Over the last three decades, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the sports we watch. The NBA has gone from a league mostly dominated by gigantic centers and super-athletic slashers/midrange iso-guards to one where all of the very best players are at least halfway-reliable three-point shooters. In pro football, the running back position has gone from perhaps the single most important in the game to one relegated to a supporting role for most NFL teams as they’ve shifted to more complex, pass-centered offensive schemes. Baseball just changed a whole bunch of rules in order to juice run-production, but it’s still mostly the same game it’s been forever.
No sport, however, has evolved more in the last 30 years than mixed martial arts. Before 1993 – the year the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Pancrase held their first events in the U.S. and Japan, respectively – the sort of multidisciplinary clashes to which we now have grown so accustomed only took place in basement gyms or in Bloodsport. Even then, the first iterations of MMA were either violent pseudo-infomercials for Gracie Jiu-Jitsu or special events meant to showcase legitimate fights between Japan’s most popular professional wrestlers. In fact, the very term “mixed martial arts” did not even overtake “ultimate fighting” or “no holds barred” among mainstream sports media until well into the new millennium.
Because failure in martial arts involves far more bodily harm than, say, getting dunked on or giving up a home run, the techniques we saw in the cage and in the ring necessarily evolved very quickly. After Royce Gracie effortlessly submitted seven consecutive opponents on his way to winning the first two UFC tournaments, observers quickly realized that a great fighter needed to do more than just throw punches and kicks. When elite amateur wrestlers Dan Severn and Mark Coleman began using their size and body-control to smother any potential ground attacks while doing a ton of damage themselves, fighters began focusing on takedown defense. And when Maurice Smith and Pete Williams stayed out of Coleman’s grasp and chopped him down with well timed kicks, fighters realized that striking was still important after all.
Today, the notion that the world’s best fighters even have a particular combat specialty is outdated. Every fighter who makes it into the modern UFC must be proficient in striking, grappling, wrestling and have world-class cardio. While the 1993 version of Michael Jordan could probably still be one of basketball’s best players, most of the guys who appeared in the UFC in its earliest years would not only be utterly dismantled by today’s champions, but would almost certainly be dominated even by veteran fighters from a lot of regional promotions.
Does this evolution make for the most entertaining product, though? While some fans love how the innovations in offensive game-plans have boosted scoring in both the NBA and NFL, others no doubt preferred the days when Kareem Abdul-Jabaar and Wilt Chamberlain were winning all of their MVP awards while mostly staying positioned near each basket or when Reggie White could lay all of his body weight on an opposing quarterback as he brought him down in the backfield.
In the world of MMA, the skill-level is as high as its ever been. As a direct result of the UFC’s overtures to more mainstream audiences beginning shortly after the turn of the century, jiu-jitsu gyms have sprung up all over the world, many of these serving as launching pads for fighters to begin their MMA training. Where in the mid-1990s the idea of someone being a professional cagefighter seemed like something out of a pulp magazine, today MMA has opened up new career opportunities not just for dedicated gymrats starting from scratch, but also for experienced athletes like collegiate wrestlers or Olympic judokas whose competitive journeys would otherwise end in their early 20s. The pool of talent has never been deeper, but so what?
One would think that the vast expansion of the UFC in particular – 43 events in 2023 compared to just five in 2003 – would have led to a massive increase in the number of celebrity athletes making millions of dollars and showing up in insurance advertisements. Unfortunately, today’s MMA landscape is dominated by a revolving door of barely recognizable fighters and a very small number of super-duper-stars who almost never actually get in the Octagon. Fighter pay has remained mostly stagnant, with some earning as little as $10,000 per appearance (the equivalent of about $6,000 in 2003), which hasn’t done much to separate all but a tiny percentage of the UFC’s athletes from the hundreds of others on its roster and turn them into household names.
Personally, I’ve lost interest in keeping up with the latest MMA news, and I certainly don’t feel compelled to spend $80 every month on pay-per-views that perpetually seem hastily thrown together at the last minute. That doesn’t mean I don’t still like watching fights, but these days the bulk of my attention is dedicated to a shuttered Japanese promotion that held events whose prestige was matched only by their audience size. In 2002, the UFC played to crowds of just a few thousand and featured a literal handful of “big-names” that received any kind of marketing. In Japan, meanwhile, the people behind Pride Fighting Championships were filling football-stadium-sized venues to capacity and paying the world’s best fighters astronomical salaries to lure them over.
These comparatively favorable factors – coupled with the lack of an athletic commission to regulate the sport – led to some of the best and most fun fights in the brief history of MMA. The UFC might have been first, but Pride took advantage of MMA’s massive popularity in Japan to bring the sport to a new level. Many of the sport’s most legendary figures either first achieved popularity in Pride or jumped there from the UFC to earn bigger paychecks, and the promotion generally did its part to ensure the best fighters always ended up in the ring together before it was abruptly shut down in 2007.
In some ways, things have gotten a lot better in the world of MMA than when Pride was around. There’s an event being broadcast from one company or another just about every week, and the UFC specifically has grown tremendously to include a dozen weight classes across both men’s and women’s divisions. Mainstream sports media outlets now cover MMA with the same seriousness they dedicate to Major League Baseball. Celebrities now treat major UFC fights the same way they did professional boxing during Mike Tyson’s heyday.
At the end of the day, though, the increasing sameness of the UFC’s fights and fighters has made me bored with the sport I used to follow religiously, but I still love it. With that in mind, I decided to start a long-term writing project to capture what made me fall in love with MMA in the first place. And long before I was watching the UFC, I was watching Pride.
What will follow is a multi-part series of essays covering the entire history of Pride Fighting Championships, from its first experimental event in 1997 to its history-making tournaments to its brief and ill-fated journey to the U.S. No one did it better than Pride, and here you’ll learn what that meant.
Eric Reinert 