This Is What Happened To The Game You Love

The UFC won. They fought back from the brink of bankruptcy to get a sport regulated and broadcast a fight from the White House lawn. Today we’re going to walk the winding road of what could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory.

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Around 1905 Theodore Roosevelt decided that his work as the President was getting in the way of his training. He installed mats in the White House basement to remedy the situation.

Roosevelt would religiously practice boxing, wrestling, and jiujitsu. He trained so hard and so often that he blinded himself in one eye. Roosevelt would profess his love of combat by bestowing the following line on our community:

"The art of jiu-jitsu is worth more in every way than all of our athletics combined.”

Maybe Donald Trump knows this. Maybe that’s why he’s allowing Dana White and the UFC to erect a stadium on the White House lawn this Sunday.

Or, maybe, White is able promote a fight for the President’s birthday because his company allowed Trump to launder his image so he could resume his temper tantrum of a presidency and use the office’s influence to manipulate the financial system and collect billions of dollars through insider trading.

If you told me that the barely legal sport I fell in love with as a teenager would make its way to the White House and become a national spectacle I would have laughed out from my bright red UFC hoodie. In retrospect I can only see the event as an inevitability.

The UFC’s success in creating an entertainment category and inserting itself into sports, culture, and politics can not be overlooked. And understanding the UFC’s success is critical to understanding how power games are won before the other teams even knows they’re competing.

Want to understand The United States of America? Watch combat sports.

Where else can you see people of all races, creeds, and intellectual flavors fight for a place on the world stage to better themselves and their children and their children’s children? That’s why I fell in love with fighting. That’s what it is supposed to be about.

Then you follow fighting for long enough and you learn about the reality of contracts, the unserious world of “unbiased” rankings and matchmakers, and the precious modern prize of site fees and you say, “I thought this was about who’s the best?” It is, as long as your definition of best is something like biggest cash creating moment.

What powers fighting is the same thing that drives our current culture. Attention.

Purists pray to see the best take on the best. Realists know that doesn’t put asses in seats.

You need contracts to ensure fighters fight.
You accept matchmakers’ existence because someone needs to pit contracted athletes against one another.
You learn site fees put money back into the business that should be paying the fighters more and more.

The sad thought that every real fan has to grapple with is they are the mark buying the ticket to see people bludgeon one another. You hope the men and women accepting the punishment are rewarded fairly for their contributions to the entertainment sphere. You tell yourself you tolerate it because you enjoy the craft. You love the technique. You play the games and you want to know how to win them.

Fair weather fans leave the arenas’ seats as soon as enough is enough. But hardcore fight fans trick themselves into thinking they get something else from the sport. Something beyond the psychotic vision born of a wannabe boxing manager’s thirst for power and influence.

If you want to know how one boy from the North East managed to become one of the most influential men in America keep reading. Just don’t expect the story to walk a straight line.

Combat sports were, and still are, regulated state by state through boxing commissions. There was no legal framework addressing mixed martial arts in the United States before the UFC existed. The sport had no promoters, no revenue streams, and no regulatory classification.

WOW Promotions and Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) produced the first event at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado on November 12, 1993. The event was delivered directly to consumers via pay-per-view. The UFC continued like this in an unregulated space until 1996. Then New York became the first state to enact legislation that legalized professional MMA fights in the United States. That’s right around the time that American mixed martial arts and the UFC met their first major road block.

Senator John McCain launched a campaign against MMA. We have him to thank for the term "human cockfighting". He sent letters to the governors of all 50 US states asking them to prohibit the sport.

36 states enacted laws that banned "no-holds-barred" fighting. The New York legislature passed a bill that banned professional MMA fights just one year after legalizing professional MMA. The UFC had almost no means of hosting or broadcasting events and they were running out of money.

How did they climb out of that chasm? People like me. Chronically online fans.

The UFC was dying. The larger sport of MMA was not. Frankly, the most interesting action in martial arts was happening outside of the US in Japan.

Shootboxing, RINGS, Shooto, and Pancrase were all promoting professional contests before the UFC was. The rules were not uniform and to do a thorough explanation of every divergence between these promotions would be a book in and of itself. You just need to understand that these oversees organizations were fostering a live audience that the promotion PRIDE FC would capitalize on.

PRIDE was the biggest spectacle in MMA. Ever. To this day 2002’s PRIDE Shockwave (co-promoted with K1) is the most well attended mixed martial arts fight with 91,107 attendees. That many interested people meant there was plenty of talk online. That chat was, and still is, hosted on message boards like The Underground, Sherdog, and others.

John McCain thought he stopped the UFC and MMA in the USA by destroying the distribution. He didn’t understand that technology was evolving to solve this problem.

BitTorrent and peer-to-peer networks became the informal distribution layer for MMA content. Private communities like MMATorrents, MMA-Tracker, and XtremeWrestlingTorrents formed and fostered hoarding fight footage to create digital archives.

Piracy? Sure. But hardly anyone cared that an informal amateur hacker group was keeping the fighting spectacle we know as mixed martial arts from dying in the USA.

Then came another problem. People not like me.

I’m a hardcore fan. An addict. I gotta train, watch, and teach this stuff to keep my life in order.

Most people are not addicts. Most people don’t know the difference between MMA and the UFC. They don’t care because they think fighting and the people obsessed with it are weird, if not outright insane.

That meant me and the UFC were fighting a hard uphill battle through the 2000’s to get people to think we weren’t weird for enjoying fighting and that you should give fighting a chance because people exactly like you are already into it.

I’m going to show you a picture of a man. I want you to guess his job.

If you guessed actor because you thought this guy was a young Jim Carrey you’d be wrong. If you guessed fighter you’d only be half right.

The guy above, Rich “Ace” Franklin, was a math teacher. And if you don’t know that, you probably avoided the UFC’s marketing machine through the early 2000’s.

The UFC started out as a No-Holds-Barred one night tournament. That earned them the ire of John McCain and his label, “human cockfighting”.

Cockfighting is illegal. Human cockfighting won’t be far behind if it ever gets regulated.

The UFC didn’t want that label so they rushed to get some type of recognition and regulation in the mid 90’s so they could continue to operate. The UFC started a war on two fronts. They fought to win the hearts and minds of the plebes, patricians, and, most importantly, politicians.

That’s why they went out of their way to tell everyone Franklin was a math teacher. Every time Chuck Liddell’s mohawk and tattooed head were on screen, the UFC was quick to remind us that he graduated from California Polytechnic University with a degree in accounting!

They were signaling that he, like you, is civilized.

You might think these people are scary but they’re a lot more similar to you than you can imagine. The fighting thing is basically just a hobby. A way to express their artistry. And you can understand that even if you don’t engage in the same pursuits that they do. That’s why you should watch.

MMA fighting was sold as a display of human will, technical mastery, and artistic flair.

This is martial arts marketing 101. They’re for everyone so anyone, including women, men, and skinny twerps, can learn them and use them to better their life.

It’s hard to argue that the UFC is less egalitarian than other sports. Think about it like this, what other organizations promote men and women together? What other major sports even have them do the same activity?

The WNBA uses a different ball, rules, and court.
The MLB sponsors the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL) instead of having a women’s baseball organization.
If you seriously want to discuss women’s tackle football you first have to look past the hilariously dumb and retrograde Lingerie Football League.

The UFC didn’t add women to the organization until UFC 157 in 2013. When they did, the card was headlined by Ronda Rousey and Liz Carmouche. Rousey went on to become one of the highest paid fighters ever and she recently came out of retirement to headline Netflix’s first MMA card. That event ended as the most watched MMA fight in American history.

Carmouche, the other half of the UFC’s first ever women’s fight, is openly gay. The woman who usurped Rousey’s claim as the UFC’s best WMMA fighter, Amanda Nunes, spent most of her time as a champion married to another woman in the UFC. Even as far back as 2009 Dana White was saying,

Outside of gender and sexual orientation, what other sport has high profile athletes from every corner of the world? America, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Siberia, Dagestan, Australia, New Zealand, and The United Kingdom all currently have a UFC champion. Half of those regions have never even put an athlete into the NBA, MLB, or NFL.

To say that the UFC and mixed martial arts more broadly doesn’t have representation from all walks of life is ludicrous. That’s why it’s so sad to see the turn the organization is taking.

Dana White knew that mixed martial arts and the UFC could turn into one of the biggest spectacles in the world. He convinced the financially necessary Fertitta brothers of that, they made it his job to tell everyone about the UFC, and he did not care if you listened to him or not.

There’s a marketing cliche that says if everyone is your customer, no one is. White exudes that. If you love him, or, as is more likely, hate him, he does not care what you think about him or his business because he knows someone next to you will love the punches he’s peddling.

This was exactly the leader that the UFC needed in its nascency. Not just a fighter, but a pressure fighter. A person who goes forward until their opponent flinches, folds, and he can run over them.

White occasionally made unforced errors like every other confident pressure fighter.

This quote above is actually what sparked the earlier quote where White claimed his PR Team wants him to do an interview with GLAAD.

Instead of getting in GLAAD or sparring with every journalist, White would often just push people out of the UFC’s orbit.

White pushed Loretta Hunt away for reporting that the UFC has removed fighters’ managers’ backstage access.

White blacklisted Josh Gross after Gross rejected his offer to become the editor for the UFC’s website, revealed the finalists of season 4 of The Ultimate Fighter, and wrote an open letter to White asking that he fix the fighters’ steroid problems and thuggish images.

White kicked Ariel Helwani out from a UFC event and got him removed from the press tour for Conor McGregor versus Floyd Mayweather for announcing that Brock Lesnar would headline UFC 200.

White even banned all of Bloody Elbow’s staff for years before the company was bought and repurposed as an AI slop factory.

White and the UFC fought against “fake news” before Donald Trump cemented that phrase into our lexicon forever. They portrayed every media member they didn’t like as losers who have never and could never accomplish anything.

White and the UFC started inviting influencers and content creators to replace the credentialed unbiased journalists you expect at pro sports events. They could make videos, promote the events, and they wouldn’t question the organization giving them good tickets to said events in fear of losing opportunities to create monetizable content about their lavish life.

What the UFC was doing was creating a culture of total control.

When the UFC was fighting for relevancy, a few other organizations were putting on some of the best fights you’ll ever see.

PRIDE was dominating in Japan and many fans thought their heavyweights and light heavyweights were the best in the sport. Names like Fedor Emelianenko, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Shogun Rua, and Wanderlei Silva were just some of the stars carrying their brand.

On the other end of the world and weight divisions, WEC was leading the charge. Demetrious Johnson, Dominick Cruz, Jose Aldo, and Anthony Pettis are only a few of the men who fought there and later became UFC champions.

Both of these organizations were purchase by the UFC in 2006 and 2007. Alongside them came World Fighting Alliance, International Fight League’s assets, and Strikeforce all were folded under the UFC’s parent company Zuffa.

Having so many great fighters under one roof makes for a convenient viewing experience but it leaves fighters without many options to fight elsewhere. That meant they had little leverage in contract negotiations. It was the UFC’s way or the highway and rhe coming years would make the UFC’s way that much harder.

For the majority of MMA’s existence UFC fighters earned extra cash by accepting uniform sponsors. Companies could strap a logo on fighters’ shorts in exchange for additional compensation. This made the athletes’ clothing look not uniform.

In 2014 the UFC signed a 6 year deal with Reebok worth $70 million to outfit all of their athletes in similarly branded gear. Then CEO Lorenzo Fertitta announced all of the money would go to the fighters. When the deal ended in 2020, only $39.3 million made its way to the fighters and it cut many fighters’ overall pay.

Brendan Schaub said,

Schaub went on to say one of his coaches, Greg Jackson lost additional sponsorship income. Even cutman Stitch Duran was never contracted by the UFC after speaking out against the Reebok deal.

After creating an organization for everyone to watch that allowed anyone to compete in to improve their life, the UFC bought competitors and removed their contracted athletes means of making additional money so they would be more desperate to fight. Dana Whit even spelled out his logic in a Stanford Business School lecture.

It’s quotes like this and the actions above that resulted in the UFC’s former and ongoing antitrust lawsuits.

In 2016 the UFC sold for just north of $4 billion. That was the largest transaction in professional sports history. Since then there has been a gradual degradation in fight promotion.

Before 2016 the UFC was run by fanatics. A name you don’t hear often and a face you never see was largely responsible for the UFC we loved. Joe Silva. The tyrannical matchmaker’s story is emblematic of the UFC’s early days.

Silva grew up in Richmond, Virginia, reading Black Belt Magazine, watching boxing, and studying pro wrestling promotion. His wide love of combat gave him a clue that boxers weren’t the best fighters on the planet. When he encountered the UFC, it was like his entertainment dream was coming to life.

Silva saw an ad in Black Belt Magazine from the UFC’s parent company at the time, SEG. They were looking for fighters. Silva decided to call the number and reached then owner of the UFC, Campbell McLaren.

McLaren was enthralled by Silva’s knowledge of the sport. He convinced Silva to attend Ultimate Ultimate in 1995 and hired “the UFC’s greatest fan”. Silva even worked with John McCarthy and Jeff Blatnick to write the sport’s first rule book before the UFC was sold to the Dana White and The Fertittas.

Once White and The Ferittas did have control of the promotion, Light Heavyweight Champion Tito Ortiz convinced White to hire Silva as the company’s matchmaker. He had no experience negotiating contracts, matchmaking, or anything else. He was just the “UFC’s greatest fan”.

Silva would go on to handpick the fighters for the first season of The Ultimate Fighter reality show, pitch the idea of having the WEC go all-in on smaller fighters before dissolving the promotion, and mentor one of the UFC’s current matchmakers, Sean Shelby.

Silva only wanted to make the best events he could. As the promotion grew, his job became more about filling up time slots. When the UFC was purchased in 2016 he saw the writing on the wall and left a year later.

Silva built events to sell to us so we would buy them on Pay-Per-View. It was riskier and required more marketing to get us to buy in. The UFC has de-risked their business with two major developments since then.

If a local municipality is hoping the UFC will come to town they have to pay. Saudi Arabia reportedly paid $20 million to get a fight in 2024. In addition, broadcast partners now pay for streaming rights to show the UFC. The most recent deal with Paramount was worth $7.7 billion for 7 years. This deal doesn’t even cover every country in the world’s broadcasting rights either.

You have to take a step back and acknowledge how impressive the UFC’s business is. In 2025 they hit $1.5 billion dollars in revenue with $851 million EBITDA.

That means they have plenty of money to put into signing and developing talent. Instead, we regularly read reports of athletes not signing with the UFC because of the pay offered to them.

The last man to beat Alex Pereira in kickboxing, Artem Vakhitov, didn’t sign with the UFC because they offered him the standard $10,000 to show and $10,000 to win contract.

The PFL paid another kickboxing star Cedric Doumbe 10 times what the UFC offered him.

KSW gave Salahdine Parnasse 20-30 times what the UFC offered him.

The UFC makes so much money it has no incentive to keep working like it once did, much like Dana White predicted during his Stanford Business School lecture. They aren’t investing in the athletes like they used to, they hardly have to tell their fighters stories because the money is already made and there’s effectively no competitor to force them to change. Plus they can literally call in favors from the White House whenever they need to get something done.

If you listen to Dana White explain his relationship with Donald Trump he’ll call him a friend. A once necessary ally that saved his company and the sport in America.

That’s not exactly the whole story.

It’s true that Trump hosted three UFC events between 2000 and 2001 at his Taj Mahal Casino. The first of those events, UFC 30, was the first event that White and the Fertitta brothers promoted after buying the company. But the UFC also hosted 23 events between 2000-2004 and Trump even tried to compete with the UFC after the success of The Ultimate Fighter reality show.

Trump, Michael Cohen, and Tom Atencio started a promotion called Affliction in 2008. They signed former UFC champions Tim Sylvia, Josh Barnett, Andrei Arlovski, and Vitor Belfort, plus future champ Robbie Lawler. It was a promotion centered around the all-time great Fedor Emelianenko. The fighter who former UFC Heavyweight and Light Heavyweight Champion Randy Couture tried to exit the UFC in hopes of fighting.

Trump bragged about how Affliction was going to take over MMA, “All the fighters want to be with us, and I think it probably will take over.”

It didn’t.

Before Affliction put on their third event, Josh Barnett tested positive for a banned substance. He was unable to headline the card against Fedor and Trump’s attempt at promoting MMA was dead and gone much to the delight of White.

Trump mostly stayed out of MMA until he decided to run for President. Then he began sitting cage-side at UFC events to appeal to more young men that felt disenfranchised by previous political administrations.

Trump got elected in 2016 and 2024 but that wasn’t the end of the UFC’s utility for him. He appeared cage side at UFC 264 in July, several months after January 6th’s attack on the capitol. He was met with boos and cheers but it was clear he had people in his corner. White would even introduce Trump at 2024’s Republican National Convention.

Like all good relationships, this one has plenty of ongoing reciprocity.

Paramount+ is the UFC’s current streaming partner in the USA and Canada. 7 years of broadcasting cost them $7.7 billion dollars. Paramount was only able to afford that price after Trump’s FCC approved their merger with Skydance 18 days before the transaction. Trump has since taken additional interest in the success of the UFC by purchasing stock options in the UFC’s parent company ahead of the event on his birthday. An event that might not even be legal.

A recent lawsuit filed against UFC Freedom 250 argues that the UFC and its partners are being allowed to profit from access to some of the nation's federal sites which means it does not qualify for special authorization under temporary rules adopted for America's 250th anniversary celebrations.

Just today it was announced that Marco Rubio and UFC are planning use cage fights for diplomacy. What the fuck does that even mean?

You just can’t look at the UFC’s alliance with Trump objectively and think it will continue to be a net positive for the company. He literally has the lowest approval rating of any other president at this point in their term. He sucks and it sucks that the UFC is joined with him at the hip. With the event at the White House approaching, you do need to remember that mixed martial arts is bigger than this weekend.

In case it’s not obvious, I love mixed martial arts. Talking, training, and watching fighting has taken most of my time since I was a teenager. And because the UFC makes up the majority of MMA, I can’t help but have a special place in my heart for the company that has given me so much joy and helped define the activity that gave my life some direction.

When I was 17 I was briefly homeless. I like to say I was homeless-light. I hate the term “unhoused” but I have to acknowledge it perfectly explains what happened to me.

My father was unable to pay the mortgage of the home that I slept in. I watched police change the locks on our front door. I was forced to face up to his eviction notice and my housing was undone.

I was able to live at my best friend’s house. His dad had a spare bedroom and I had a way to pay for my own food so I wasn’t really in the way. I was as happy as a hermit crab finding a more spacious shell. But really my happiness had more to do with where I was when I wasn’t in my temporary home. My gym, Combat Fitness.

Combat Fitness still inhabits a warehouse in Concord, California. They had bags to hit, people to spar with, and real role models to learn from.

I spent hours of my days there. I found passion in a physical struggle. It lit a fire in me and told me I don’t have accept whatever position I find myself in, in and out of a ring. And I can’t help but see a version of my experience in people across the world.

Martial arts can satisfy when I see as a necessary experience. A type of initiation ritual into the beginning of adulthood. The accepting of responsibility for your development.

If you want to get better you have to train. You have to take it on the chin and come back to get better. You have to care enough to actually work for something.

Dojos, gyms, and rings around the world can create places where particularly at risk youth can mature. With professional combat sports, these people can find means of turning their skills into money. They can sell their skills to gyms, promoters, and people wanting to learn from and be entertained by them.

The writer Gerald Early wrote,

Man if Early could see the UFC.

Political corruption. Market consolidation. Tailored suits taking out the fans and craftsman that made the company and its product special. They really have take the psychotic vision and ran with it.

But I am here to say that much like America is bigger than Donald Trump, combat sports exist outside of the UFC.

The three highest attended events to this day are PRIDE Shockwave, OKTAGON 62, and KSW 39. All three of those events happened in different years and countries. The market for mixed martial arts exists and it is ready for more players.

We have new people putting new money into MMA, exquisite pageantry from promotions like Rizin, European promotions like Oktagon and KSW are selling out stadiums, and the most watched MMA fight in American history was not promoted by the UFC. I mean, even the PFL is in the middle of contract negotiations for a new streaming partner and they’re coming to my town soon so I will be in attendance.

I’m not self-righteous enough to pretend that fighting professionally or even training for fun is solely some virtuous pursuit. It’s bloody. It can be gross. And, as I hope you can see from above, many of the people in it are ripe for exploitation.

But combat sports and martial arts have, and will continue to, benefit countless disenfranchised people so I’m not going to let one guy’s egomaniacal birthday party ruin my sport. And I’m definitely not ready to secede from what I love.

The man that founded the martial art that the Gracies adapted, rebranded, and used to win UFC 1 described the two principles of his system as,

Highest efficient use of energy for mutual aid. That’s what martial arts, combat sports, and MMA are about at their core. I will die on that hill whether it’s during this administration or next.