TheSaviour Posted January 31, 2010 Posted January 31, 2010 Art Davie met Rorion Gracie in 1991 while researching martial arts for a marketing client. Gracie operated a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school in Torrance, California and the Gracie family had a long history of vale tudo matches—a precursor of mixed martial arts—in Brazil. Davie became Gracie's student. In 1992, inspired by the Gracies in Action video-series produced by the Gracies and featuring Gracie jiu-jitsu defeating various martial-arts masters, Davie proposed to Rorion Gracie and John Milius an eight-man, single-elimination tournament with a title of War of the Worlds. The tournament would feature martial artists from different disciplines facing each other in no holds barred combat to see which martial art was truly the best which replicated the excitement of the matches Davie saw on those videos. Milius, a noted film director and screenwriter, as well as a Gracie student, agreed to be the event's creative director. Davie drafted the business plan and twenty-eight investors contributed the initial capital to start WOW Promotions with the intent to develop the tournament into a television franchise. In 1993 WOW Promotions sought a television partner and approached pay-per-view producers TVKO (HBO), SET (Showtime) and the Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG). Both TVKO and SET declined, but SEG – a pioneer in pay-per-view television which had produced such off-beat events as a mixed-gender tennis match between Jimmy Connors and Martina Navratilova – became WOW's partner in May 1993. SEG contacted video and film art-director Jason Cusson to design the trademarked "Octagon", a signature piece for the event. SEG devised the name for the show as The "Ultimate Fighting Championship", and its debut was almost here. ============================= The Ultimate Fighting Championship to air on SEG Pay Per View Nevada, Friday, week 4, October 1993 Eight man single elimination tournament to crown "the Ultimate Fighter".. Masakatsu Funaki Vs Ron Van Clief Patrick Smith Vs Jason Delucia Royce Gracie Vs Teila Tuli Trent Jenkins Vs Kazuo Takahashi ==================== Funaki/Van Clief Vs Smith/Delucia Gracie/Tuli Vs Jenkins/Takahashi ==================== Tournament Final!
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