I remember the first time I ever sat down to watch the UFC. I was in my first year of high school at the time and a friend of mine had a VHS tape that recorded the best fights in the first 3 shows that the UFC ever put out. The promoters came up with the idea of finding out: “What fighter had the best style?” At that time, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter were popular as video games and they basically did the same thing. What would happen in real life?
In the first ever pay-per-view, you had eight fighters, including a boxer that fought with one glove (seriously?), a sumo wrestler, a pit-fighter, a karate guy and a jiu-jitsu master in Royce Gracie. All of them had a distinct style and fought with only that style to see how they would fare inside of the cage.
Everyone was one-dimensional and Gracie’s jiu-jitsu proved to be the best style on that night and many nights in the future. The evolution of the sport of mixed martial arts was on. Anyone that wanted to fight had to learn jiu-jitsu as a starting point or as something to add to their repertoire.
As the sport grew, more styles became prominent and fighters learned to add aspects such as wrestling, ground-and-pound, submissions and pure boxing. All of these fighters in the middle stages of the evolution of the UFC still had a base-dimension that they had a ton of experience in. They had to add skill sets that they weren’t necessarily comfortable with in order to keep up.
However, over the last year or so, I believe we’ve started to see the next stage in the evolution in the sport of mixed martial arts. We’re starting to see the first set of fighters that have never trained in just one aspect, but have been groomed from day one to be MMA fighers and UFC World Champions.
Cain Velasquez got the trend started by going through the heavyweight division in order to set up a date with UFC Heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar. People were split when it came to picking a winner in that championship fight, but when it was all over, Velasquez laid a thunderous beating on Lesnar that he may never fully recover from.
Jon Jones continued the trend on Saturday night. Despite being only 23 years old and having faced limited competition in his young MMA career, the kind of destruction he unleashed on former champion Mauricio “Shogun” Rua was one of a kind and may have been the best performance ever seen in the octagon.
These two represent the future of the company and could find themselves at the top of the division for a long time. They also represent the next evolution of the sport. At a time, it was OK to be one-dimensional as long as you performed that skill-set really well. Then you had to be multi-dimensional. Now being multi-faceted isn’t even enough anymore. Jones and Velasquez represent the first that were born and bred to be UFC champions. They have the belts now. The question is: Who’s going to take them?