UFC 100: 15 years later, let’s remember the event that flexed the muscles of MMA’s new power

The big guy slowly turned his head to look at me as I told him the news. I naively assumed he already knew. At this point he was all over the internet, or at least in the small MMA quadrant. News spread quickly that Frank Mir was officially out of the planned heavyweight title main event against Brock Lesnar at UFC 98.

But somehow no one had thought to tell Lesnar yet, so when I asked him what he thought of this new development, I was inadvertently breaking the news to him. Lesnar and his wife, Rena (better known to professional wrestling fans at the time as Sable), turned to me as if I were a bug that had just landed in their soup.

That was in March 2009. The big rematch with Mir was supposed to be in May. Lesnar came to Columbus, Ohio for the Arnold Classic in order to make a promotional appearance for a sponsor. I was there to do a story about him for a magazine and we didn’t get off to a good start. We had just met and here I was “lying” to him.

“No way,” Lesnar said after I showed him the online report on my phone. “I would have heard something.”

The next morning, when I met him for an interview over breakfast at his hotel, he had already done so. It was all true. Mir was out of the fight. Lesnar was discouraged. All the money he was going to make from that fight – and Lesnar loved money, insisting that there “wasn’t” enough money – and now he could only shake his head as it slipped through his enormous fingers.

What he couldn’t know was how everything would work out in the end. Extremely well, in fact. Like, he would soon become the headliner of the biggest-selling UFC event of all time up to that point. With him would come an unforgettable place in the history of MMA.

Today marks 15 years since UFC 100 took place at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas. He reportedly sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.6 million pay-per-view buys, raised over $5 million at the gate, and firmly established the UFC as a major sports organization that is definitely here to stay.

For many current MMA fans, this may seem like a given. It’s easy to look at today’s UFC and assume it’s always been like this, a fight promotion that was born full grown and in total command. But for anyone who lived through events like UFC 35 (the one where almost everyone got sick in Uncasville, Connecticut) or UFC 37.5 (the one the UFC organized in an attempt to get at least one fight on cable TV for the first time), no there was a guarantee that there would be a UFC 100.

This first centennial event was special for a few different reasons. On the one hand, there was the sheer star power of the thing. Lesnar and Mir in a heavyweight title rematch in the main event. Georges St-Pierre, welterweight champion and “pay-per-view king” of the UFC, defended his title against Thiago Alves in the co-main event. Then you had a supporting cast that included Dan Henderson creating his own logo with a brutal and frankly mean-spirited knockout of Michael Bisping, plus Yoshihiro Akiyama and Alan Belcher putting on a savage brawl, and Mark Coleman defeating Father Time in an unlikely victory. about the late Stephan Bonnar.

Just so you know how complicated the card was, Jon Jones fought in the preliminaries. There were live parties at Radio City Music Hall. It was the first true mega-event that the UFC held, a fight card that you simply couldn’t miss if you cared even a little about this sport.

That’s another thing that made UFC 100 special. For the first time, here was the UFC exerting all of its power. Five years earlier, you could barely find this sport. The UFC had no TV contract, no reality show. It held about five events a year, all pay-per-views that were considered a huge success if they reached 100,000 purchases.

But in the summer of 2009, the UFC was a giant. The centennial event felt like a celebration, like climbing to a high point only to look back at the desolate valley where you almost died of thirst.

The UFC celebrated not only with the event, but also with its first fan expo. These days, the buzz surrounding “international fight week” every summer in Las Vegas is only to be expected, but back then this was all new ground. Tens of thousands of people passed through a giant but somewhat claustrophobic convention center space in Mandalay Bay, shaking hands and taking photos with almost every important person in the MMA universe. Standing there among the sweaty bodies dressed in loud t-shirts and bedazzled jeans (2009 was a dark time for men’s fashion, I’m afraid) was to be reminded that this weird, strange sport had finally arrived – for better and for worse.

All of this combined to make the entire weekend an unmissable event for MMA fans. But on fight night, the two biggest pieces of it all were obviously St-Pierre and Lesnar.

St-Pierre became a bonafide superstar with the help of his rivalries with Matt Hughes and BJ Penn. The two were already big names in MMA when St-Pierre showed up, looking like a computer-generated model of the fighter of the future. He was an excellent athlete who combined kickboxing and karate tips with a dynamic submission game. When he suddenly learned how to fight out of nowhere, despite having no real experience doing so, he closed the door on an entire generation’s welterweight title hopes.

Whatever aspect of the sport you were best at – striking, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, it didn’t matter – St-Pierre always had at least two other areas in which he could beat you. he spent time in South Florida with Thiago Alves for a magazine profile. I remember sitting with him at his favorite Asian fusion restaurant (I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who enjoyed eating more than “The Pitbull”) and trying to ask, in the most polite way possible, where he felt he held an edge. about someone as complete as GSP.

Alves shrugged his shoulders as he explained that he wasn’t sure how he would beat St-Pierre for the title, but he was sure he would. So when he was hit by St-Pierre nearly a dozen times, one could see the change in his rapidly swelling face. His belief turned into hope. Hope diminished more and more each time he returned to his corner after another round.

(Meanwhile, in the other corner, St-Pierre was telling his trainer, Greg Jackson, that he had strained his groin. “I don’t care,” Jackson said. “This is where champions are made. Nothing matters now. Hit him with your crotch.”)

But for the masses, Lesnar was still the big appeal. A former WWE wrestler who spent some time in training camp with the Minnesota Vikings before deciding to commit (briefly but memorably) to MMA, Lesnar was a big deal in this sport the moment he showed up.

UFC 100 was Lesnar’s high point as a fighter, both athletically and financially. He would never again look as dominant in the cage as he did when he knocked Mir down and beat him like a caveman fighting for the last piece of mastodon meat. He would also never fight at a UFC event that sold more pay-per-views than this one – not even when he returned for the next centennial event, UFC 200.

As angry as he was about the cancellation of his UFC 98 fight (so, so angry), it ended up being the best thing that could have happened for all parties involved. Adding Lesnar to the top of UFC 100 made an already stacked pay-per-view seem even more massive. It brought the greatest possible prominence to all participants on the card, while at the same time allowing the UFC to showcase the full extent of the sporting power it had become.

It even gave Lesnar a huge audience for perhaps his most memorable interview. As the Las Vegas crowd booed him, Lesnar celebrated his victory over Mir by specifically stating that he would go home and drink a Coors Light – “That’s a Coors Light, because Bud Light won’t pay me anything.” -he celebrated with friends and family and added: “Hell, I might even be on top of my wife tonight.”

That, at least, earned him some applause before he rode off into the sunset. And how could he know then that, at least for him, and at least in this sport, it would never be much better than tonight?