UFC's milestone event shows how far sport has come

NEW YORK — Marc Ratner vividly remembers driving up to the Mandalay Bay Events Center on the Las Vegas Strip. It was late September 2001, and the longtime head of the Nevada State Athletic Commission couldn't believe what was unfolding.

Thousands of people had lined up more than an hour before the doors opened for UFC 33, the first mixed martial arts event ever sanctioned in his state.

"I'd never seen anything like that for boxing," Ratner recalls.

The sport was still years away from what it's become, a multibillion dollar industry with the Ultimate Fighting Championship carrying the banner. That first Las Vegas show was plagued by problems, including a fight card that went longer than the pay-per-view TV window. As a result, fans watching at home never saw the conclusion of the main event.

Still, Ratner — who later joined the UFC — could tell that brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta and a street-smart former boxing promoter named Dana White were on to something. Less than eight years later, the UFC was poised to stage the biggest, most lucrative event in its history: UFC 100 on Saturday night at the Mandalay Bay.

Once branded by John McCain as "human cockfighting" and banned from television, MMA is now sanctioned in every state with an athletic commission except New York. Tickets for Saturday night were snapped up in minutes, and some ringside seats were available on StubHub this week for $45,000 each. The UFC's pay-per-view audience surpassed boxing and World Wrestling Entertainment for the first time in 2006, and has been on top ever since.

The organization has expanded to England and Germany, and is poised to take on France and Australia next. There is a fever for it in Canada, and a palpable sense of momentum for a company that just five years ago was more than $40 million in debt.

"All the things going on right now, whether it's UFC 100 or going to Germany for the first time, it's really the way it's been for us the last nine years," White told The Associated Press recently. "The great thing about this sport, it transcends all cultural barriers, language barriers, because I don't care what language you speak, what color you are, what country you're from, at the end of the day we're all human beings. Fighting is in our DNA."

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The UFC began in 1993 as a tournament to crown the world's best fighting style, featuring everything from boxers to a sumo wrestler. There were no weight classes, gloves or rounds. There was no judging and virtually no rules. The only way to win was by knocking out your opponent or making them quit, which is precisely what a scrawny jiujitsu expert named Royce Gracie did.