Your Age At UFC 1, When & Why You Started Watching MMA

CorpseApathy

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Writing a paper on MMA for my return to college, any feedback is appreciated, and might make it into the final draft.

I was 12 when the UFC debuted, but didn't started watching until I was maybe 14-15 years old. I used to ride my bicycle to the local, "16, 000 Movies" store to rent the events on VHS, a franchise that was eventually purchased by Blockbuster.

I had taken Shotokan Karate, and was taking Tae Kwon Do when I started watching. Like most fans back then, I had never seen any real NHB or Vale Tudo style competitions, but a lot of boxing and other TMAs.

It was more than just watching a bloodsport, (although that was definitely part of it) but I was also interested in seeing how all these martial arts and their practitioners would stack against each other. Watching Gracie tie up all these larger, tough fighters showed me how easy it could be to neutralize years of training, rendering all that work basically useless.

Watching the sport evolve from it's infancy has helped tremendously in understanding the sport as it exists today.
 
I had almost same story as you except I attempted to watch UFC 1 as a kid live sort of like how i tried to watch the Spice channel back in the day. I gave up and found out a skinny jujitsu guy won the thing. I then got a hold of UFC 1 and then watch the next few live via a friends pirate box. I stopped watching during the dark days of the late 90s when it got banned and then got a Japanese bootleg tape of Pride Grand Prix in 2000 so I could watch Gracie vs Sakuraba(I got the tape because I heard Gracie lost a fight and had to see it). That was my intro to Pride and then I started back into MMA.
 
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would have been 8 when the UFC first started.

First UFC I ever saw was UFC 27. Saw a news piece about the UFC on a tv show about the business of sport. Perked my interest.
 
I was 10, and i never got to watch them live, but i lived by a pizza place that rented movies and my grandpaw would rent them for me. I never studied martial arts but i loved mortal kombat, street fighter, and bloodsport. So the idea of different disciplines going up against each other was always intriguing to me. UFC 8 is the first event i actually remember watching, its still to this day one of my favorite events.
 
I was 1 when UFC 1 happened and got into mma in 2005 when Fight Network was created.
 
I was 18 and had just graduated HS. My cousin was telling me about the Gracie family and this new “real fighting tournament”. It was a few months after that and I saw UFC 2 at the video store so I rented it. I was hooked immediately and began talking it up to all my friends and having them watch too.
 
my uncle got me into mma .... i was 7 in 1994 and we watched ufc (not live it was in latin america)... we kept on watching more events until they stopped broadcasting them totally and we switched to wwe. Many years later i moved to us and one day i watched the second or third episode of tuf 1 and the rest is history. I began to learn about what happened in those 10 years ... i didnt know about pride, fedor, crocop, chuck, randy, hughes , penn , etc....
 
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Thank you everyone for your replies so far, ya'll are awesome.
 
I was 1 at UFC 1.

I was 1 when UFC 1 happened
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On November 12th, 1993 I was 9 years old. I started watching around UFC 50/PRIDE 28, so 2004. As for why, my friends and I were students who were looking for something to watch in the evenings while getting high.
 
I was 10. And I started watching MMA regularly about 2007 because of how rapidly boxing was declining and the cards has gotten awful and boring. WEC hooked me. I had watched some big UFC cards in the early 2000s before that, with Tito and Liddell etc... Just didn't watch regularly until then. I was a big boxing fan from the late 90s to the late 2000s.
 
I was born about a month after UFC 1. Been a boxing fan for years, heard about this McGregor kid having great boxing in some European scene, followed him in his MMA journey and have grown to be an avid fan of the UFC.
 
Writing a paper on MMA for my return to college, any feedback is appreciated, and might make it into the final draft.

I was 12 when the UFC debuted, but didn't started watching until I was maybe 14-15 years old. I used to ride my bicycle to the local, "16, 000 Movies" store to rent the events on VHS, a franchise that was eventually purchased by Blockbuster.

I had taken Shotokan Karate, and was taking Tae Kwon Do when I started watching. Like most fans back then, I had never seen any real NHB or Vale Tudo style competitions, but a lot of boxing and other TMAs.

It was more than just watching a bloodsport, (although that was definitely part of it) but I was also interested in seeing how all these martial arts and their practitioners would stack against each other. Watching Gracie tie up all these larger, tough fighters showed me how easy it could be to neutralize years of training, rendering all that work basically useless.

Watching the sport evolve from it's infancy has helped tremendously in understanding the sport as it exists today.
I was 5. I started watching because I'm a white male and the ufc markets towards me. NOT. I just like the fight game. Always had an interest in boxing and combat sports
 
I was 2 months old... I knew the main guys growing up in the ufc cuz of the video games... some of my friends were into it and I watched the TUF and few free fights on tv but was a casual I never watched a PPV... I was listening to ESPN radio and Chael was hyping up this dude named Conor McGregor so I watched his next fight vs Dennis Siver and he got me as a fan... followed casually and then watched my first PPV UFC 189 and was hooked and been following and watching every single fight since.
 
I was about in Grade 1 to 3 the moment I saw UFC with Shamrock and Gracie and find it too violent, then I switch back to WWE (WWF then).

The moment I realized WWE is fake and experience the Ortiz-Shamrock era I got hooked, especially the Liddell and PRIDE (because of K-1 Crocop)...
 
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