UFC History: How the UFC Started, From UFC 1 in 1993 to the Paramount Era

Image: Peter Gordon, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The UFC began on 12 November 1993, when UFC 1 was held at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado. It was created by Rorion Gracie, the eldest son of Brazilian jiu-jitsu pioneer Hélio Gracie, and Art Davie, an advertising executive, with the pay-per-view company Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) putting up the money and the pay-per-view airtime.

The pitch was simple: find out which martial art actually works when there are almost no rules. SEG's Campbell McLaren wanted to sell it as a live video game, and the Hollywood director John Milius, a friend of the Gracies, is credited with the eight-sided fenced ring that gave the sport its most famous word: the Octagon.

Nobody involved set out to build a mainstream sport. UFC 1 was planned as a one-off spectacle, and the "Ultimate Fighting Championship" name described a tournament, not a company. That distinction matters for everything that follows, because the UFC spent its first eight years being treated as a television stunt rather than a sport.

UFC 1 was an eight-man, single-elimination tournament, and Royce Gracie won it by beating three men in a single night. The Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt submitted every opponent he faced, none of them lasting longer than two and a half minutes.

• Quarter-finals: Gerard Gordeau stopped sumo wrestler Teila Tuli in 26 seconds; Kevin Rosier beat Zane Frazier on a corner stoppage at 4:20; Royce Gracie submitted boxer Art Jimmerson, who famously wore a single boxing glove, at 2:18; Ken Shamrock heel-hooked Patrick Smith at 1:49.
• Semi-finals: Gordeau stopped Rosier in 59 seconds; Gracie choked Shamrock in 57 seconds.
• Final: Gracie beat Gordeau by rear-naked choke at 1:44 to win the $50,000 prize.

An alternate bout also took place, with Jason DeLucia submitting Trent Jenkins in 52 seconds. The event drew 7,800 people in the arena and roughly 86,000 pay-per-view buys, enough for SEG to order a sequel. Gracie went on to win the UFC 2 and UFC 4 tournaments as well, and his rivalry with Shamrock produced a draw at UFC 5 in April 1995.

The lesson most fans took from Denver was that grappling mattered. A fighter who could take an opponent down and control him on the mat beat bigger, heavier strikers, and that discovery is why every modern fighter trains wrestling and jiu-jitsu alongside striking. Our guide to MMA fighting styles explains how those disciplines blended over the next three decades.

The early UFC had no weight classes, no rounds and no judges. A fight ended by knockout, submission or a fighter's corner throwing in the towel, so the only route to victory was to finish the other man.

Only three things were prohibited at UFC 1: biting, eye gouging and strikes to the groin, and even those were enforced through $1,500 fines rather than disqualification. Gloves were optional, which is why Jimmerson could walk out with one on. The referees, João Alberto Barreto and Hélio Vigio, were both veteran officials from Brazilian vale tudo.

That tiny rulebook was the marketing hook, and it nearly killed the promotion. Compare it with the dozens of fouls, the 10-point must system and the defined weight limits in today's Unified Rules of MMA and you can see how far the sport had to travel.

By 1996 the UFC had a powerful enemy. Senator John McCain watched a tape of the events and called them "human cockfighting", then lobbied state governors to stop them. Dozens of states moved against no-holds-barred fighting, with one widely cited count putting the number that enacted bans at 36.

Events were pushed to smaller venues in states with no athletic commission: UFC 12 in 1997 was moved at the last minute from New York to Dothan, Alabama.

This was the period that rescued the sport, even if it did not feel like it. To survive, SEG started adding rules: weight classes and a ban on fish-hooking at UFC 12, mandatory gloves and no kicks to the head of a downed opponent at UFC 14, and five-minute rounds at UFC 21 in 1999.

The turning point for legitimacy came on 17 November 2000, when UFC 28 in Atlantic City became the first UFC event sanctioned by the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board. Fighters had to wear trunks and gloves, strict weight classes applied, and Randy Couture won the heavyweight title by stopping Kevin Randleman in the third round.

New Jersey had opened its doors to MMA promoters in September 2000 so its officials could watch real events and write proper regulations. On 3 April 2001 the board hosted a meeting of regulators and promoters that agreed one common set of rules. Those became the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, and as more states adopted them they became the standard for professional MMA across North America.

Sanctioning is also where weight divisions became permanent. The modern ladder of eight men's and several women's divisions grew out of that framework, and our UFC weight classes explainer lists every limit in use today.

In January 2001 the Las Vegas businessmen Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought the struggling UFC from SEG for $2 million and created Zuffa, LLC to run it. Their friend Dana White, who had been managing fighters, told them it was for sale and was installed as president with a 10 per cent stake.

What they bought was thin: the brand, a wooden Octagon and around a dozen fighter contracts. The value was in timing. With the Unified Rules newly in place, Zuffa could stage the UFC under athletic commission sanctioning, return to pay-per-view and pitch it as a regulated sport rather than a spectacle.

The early Zuffa years still lost money heavily. The breakthrough did not come from a fight card at all, but from a reality television show.

The Ultimate Fighter premiered on Spike TV in January 2005, putting aspiring fighters in a house together and offering a UFC contract to the winner. It is widely seen as the moment the UFC broke into the mainstream, and the reason is one fight.

On 9 April 2005, Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar met in the light heavyweight final of the first season. Their three-round brawl was won by Griffin on a unanimous decision, but Dana White was so impressed that he announced on the night that both men would get contracts. White has called it the most important fight in UFC history, and it was later inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame's Fight Wing.

Griffin went on to become light heavyweight champion. More importantly, the ratings convinced Spike to keep going, and the show built a new audience that bought pay-per-views for the next decade. The Ultimate Fighter is still a route into the promotion today, alongside Dana White's Contender Series, as covered in our UFC event calendar guide.

Once the UFC was profitable it bought or absorbed almost every serious competitor. On 27 March 2007 the Fertittas announced they had purchased Japan's Pride Fighting Championships, then the biggest MMA promotion outside North America. The two were meant to run side by side, but Pride's Japanese staff were laid off in October 2007 and it never promoted again.

Zuffa's own World Extreme Cagefighting brand, home of the lighter men's divisions, was merged into the UFC in December 2010, bringing featherweight and bantamweight into the Octagon. In March 2011 Zuffa bought Strikeforce, and in August 2011 the UFC signed a seven-year network television deal with Fox.

The consolidation is why the UFC is so often described as the major league of MMA. Promotions such as Bellator, ONE Championship and the PFL continued, but for most of the 2010s the best fighter in almost every division was under UFC contract.

Women first fought in the UFC on 23 February 2013, when Ronda Rousey defended her bantamweight title against Liz Carmouche at UFC 157 in Anaheim, California. Rousey survived a rear-naked choke attempt and won by armbar with 11 seconds left in the first round. It was also the first UFC main event headlined by women.

Rousey had been signed on 16 November 2012 as the first woman on the roster, and later in 2013 the promotion bought 11 fighters from Invicta FC to launch a strawweight division. Women's divisions now produce some of the promotion's biggest names, including two-division champion Amanda Nunes and Kayla Harrison.

The UFC is owned by TKO Group Holdings, the New York Stock Exchange listed company formed when the UFC merged with WWE on 12 September 2023. Endeavor held a 51 per cent controlling stake at launch and former WWE shareholders the remaining 49 per cent. Dana White, now titled UFC chief executive, still runs the promotion day to day.

The road there started in July 2016, when the Fertittas sold Zuffa to a group led by the talent agency WME-IMG, backed by Silver Lake and KKR, in a deal valued at about $4 billion (the precise figure widely reported was $4.025 billion). The Fertittas kept small passive stakes. A sport bought for $2 million in 2001 had multiplied in value roughly two thousand times in 15 years.

Television followed the money. In May 2018 ESPN took the American rights from Fox in a five-year deal reported at $1.5 billion, starting in January 2019 and moving the UFC's US events onto ESPN and its streaming service ESPN+.

The UFC's current chapter began in 2026. On 11 August 2025 Paramount announced a seven-year, $7.7 billion deal for the exclusive US rights, averaging $1.1 billion a year. It ended the UFC's pay-per-view model in America: all 13 numbered events and 30 Fight Nights a year stream on Paramount+, with selected numbered events simulcast on CBS.

UFC 324 on 24 January 2026 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas was the first card of the Paramount+ deal. Justin Gaethje beat Paddy Pimblett on scores of 48-47, 49-46 and 49-46 to win the interim lightweight title.

Five months later the UFC staged UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House on 14 June 2026. Gaethje stopped Ilia Topuria when the champion's corner ended the fight after the fourth round, winning the undisputed lightweight title, and Ciryl Gane knocked out Alex Pereira in the second round for the interim heavyweight belt. All seven fights ended inside the distance. From a Denver arena with three rules to a cage outside the White House took a little under 33 years.

Image: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

• 12 November 1993: UFC 1 in Denver; Royce Gracie wins the eight-man tournament.
• 1996: John McCain's campaign against "human cockfighting" begins; state bans follow.
• 1997: UFC 12 introduces weight classes and moves to Dothan, Alabama.
• 17 November 2000: UFC 28, the first UFC event sanctioned by New Jersey.
• January 2001: the Fertittas buy the UFC for $2 million and form Zuffa.
• 3 April 2001: regulators agree the Unified Rules in New Jersey.
• 21 November 2003: the UFC Hall of Fame opens at UFC 45 with Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock.
• 9 April 2005: Griffin vs Bonnar on The Ultimate Fighter finale.
• 27 March 2007: Pride bought by the UFC's owners.
• 23 February 2013: Rousey vs Carmouche, the first women's fight in the UFC.
• July 2016: WME-IMG group buys the UFC for about $4 billion.
• 12 September 2023: UFC and WWE merge into TKO Group Holdings.
• 24 January 2026: UFC 324, the first event of the Paramount+ deal.
• 14 June 2026: UFC Freedom 250 at the White House.

The thread running through every date is regulation. The UFC only became big business once athletic commissions treated it as a sport, which is why rules, title structures and how title fights work now matter as much to fans as the fights themselves.

• Wikipedia: UFC 1
• UFC.com: UFC 1 The Beginning event results
• Wikipedia: History of the Ultimate Fighting Championship
• Wikipedia: UFC 28
• Wikipedia: UFC Hall of Fame
• UFC.com: UFC Legends, Griffin vs Bonnar 1
• Wrestling Inc: Official UFC sale announcement
• Sports Video Group: ESPN expands UFC rights deal to become exclusive home of UFC in US
• Sportcal: Endeavor closes UFC-WWE merger and creation of TKO Group
• CBS News: Paramount acquires UFC rights in 7-year, $7.7 billion deal
• UFC.com: UFC 324 results, Gaethje vs Pimblett
• Fox Sports: Gaethje vs Pimblett headline first Paramount+ card
• UFC.com: UFC Freedom 250 results, highlights and interviews
• MyMMANews: UFC White House results

When did the UFC start?

The UFC started on 12 November 1993 with UFC 1 at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado. It was an eight-man, one-night tournament with no weight classes, rounds or judges, and Royce Gracie won it by submitting Art Jimmerson, Ken Shamrock and Gerard Gordeau. About 7,800 people attended and the show sold roughly 86,000 pay-per-views.

Who founded the UFC?

The UFC was created by Rorion Gracie and advertising executive Art Davie, with Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) financing and broadcasting the first events on pay-per-view. Film director John Milius is credited with the Octagon concept. The Fertitta brothers and Dana White did not arrive until January 2001, when they bought the promotion from SEG for $2 million.

Who won UFC 1?

Royce Gracie won UFC 1 and its $50,000 prize. He submitted boxer Art Jimmerson in the quarter-finals, choked Ken Shamrock in 57 seconds in the semi-finals and beat Gerard Gordeau with a rear-naked choke at 1:44 of the final. He later won the UFC 2 and UFC 4 tournaments and was one of the first two UFC Hall of Fame inductees in 2003.

Who owns the UFC now?

The UFC is owned by TKO Group Holdings, the publicly listed company created when the UFC merged with WWE on 12 September 2023. Endeavor held a 51 per cent controlling stake when TKO launched. Dana White runs the UFC as its chief executive. Before TKO, a WME-IMG led group bought the UFC from the Fertitta brothers in 2016 for about $4 billion.

How much did Dana White and the Fertittas pay for the UFC?

Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta paid $2 million for the UFC in January 2001 and set up Zuffa, LLC to own it, with their friend Dana White as president holding a 10 per cent stake. They received the brand, a wooden Octagon and around a dozen fighter contracts. In 2016 they sold it to a WME-IMG led group for about $4 billion.

Why was the UFC banned in so many states?

Senator John McCain campaigned against the early UFC from 1996, calling it "human cockfighting", and dozens of states banned no-holds-barred fighting, pushing events into small venues. The UFC answered by adding weight classes, gloves and rounds, then winning commission sanctioning in New Jersey at UFC 28 in 2000 and the Unified Rules in 2001.