Russian guy who kicked everyone’s ass, and then I caught UFC 100 at another friend’s house. Then I just kind of started watching it with them whenever they got a PPV. Then I started getting them myself. Then I started watching old fights. Now I can’t watch any other sport for more then about 45 seconds without getting bored.

And the rest is history.

Saw all of the ads for UFC 1 – 5 or so but never got to watch them. Didn’t even hear about the sport again until … TUF 1, but am not sure if I saw reruns or the originals. Didn’t know PRIDE existed. Saw a few Chuck – Tito replays w/ Juliet Lewis screaming her head off like a harpy. Saw a replay of some Matt Hughes fight that included the Trigg slam in a highlight package. All of these things made an impression on me but not enough to make me turn the corner into being a fan. Frankly, the main impediment was that I didn’t know how to reliably watch more. Never had cable tv so a PPV didn’t even occur to me. None of my friends watched it, but most importantly, the reality that this was a sport that one could have a consistent relationship wasn’t there.

The ACTUAL gateway was St. Pierre – Serra II at UFC 83. I think I saw a highlight package for the run-up on ESPN. Georges St. Pierre looked like a bad ass and had a great name. The idea that he was a new breed of dominant fighter and was supposedly trucking everyone he fought caught my imagination. I watched some more media in the lead-up for the fight and was intrigued by the whole thing. I started to enjoy Matt Serra as well, especially the idea that Serra would have to go into Canada to defend in front of a bunch of rabid GSP fans. It turned out to be a great fight and I haven’t missed an event since.

I played a lot of sports until I was about 16 or 17. I was a fan of pretty much everything until a little bit later in life, then my investment in sports began to wane in my mid-20s. Once I got caught up in MMA, my interest in other sports took a precipitous decline. Now I can’t even sit still to watch 10 minutes of football or basketball or anything else, but I watch every UFC & Strikeforce fight and any others whenever I have the time.

My friends told me about Kenny Florian and his “pussy style” he employed on Roger Huerta. I was hooked ever since. plus ufc 100. Thats when the madness started

background: grew up in an athletic/sports-oriented family but stopped when I was about 13. extremely long nerd interlude leads to highly intellectual but stressful career. travel alone frequently and decide that the only way to deal with the anger & danger is by learning to hit things (for self-defense), and doing it a lot (for anger management).

so I took up krav maga for a while, then boxing. after youtubing lots of boxing fights, I came across MMA. I remember when the UFC first appeared in all of its vale tudo-esque glory and for many years had persisted with the belief that the goal of it was literally to kill people, so when I rediscovered it with fresh eyes and a newly found thirst for blood, I found it muuuuch more palatable. I began going to local events, watching online streams, and then eventually began attempting to train (just muay thai so far, and boxing of course), and later this month I am moving to Brazil for a while to learn jiu jitsu. :)

it’s kind of a weird situation for me because I am female and still part of the Highly Intellectual Social Milieu that finds fighting disgusting & barbaric, so I don’t really have anyone to share my fandom with in real life, but the internet talk is good enough for me.

I’ve never been much of a sports fan. I had seen promos for early UFC’s years before but never watched. I was bored and looking for something to watch and someone had posted a UFC on a torrent site. I think the UFC was in the 70’s range, can’t remember which one exactly. Been watching them ever since. Went to both of the events held in Germany.

I discovered MMA through TUF 2 and started to learn about the sport by going through old UFC and Pride videos
I stumbled upon this fight and got hooked immediately

i was a sports fan for as long as i can remeber. i watched football and boxing with my grandfather whenever it was on. i started playing soccer when i was 5 and im still playing it today (im 29). i also played baseball for most of my pre-teen and teen years. I can basically watch any sport as long as i have some form of interest. Nhl, Nfl, soccer, and mma are for 4 favorite sports to watch (not in that order).

i became a ufc fan way back in the early 90s when i was about 15 or so. I basically lucked out. I was living with my grandparents at the time and my grandfather is a mechanical/electrical engineer and he got his hands on a black cable box. well for whoever doesnt know what that is, its a box that let you get every channel on cable including ppv for free. Well we watched a lot of boxing together and one night i was flipping through and saw 2 guys going at it in a cage so that obviously caught my attention and ive been hooked ever since.

a side note i learned a lot about life through the power of free ppv!

I’ve been a Martial-Arts-Fan ever since I saw “Bloodsport” in ‘88 (or maybe ’89). I started watching everything I could get my hands on (which wasn’t easy because most of the stuff was not deemed age appropriate for a 12yr old for some reason). I then took up Judo because that was the only sport my parents would let me do. The others were “too violent” for their taste. I did that for two years, then thought it sucked and quit. I’ve been discipline-hopping ever since, doing TKD, Muay-Thai, Krav Maga and a little Wing Chun. So know a little bit of everything but nothing thoroughly. ;)

Somwhere in the 90ies…must have been 1997 or something, I stumbled over the first four UFCs on tape. I rented two, watched and thought it was crap because a) it wasn’t flashy enough (I’d been watching van Damme & Co. mind you) and b) these guys looked sloppy. I was impressed by Gracie, but his competition seemed like bums at the time. So that was that.

Then, a few years later, a friend from MT recommended watching PRIDE (which you had to download from the net. There was no other way to get it that we knew of anyway). And that suddenly seemed like a whole different world. The production looked good, the fighters seemed so much more competent (or maybe I understood it better, who knows) and I just loved it from the first show on. That was…2003ish?

And that’s how I became a fan, watching PRIDE until they were shut down in 2007. I initially hated the UFC for taking that away from me and I disliked the “Heavy Metal”-presentation they had which seemd classless to me compared to PRIDE. But since there was no other MMA around anymore, I started watching – motivated by some of the old PRIDE-fighters moving over. After a while, I started to like even the corny intro and learned to ignore Joe & Mike’s redundancies. I started watching the old UFCs and found that they did put on quite a bit of nice fights before my time. I then ordered the TUF-Sesons and watching the first six together with the corresponding old UFCs was quite outstanding. After that, it got more and more stale.

Third-stage fandom actually came with BE though. I used to read Cagepotato during the Ben-Fowlkes-Days and IMO the site was tits back then. But after a while it degraded and I found the community here to be so much more interesting (also, CPs comment-system sucks for discussions). After I joined here, my MMA-interest deepened again by quite a bit.

My buddies were black belts in Karate, studied Judo, and also Jiu Jitsu before it was the thing to do, so I had exposure to rolling / subs / trips / throws at a young age :p

we would get < UFC20 on VHS and then watch them, later in highschool I wrestled, and did a little study of boxing

was also a WWE fan back in the Attitude era, starting with the debut of Smackdown on UPN (mainly cause I didn’t have cable, I started going to a local apartment complex to catch RAW)

It first started when I first touched a videogame controller at 6 and Ken from Street Fighter 2 was on the other side of it. I watched a lot of kung fu movies as a kid (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li). When I was 7 or 8 I remember seeing an ad for K1 on the back of a magazine with Jérôme LeBanner (I’m french) and being intrigued by it.

I practiced Aikido for a year when I was 10 but I found it unrealistic and none of the moves seemed to work when your training partner was resisting a bit. So I stopped and started fencing the next year but I stopped that too when I realised there were a lot less badass jedi lightsaber battles that I imagined.

At 12 I asked my mom to box but she didn’t agree with it so I started playing rugby instead. After three years I went to high school and stopped sports for a year as I was way more interested in beer, weed and girls at the time. Sometime during that year while flipping through channels, I saw the De La Hoya-Mayorga fight, seeing Oscar knocking out that mean looking dude that trash talked him bad made an impression on me.

That summer I went with a buddy of mine for a week at my grandmother house, wasn’t a lot to do but there was this big yard so we started fighting in it. One of our friends was boxing at the time so most of this summer’s afternoon were spent fighting in yards. That was when I decided to take up martial arts.

I checked online to choose a martial art and saw a Genki Sudo fight on youtube. Just after that I saw LeBanner knocking out a tae kwon do fighter. While I didn’t become a fan right away, it convinced me that I needed the most complete possible martial art and that kickboxing was badass. Two of my friends were training sports jiu jitsu (basically judo with a bit more of groundwork and a bit of stand up, mostly inspired by point-fighting karate). I joined them as it was the only way to train both stand up and grappling.

I’m still in this gym but was feeling taht the standup part was lacking full contact fighting so I joined a Kyokushin Karate club for 2 years and since have trained in muay thai and boxing along with BJJ seminars whenever I get the chance.

Since I started training, I was searching for fights online and discovered Pride via youtube in late 2006-early 2007. As I learned about the sport I started purchasing magazines and learned that pride had been purchased by the UFC. I was aware of the UFC but didn’t know much about the fighters as it was mostly impossible to watch full fights on youtube. I started tracking down the fights online as I heard Wanderlei was fighting Chuck. I then saw GSP beat Serra and watched most of the fights of UFC 84 and followed most of the main events I could find online until I downloaded UFC 90 and haven’t missed a card since.

Im only 17 and am a huge mma fan havent missed a fight in a couple years and im literally addicted to Bloodyelbow. Its sad for me to admit but the only reason i started watching the ufc is because of brock lesnar. i had obvs heard of it before my dad was a liddell fan when everyone was, and i was young and still enjoyed watching john cena and the undertaker scrap it out in a cage instead of anderson or gsp. The first card i watch all the way through was ufc 99 and watch the hometown hero of Bangor Maine (marcus davis) lose a bs fight to dan hardy, but i can say i was hooked after that and rented ufc 100 and its been nothing but love since!

I grew up watching basketball (serious NBA fan), soccer, tennis, and American foot ball on occasion cause it was hard to get games while I was growin up overseas. But I’ve always been serious in following sports-news and joining fantasy leagues since the internet began. I never followed baseball in great detail cause of the number of games and cause it’s about as entertaining as watching as paint dry.

First time I heard the word UFC was when Ken Shamrock joined the WWF. I didn’t look further into it at the time tho. My interest in MMA came about cause of TUF 1. I mean, I’d seen UFC clips (Tank Abbot) on the internet but had never really seen an MMA fight till then. By the time the finale was over I was hooked. Our dorm RH was a real chill dude and threw a party and ordered the following Couture vs Liddell PPV. Been watchin ever since.

Then I visited youtube, watched Fedor’s highlight vids and became a fan.

Like many I was never a big fan of big league sports, but have been watching boxing with my grandfather since I was young, & I wrestled during middle school, so when I found out about a sport that combined the two, I immediately checked it out & was hooked. That was UFC 88

Thought it was cool. Saw my first fight in late 90’s. Tito was ref and Yves Edwards knocked out some dudes teeth with a knee. Fan ever since.

I’m only 18, and have only become a hardcore fan recently. Some friends of mine had told me about UFC, but I never really thought much of it. The first event I remember watching was UFC 100. I caught a few fights after that, but it wasn’t till I saw some old Anderson Silva fights that I really got into it. I’ve watched just about every event since.

Started watching, wasn’t moving fast enough so I watched a past season, started looking up the coaches, research broadened as did my interest.

People underestimate how much Spike worked as a platform post-“TUF boom”

Who fought in the first few UFC’s, so we always heard about Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock. As a kid I tried a few times to use my neighbor’s black box to watch the UFC’s, but it usually didn’t work and we had to watch Playboy with it instead.

Definitely TUF 1 and GSP, Hughes, BJ Penn fights that sealed the deal though. Been watching every fight I can since.

As for other sports, played em all. Only watch football though

I took Judo as a screw around class in college. During class, the instructor showed clips from the Gracies in Brazil taking on all-comers. There was a Tae-kwon-do nut in class that ‘challenged’ the instructor to a sparring session within their own disciplines. The instructor won all the rounds by submission.

Later after a move, I wanted to take up Judo again and the only place in town that offered it was an MMA training center. I got into BJJ and some Muay Thai there and sparred with some amateur MMA guys. They used to throw UFC parties back then because the fights were every other month or so. I think the first UFC I saw was the one right before TUF 1. I don’t remember the number, but Tito and Chuck fighting as coaches was among the first I saw live. The head of the camp had every UFC on DVD and we used to watch them occasionally in class and were available for rent. I wasn’t quite a TUF n00b, but pretty close. Been a fan ever since.

I was working at a grocery store in the early 90’s and the floral girls boyfriend had started doing BJJ. I had no clue what it was and he let me borrow his copy of UFC 1 and I was hooked. Started searching the mom and pop video stores for all the UFC tapes I could find. Got out of it a bit in the dark ages, didn’t watch the PPV’s or anything like that as I got married and had kids and all of that good stuff. Always kept up with it though. Watched the interviews and the fights on TBDSSP, kept up with the McCain stuff, all the Tito, Randy, Chuck triangle stuff and TUF 1. When the TUF finale happened and Royce fought Hughes that’s where I came back full time.

What does this have to do with Carlos Condit being a pussy?

i was watching this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ3twE2BRUI and I’m like "Tito who? So I googled him. Bam, hooked.

I was never interested in the slightest in professional sports, even hating hockey (which in Canada is basically the equivalent of clubbing baby seals). I just found any sport way too slow-paced/boring and couldn’t even come close to sitting through an entire game/match. I absolutely loathed WWF and all other pro wrestling, but had heard about Jiu-Jitsu from a cousin and after discovering what it was I became obsessed with it.

When I was around 11 or 12 I stumbled onto a video on the internet of Wanderlei/Sakuraba 1, and shortly after discovered PRIDE in all it’s glory, and the UFC very shortly after that. The rest, as they say, is history. I watched every bit of MMA I could find and found myself caught up on all the events I had missed (both UFC and PRIDE), and had to wait in anticipation for upcoming events like everyone else. I think half of the original attraction for me was that a fight could end at any moment in any number of ways (which for a kid with ADD was a huge blessing), and the other half was due to my unexplainable love of violence (i’m not a mean or violent person by a long shot, but for some reason have always enjoyed being in fights and watching fights).

I’m not one of those PRIDENEVERDIE! guys but I definitely have a bias towards my favourite fighters from those days (Fedor, Nog, Shogun, Rampage, Saku, etc), and find myself sometimes longing for the good old days when wrestlefucking wasn’t even a term.

It’s pretty crazy that I’m going on 11 years as a die hard fan of this sport now that I think about it, but hopefully this is only the beginning and I can continue to watch for years to come.

My best friends dad was a huge martial arts fanatic. He showed us all he early ufc events as soon as the vhs became available. MMA fell off my radar for a few years, then I came across Pride and was totally back in.

It’s strange looking back and seeing that I got into MMA as much as I did. My brother liked it, and he ordered Liddell vs Ortiz II. It was cool, and I was interested, but not fully converted. After that, (my brother was a huge fan of BJ Penn during the time), the UFC had that TUF Finale with BJ Penn vs Jens Pulver as the main event, and I saw it with him and some of our friends. I became a convert ever since and went so far as become a much bigger MMA fan then my brother and even started to train in kickboxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

From being a boxing fan I was down with K-1, Pride, and the UFC. Was a casual till about UFC 98, but after that I think I’ve watched every single UFC event. Watched a couple of Dynamite! shows, whatever JMMA I could catch.

My friends all watch as much MMA as they do because of me.

Sunday morning in either late 1994 or early 1995 and my family and I were going through the newspaper. I had already gone through the funnies and the sports section — I pretty much watched it all although at that time I was a bigger Cowboys fan than anything — so I picked up Parade.

There used to be — or still is, maybe, if the thing still exists — a Q&A column on the inside front cover where people would ask questions about celebrities and stuff like that. One question was about the UFC. A concerned mother wrote she came home and saw her son watching it and wondered how it could be legal. I remember coming away from it thinking, “It’s like pro wrestling except it’s actually real.”

Cut to summer of 1995 and I move to a new city. Since school hadn’t started, I hadn’t really met any other kids and made friends so my mom asked if I wanted to go to the video store. I immediately darted to the Special Interests section because that’s where the pro wrestling tapes were. It so happened this Video Update had all the UFCs up until that point.

I rented a couple and fell in love. I continued on until the Dark Ages where I sporadically kept up with the product but it wasn’t until I met one of my best friends who was also in MMA in 2002 that I really got back into it. Since then, it’s been full speed ahead.

I spent many nights from 2003 to 2006 with a six pack and a pizza watching Pride PPVs alone. Shockwave 2004, my GF at the time made plans to go to her parents’ house without consulting me and I made them order the PPV so I could watch it at their house. UFC 75, my friend and I showed up late to a friend’s 21st birthday because it was the same night as Rampage/Hendo. My friend called me at work once to ask me if I had read the Bushido 9 spoilers. When I told him no but I didn’t want to know, all he said was, “Dan Henderson hates Asians.”

I love sports — soccer, football, baseball, basketball, hockey — I’m just a sports nut. But MMA is my passion. I love it more than just about anything. The first thing my 18 month old daughter ever watched was an episode of Unleashed that was airing when we moved into our private room at the hospital. She’s probably seen more fights than your average Sherdogger.

I’ve been a fan of sports in general and especially football(soccer to most of you) only since around the age of around 15 when I got more into it wanting to be able to be more sociable, these days I like following it though and reporting on some for a local radio station. Before then though I liked some more niche stuff like cycling and kickboxing, K-1 as it was on Eurosport, when they had a lot more GPs going across the world was quite entertaining, which probably is the reason for me favoring striking whenever watching MMA these days. The match between Andy Sower and Buakaw Por Pramuk for the K-1 Max title in 2005 prob being what really attracted me as a fantastic contest, cheering for Andy who seemed to keep trying to bring the fight on while Buakaw was holding him off with the thai clinch and various kicks.

Not long after that Setanta sports picked up the UFC, I caught a few fights which I really liked, for some reason Anderson Silva vs Chris Leben and Randy vs chuck 2006 standing out, apart from a little time I was at at university watched most of the ufc fights since then. Also always had a fondness for pro wrestling for the theatrics and a flowing, well-constructed match but didn’t really connect it with MMA much, tend to think of MMA more in a sporting sense. Enjoy the niche aspect of it alot as well though.

I used to be a big boxing fan and traded tapes (yes VHS) with a guy – he sent me a tape of UFC 1 saying ‘you should check this out’ and I was hooked immediately. It was pretty tough back then trying to acquire decent quality fights, but the internet has been amazing for MMA and its evolution. I love having access to so much info / fights so easily now. I still have the first 10 UFC’s and a couple of Ultimate Ultimates and assorted Pride tapes in storage.

UFC 1 on VHS as soon as it was out .
Was/ am a jock.

saw the Hughes slam against Newton and called shenanigans because i swore up and down that hughes was out cold and fell rather than slammed Carlos (BTW, i still stand by this) from then i was a casual fan up to the TUF 1 finale. I had watched the whole season because i was broke and stole cable from my landlord. he found out the day before the finale and i begged him to let me keep it one more day, which he did. i watched the fight and listened to the crowd and smiled. i went into work the next day and it was the first time i heard anyone else talking about MMA. 2 years later i moved in w/ my future wife and found the internet. (yes, i had never been on the web up until 2006) found MMA Weekly, MMA Junkie and Sherdog and studied fights, fighters, promotions, and styles like it was going out of style. started taking BJJ, Sambo, and Muay Thai classes. eventually i found BE and here i am w/ a minor obsession and a strong determination to go back to the states and be judge and a referee in the sport i love.

When I was younger, I caught Griffin/Bonnar on Spike TV, while I was trying to find RAW, I believe. But I wasn’t really hooked, I just watched a part of it and seemed to forget about it. Couple years ago, I had a Sociology class with a friend who was a huge fan. He talked to me about MMA a lot and I had no idea who BJ Penn or GSP were. I expected Penn to be some big heavyweight monster. Anyway, he told me there was a free card coming up, which was UFC 95 and I checked it out. Ever since then, I started watching anything I could and researching a lot of the fighters in the UFC and MMA. I’m quite glad that I watched that show, as I really love the sport now.

This is the fight that got it started for me. It had probably been out for a little while before I rented the VHS. But I remember sitting with some of my friends (I was probably 13 maybe 14) watching this going, “the small guy is going to get murdered”. Ever since then I’ve been hooked. In highschool and college I was what Sherdoggers deemed an “Elitist Pride Nuthugger”. I still think the way PRIDE did things was the way to do it, rules, ring etc etc but I enjoy MMA of all flavors and organizations. I own every PRIDE event and continually watch them.

That got me started into MMA……but what kept me a fan was….

…went off on a rant about the fallout from the Yoshida-Royce match, and the Gracie family claims that he hadn’t been strangled unconscious. He also sounded off on the format “of the UFC” (actually the format of the early tournaments & the use of ‘substitute/wildcard’ fighters as injury replacements) and mentioned something about denying that Royce had been beaten properly because his corner threw in the towel – obviously this was the open GP.

In relation to this, a training partner of mine got me to search for “the gracie hunter”. So you could say it was Kazushi Sakuraba, “The Gracies”, Hidehiko Yoshida, my roomate or my sensei that got me interested. The truth, however, is that the first video I watched after that search was someone who for a long time I thought was Genki Sudo open a match with a low, flying left front kick; I was hooked. I can’t find the fight anymore, and it may be that I saw that on the living room TV, but I am not sure.

I had been aware of MMA before, of course, but it was that front kick that got me – I used to practice that leap all the time when nobody in the dojo was looking – but I never had any interest in the UFC until I saw it regularly on Bravo. I feel like it was Rampage entering the cage to face Chuck Liddel (and my incredulity that the commentary team seemed to think Liddel might win) that introduced my to the ufc, but I remember watching the Eastman fight and being shocked at Cro-Cop’s loss. It took Cro-Cop & Rampage to get me to follow the ufc, and while I loved the whole MMA thing, I was very suspicious of “cage fighting” at the time.

There was a genuinely thuggish feel to mma culture in England around ’06/7 – I remember people handing out pamphlets for Cage Rage when I went up to london once and being extremely distrustful of it. Somewhere along the way I grew to enjoy hearing “wic a backgraand iin GHETTO STYLE”, and I got interested in grappling as a result of a particular ukmma personality, and started learning mma because there was no suitable grappling specific training to be had close by.

tldr sigh