How ‘One Glove’ and the UFC Changed Everything We Knew About Fighting

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Earlier this month, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, more commonly known as UFC, celebrated its 30th anniversary. The company’s explosive growth is unprecedented in the history of sports, recently earning a $12 billion valuation. But the UFC didn't just create a new kind of sports entertainment. It brought a relatively unknown fighting style out of the underground and into the mainstream, upending our understanding of human combat. So today, Ryan Hockensmith tells the tale of the first-ever UFC event, through the eyes of one fighter who had no idea what he was getting into. Back in 2017, our friends at 30 for 30 Podcasts went even deeper on the origins of UFC. Check out their episode No Rules: The Birth of UFC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ryan Hawkinsmith, we're going to again pry open your cabinet of sports
0:05.6	curiosities. Tell us where we should begin today's story. This story begins
0:10.7	in the old McNichal Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado and the date was November 12th, 1993,
0:17.0	so basically 30 years ago exactly.
0:20.0	There were thousands of people in the arena that night and one of them was a guy
0:27.8	named Art Jimerson. Art Jimerson was a boxer he fought in a bunch of different weights, but he weighed about 175, 180 pounds normally.
0:36.2	And on that night, he was there to participate in the first ever ultimate fighting championship. You talk about an original event.
0:46.0	If you want to know reasons, if you want to know why it's such an original event,
0:49.0	look no further than this ring.
0:50.0	It's not a ring at all.
0:51.0	It's an octagon.
0:52.0	Eight sides, it's got a fence here. The boxers are talking about. It could be a little bit of a slow service. This is what I'm talking about. It's got a little bit of gibb. It's gonna be fun.
1:01.2	Jimerson, he was positive that he was going to win his first U.F.
1:05.0	He was fighting a guy he outweighed by a good 20 pounds and he thought it was pretty
1:09.8	funny when he looked at the guy and saw this dude was a Jiu-Jitsu black belt and he was wearing what
1:16.0	art said was it looked like a bathrobe and he just remembers he says to this day just
1:20.9	remember thinking that is easy money.
1:24.0	But as he warmed up backstage,
1:25.0	he ran into a guy from the jubitsu guy's camp.
1:30.0	And Jimerson said to him,
1:31.0	hey, you're with my opponent, right? And the guy nodded his head, and Jimerson said to him, hey you're with my opponent, right?
1:32.8	And the guy nodded his head and Jimerson stepped back and he said,
	...

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