UFC: Bloody Good Show

July 09, 2009 In 1993 Dan "Punkass" Caldwell and Charles "Mask" Lewis, founders of the mixed martial arts clothing line Tapout, saw the first Ultimate Fighting Championship on PPV. The stuff in question was mixed martial arts, a full-contact sport in which fighters can use a variety of styles of combat -- from boxing to jujitsu to karate to nontraditional fighting techniques -- in an effort to knock out their opponent. Largely unregulated in its infancy, the event once called "human cockfighting" by Sen. John McCain has made checkered appearances in modern athletic history, but wasn't codified into a legalized sport until 2001, when Zuffa, the privately held company that owns UFC and its sister organization, World Extreme Cagefighting, acquired it and instituted state athletic commission-approved rules.

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