The ENTIRE History of the UFC

It's November 12, 1993, in McNichols Sports Arena in Denver. The lights go down, and where a basketball court should be, there's an eight-sided cage with no weight classes, no rounds and no judges. A sumo wrestler is about to fight a Dutch kickboxer, and a boxer is walking in with a glove on one hand. This is the complete story of the UFC. It starts decades earlier, with a Japanese judo master in Brazil, the Gracie family and their open challenge, and the vale tudo matches that led Rorion Gracie and Art Davie to pitch a tournament to a pay-per-view company. Then it follows Royce Gracie through the early tournaments, where a smaller man in a white gi beat bigger fighters on the ground. The film then shows how the sport changed as wrestlers learned the ground game and pure specialists disappeared. It covers the political backlash led by Senator John McCain, the states that banned it, the cable companies that dropped it, the Fertittas and Dana White, The Ultimate Fighting Championship's rebuilt rules and the sport today. The question running through it is simple. How does a one-night freak show sold on having no rules become a global sport with a rulebook, and how does a company that was banned and buried climb back up?