I want to get one thing straight from the start: I’m not a fan of Forrest Griffin or Stephan Bonnar.
I’m not a fan of them individually as fighters, and I’m definitely not a fan of watching them two get together in the cage.
For that reason this article may contain a bias that I need to be upfront about.
Dana White is reported to have said The Ultimate Fighter 1 finale between Griffin and Bonnar was the most important fight in the UFC’s history.
I can’t find an actual quote of him saying that, so I’m taking all these “reported speech” quotes on face value. What can be confirmed, however, is that Spike TV in 2009 also voted the Griffin/Bonnar fight the greatest in the UFC’s history.
What made it so great? Well, for three rounds, the two fighters went at it with reckless abandon, throwing wild punches, kicks, knees and elbows. What they lacked in talent, they made up in heart.
Neither fighter landed any decisive shots, but they ended exhausted and cut and bruised, nonetheless.
And what’s more, that fight scored 3.3 million viewers for Spike TV, an unprecedented number for an event of this type. No wonder the network voted it the greatest fight in the UFC’s history.
It became the launchpad for the organization to do much bigger things. The UFC developed an expertise in hosting massive live events, and it would exploit this expertise in the Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz and Brock Lesnar fights to come later.
On the surface it would seem the UFC owes a great debt to Griffin and Bonnar—but that’s just the surface.
The The Ultimate Fighter 1 finale was the culmination of a 3.5-month reality TV show that aired on Spike TV between January and April 2005.
Reality TV is big business today, but in 2005, the format was just coming of age with shows like The Apprentice, Survivor and I’m A Celebrity cashing the biggest viewing figures.
The Ultimate Fighter was another one of these hit shows. What made it special was that it contained one of the most tantalizing and genuine rivalries in MMA at the time: Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell.
In their first fight, an aging Couture beat the then-fancied Liddell, causing a huge upset and winning the interim light-heavyweight championship. The win catapulted Couture to the status of an icon, as he became the face of MMA. The sport was already entering a golden age, as Couture would go on to defeat Tito Ortiz and Vitor Belfort—both huge names in their own right—before facing Liddell again.
In preparation of their second match, the UFC came up with a reality show spin: Make the two become coaches on the first season of The Ultimate Fighter and then have them fight for the belt at the end.
The move was a masterstroke. After The Ultimate Fighter had aired, Couture and Liddell 2 went down on the following weekend and clocked the highest-grossing live gate in the UFC’s history with $2,575,450 ticket sales.
There’s an argument that Griffin and Bonnar rode that wave, and the UFC owes a debt to a reality TV show and the Couture/Liddell legacy rather than those two fighters.
That’s admittedly a harsh view, and I’ll make the concession that, to the untrained viewer, the Griffin/Bonnar fight was a thrilling match. Two white guys slugging it out with tiny gloves like most people on TV had never seen before. It captivated and crowned the night in one of the most satisfying ways possible.
That’s still all it did, though. It promoted a reality TV show.
In the coming years, the show became a huge hit, and a cash cow, for the UFC. And yet even today, as it ever was, the series is a sideshow to what goes on in the UFC.
And with the reality format itself struggling now, The Ultimate Fighter is dying a slow death, churning out—with notable exceptions—mediocre stars.
And with that, with every year that passes, the Griffin/Bonnar fight fades further in the memory of having had the kind of significance it was once lauded with.
Looking back at the UFC today, neither fighter will be leaving much of a legacy, and neither will the fight they fought as part of a reality TV show.
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