The last time the UFC put on a show in New York, Ken Shamrock fought Oleg Taktarov to a 33-minute draw in the evening’s “superfight championship” main event.
It was September 8, 1995, and despite drawing a company-record crowd of 9,000 people to Buffalo’s Memorial Auditorium, UFC 7 was kind of a disaster. The 11-fight card featured no weight classes, no rounds and time limits that were treated more like suggestions than actual rules.
Midway through, a generator blew and caused a power outage in the arena. Because of the resulting delay, the event ran over its allotted time on pay-per-view, and many customers had their TV broadcasts go dark before the final bouts.
Widespread refunds had to be issued, and what should have been a solid success for the fledgling UFC turned out to be a dud. Though nobody knew it at the time, it would be 21 years before the Octagon made it back to the Empire State.
That lengthy drought ends Saturday with UFC 205 at Madison Square Garden. The star-studded event features three title bouts and is headlined by an actual, honest-to-goodness superfight between lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez and featherweight champ Conor McGregor.
Barring any last-minute shake-ups, it’s almost certain to be the biggest, most watched and most profitable fight card in UFC history.
It’ll also make a fitting victory parade.
The road back into the New York market was far longer and more arduous than anybody could have expected.
Despite the PPV failure of UFC 7, company officials were buoyed by that event’s live attendance numbers and announced a return to New York in early 1997. Unfortunately, they were denied sanctioning rights days before their planned UFC 12 event was set to go down in Niagara Falls.
At the last minute, they had to pack up and move the show to tiny Dothan, Alabama.
MMA Fighting’s Dave Meltzer captured the resulting chaos:
[UFC ownership] chartered a jet from Niagara Falls to Montgomery, filled with 200 fighters, entourages, officials, reporters and some fans. The flight was delayed because of weight issues. Luggage had to be thrown off the plane and left in Niagara Falls. They landed in Alabama at 2 a.m. Several buses were then rented to take the crew to Dothan, where they dropped people off at a number of different hotels. Fighters didn’t get rooms until 5 a.m., and everyone had to check out by noon due to a religious convention coming in, that had booked every hotel in town.
After working around the clock, they were still painting the canvas on the Octagon in front of the fans even after the first match was scheduled to go into the cage, causing the prelims to start 15 minutes late, but they made it on time for the pay-per-view.
At the time, New York wasn’t an outlier—banning MMA was en vogue during the late 1990s. An effort to kill the sport led by Arizona senator John McCain might have succeeded if Las Vegas casino scions Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta hadn’t bought the UFC along with Dana White in 2001.
White and the Fertitta brothers brought a much-needed influx of cash and enthusiasm to the waning sport but also a certain political savvy. Working alongside other groups and state athletic commissions, they got MMA legalized and sanctioned in 49 states as the UFC rapidly increased in size and popularity during the next 15 years.
The final holdout?
You guessed it: New York.
Each year between 2010 and 2015, lobbying efforts funded by UFC ownership managed to get bills to legalize MMA to pass the New York Senate, only to see them die in the state assembly. Meanwhile, the UFC engaged in an expensive and contentious political struggle with a Las Vegas-based culinary union, which sought to keep the UFC out of New York to protest the Fertittas’ business dealings in Nevada.
By 2016, however, the UFC had made enough infinitesimal progress that MMA finally broke through. Despite individual assembly members’ public comments that called MMA “gay porn with a different ending” and compared the sport to a “public hanging,” a bill to legalize the sport finally passed by a vote of 113-25.
In classic UFC fashion, the victory wasn’t exactly met with restraint.
The struggle to bring MMA back to New York had been perhaps the most expensive and acrimonious one in the fight company’s long march toward mainstream acceptance. The sport’s niche media had covered the story exhaustively—perhaps verging on overkill—for years. It was time to celebrate.
The UFC did so by booking this weekend’s date at the storied Garden and then bringing its biggest-ever PPV draw to the nation’s largest media market.
McGregor’s lightweight title bout against Alvarez will be the culmination of the Irishman’s three-year climb into the stratosphere. He’s gone from complete unknown to icon while putting up an 8-1 record in the Octagon dating back to 2013.
If he defeats Alvarez to become the 155-pound champion Saturday, he’ll be the first fighter ever to hold two UFC championships in two weight classes at the same time. He will also have earned his spot among the pantheon of the UFC’s all-time greats—perhaps, as Bleacher Report’s Jonathan Snowden wonders, as one of the greatest combat sports athletes of the last 50 years.
As UFC 205’s co-main event, newly crowned welterweight champion Tyron Woodley makes the first defense of his title against karate master Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson. The fight isn’t as high-profile as McGregor vs. Alvarez, but it’s a stylistic matchup that highlights the rapid evolution of MMA since it debuted in America in 1993.
When the Gracie family organized the first UFC events as glorified infomercials for their distinctive Brazilian jiu-jitsu system, it was specifically at the expense of traditional stand-up fighters like Thompson. The point of those early bouts, in fact, was for spectators to see Royce Gracie take down karate black belts, taekwondo fighters and Western boxers and choke them out.
Fast-forward to 2016, and Thompson—about as traditional a striker as you’ll find in the modern MMA landscape—seems poised to take the title. According to Odds Shark, he’s going off as a 2-1 favorite over Woodley, a former All-American wrestler from the University of Missouri.
If Thompson can pull off the victory, it should be marked as a sign of not only the caliber of athlete that MMA now draws but also of the unbelievable development and refinement of martial arts brought on by the sport’s popularity over the last two decades.
In the evening’s third championship bout, Joanna Jedrzejczyk puts her strawweight title on the line against fellow Polish fighter Karolina Kowalkiewicz.
Jedrzejczyk has been peerless since taking the UFC’s newest title from Carla Esparza in March 2015. She’s a minor star in the making, though in almost all ways, she projects a vastly different profile than women the fight company has heavily promoted to this point like Ronda Rousey or Paige VanZant.
Jedrzejczyk isn’t cut from the blond starlet mold. She’s not likely to show up on Dancing with the Stars or as the spokesperson for some fashion line. Her appeal is quirkier than that and, frankly, a lot more authentic.
She combines an offbeat style and innate charisma with a cold-blooded and technically splendid striking style. She’s the UFC champion most likely to calmly pick her opponent apart over five painful rounds and then post an Instagram pic of all the loot she picked up at the Disney Store the next day.
She’s a self-professed sneakerhead and cruiser bike aficionado, and during a recent media appearance before UFC 205, she summed up her appeal with self-deprecation that only further endeared her to hardcore MMA fans:
Whether or not she catches fire with more mainstream types remains to be seen, though having her on the UFC 205 card feels like a necessary nod to the UFC’s most ardent supporters—many of them are the people who kept the sport alive when politicians tried to kill it during the late 1990s.
All told, seven current or former champions will fight Saturday night. The UFC may well break the live gate record at Madison Square Garden as it solidifies what will turn out to be the most profitable year in the company’s history.
It will be the ceremonial cork-popping at the end of one of the UFC’s most protracted and toughest fights.
Barring any blown generators or high-profile draws, it will be the exact opposite of the last time the Octagon touched down in New York.
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