What is a myth? A simple definition would be a story handed down through history, usually via oral tradition, that explains or gives value to something. Typically myths concern the early history of a group of people or type of culture.
While we usually link myths with early civilisations, plenty of myths have sprung up from the sports world over the years, largely around the earliest days of those sports. MMA is no different.
As a relatively young sport that began in the early 1990’s – 1993 if you count from the first UFC, slightly earlier if you take Pancrase into account – many of MMA’s myths still resonate today as they concern fighters or personalities who are still well-known by the modern fan.
These are the stories that helped build the sport into what it is today, stories that were sometimes shocking, often times quite funny at the time, stories that have morphed slightly with each telling, as all of the best myths do.
Here are five of the best myths from the early days of MMA.
#1 Rickson Gracie in UFC 1
Practically every MMA fan knows how the UFC got started.
The original tournament in Denver, Colorado in 1993, Art Jimmerson and his one boxing glove, the first ever UFC fight that saw Gerard Gordeau kick Teila Tuli’s tooth out of his mouth, and of course, Royce Gracie easing his way through the field, submitting all three of his opponents and introducing the world to the idea that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and grappling might be the best way to win a “real” fight.
What a lot of people might not realise though is that the original UFC was actually set up by another member of the Gracie family – Royce’s brother, Rorion, and that there was a reason that Royce was chosen despite not being the best fighter in the family.
Prior to the advent of the UFC, the Gracie family were used to showing the dominance of their style, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, through the ‘Gracie Challenge’, which was basically an open challenge for any martial artist to face off with one of the Gracie family, and it usually ended in a Gracie win.
This had gone on for years in Brazil, some of the fights selling out soccer stadiums even, but in the US it hadn’t quite taken off. Rorion did manage to attract the attention of Playboy magazine, and they ran a feature on him and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.
Art Davie spotted the article and was intrigued and contacted Rorion, and from there the two marketed the ‘Gracies in Action’ videotapes for a while, before coming up with the idea of a tournament to find out which martial art would reign supreme – a basic smokescreen to show the dominance of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.
After being turned away by a number of promoters including HBO and Showtime, a deal was made between Rorion, Davie and the Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) to broadcast the tournament on pay-per-view. The board was in place, and now it was up to the founders to find the pieces – the fighters who would take place.
Davie wanted to bring in the very best fighters he could find – he didn’t necessarily care if a Gracie won the tournament – and so he brought in two kickboxers; Kevin Rosier and Patrick Smith (but only after Ernesto Hoost and Dennis Alexio turned the opportunity down).
A third kickboxer, Zane Frazier, came in due to his fame from beating up the inspiration for Van Damme’s Bloodsport movie, Frank Dux. Teila Tuli was a 400-lbs sumo wrestler and Gerard Gordeau a street fighter and bouncer from Holland.
Ken Shamrock came in from a stint as a shoot-style pro-wrestler in Japan, while the most important one of all was boxer Art Jimmerson, who apparently only agreed to do it for the money.
The final entrant was to be a Gracie, and surprisingly, Rorion chose not the obvious choice – the best fighter in the family, Rickson – but his brother Royce, a scrawny, unassuming-looking fighter in his jiu-jitsu gi.
So why not Rickson? There are a number of theories but the two that stand out are these. The first theory is that Rickson had opened a rival school in America to teach Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and so Rorion didn’t want to give him the publicity, but the second one is the more commonly told.
Rorion wanted to sell Gracie Jiu-Jitsu as a martial art that anyone could use and be effective with, and so the skinnier Royce sold that idea much better than the muscular Rickson, who looked like a pro-wrestler and was known for taking his opponents down, mounting them, punching until they gave their back and then choking them out.
To Rorion, that would’ve sold Rickson as an athlete rather than Gracie Jiu-Jitsu as a system, and that wasn’t the idea.
Rorion put his faith in Royce despite his brother not looking anything like what Joe Average would expect a dangerous fighter to look like, and naturally, his faith paid off. Royce submitted Jimmerson, Shamrock and Gordeau to win the first UFC and the rest is history.
#2 Rickson Gracie vs. Yoji Anjo
Yoji Anjo isn’t really a name that current MMA fans would recognise, and for good reason really. He had a cup of coffee with the UFC in the SEG era, losing to Tank Abbott, Murilo Bustamante and Matt Lindland, and his last appearance in the MMA ring came against the late Ryan Gracie in PRIDE, back in 2004.
Of course, there’s a reason PRIDE booked him against a Gracie, and that’s the story that forms the basis for this myth.
Anjo had risen to fame in Japan in the early 1990’s through the world of pro-wrestling. Initially coming from a background in legitimate martial arts – judo, sumo and Muay Thai – Anjo wrestled in the UWF promotion, which was well-known for shoot-style pro wrestling.
It had in fact been born when founder Akira Maeda decided to shoot on Japanese legend Riki Choshu, breaking his orbital bone with a kick to the face.
The wrestlers there were billed as the toughest fighters in the world, something that was exposed as a bit of a fraud when the UFC, and then promotions like Shooto, Pancrase and Vale Tudo Japan came along and introduced MMA.
The afore-mentioned Rickson Gracie had fought and won a really violent tournament under the Vale Tudo Japan banner in 1994, and so in order to try to re-establish their legitimacy, UWF offered him a great sum of money to do a pro-wrestling match with Nobuhiko Takada. Rickson declined and so the UWF got desperate.
Booker Yuki Miyato convinced Anjo to fly to America – on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack – and challenge Rickson to a fight in his Los Angeles dojo. The Japanese were so convinced that Anjo would win that they sent the Japanese media to film the whole deal.
The feeling was that confronted with the camera crews, as well as Anjo, Gracie would refuse to do the fight.
Unfortunately for the UWF, Rickson’s hunger for the fight had been sorely underestimated. Unfortunately for Anjo, so had his fighting skills. Reportedly, Anjo called Rickson a coward in front of his friends and family and asked him if he was ready. Rickson’s response? “I was born ready, motherf*****”.
The fight was naturally a squash, as Rickson took Anjo down, and as was customary for the Gracie champion, mounted him and beat the hell out of him with punches. Anjo refused to give up, so Rickson slapped on a rear naked choke and strangled him unconscious in the pool of his own blood.
Currently there seems to be no video footage of this confrontation but needless to say, if it had happened today it would’ve gone viral. Eventually, Takada did face off with Rickson – at the first PRIDE event – and the result was another Gracie win, but in terms of the myths of MMA, it’s the Anjo confrontation that resonates more.
#3 Tito Ortiz vs. Lee Murray
These days Lee Murray is better known for being one of the UK’s most notorious criminals – the mastermind behind the Securitas robbery in 2006 that was the largest robbery in British history.
His brief MMA career has mostly been forgotten, reduced to a cliff note due to his lone UFC fight – a win over Jorge Rivera via triangle armbar – and a pretty well-known fight with a pre-UFC Anderson Silva.
Despite this though, his name still turns heads in the MMA world today, perhaps due to one of MMA’s biggest myths that surrounds him – his street brawl with then-UFC Light-Heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz.
It was July 2002 and the UFC had travelled to the UK for the first time for UFC 38, taking place at London’s Royal Albert Hall with a main event of Matt Hughes vs. Carlos Newton for the Welterweight title. Naturally, though, all the UFC’s big stars of the time came over, including then-buddies Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell.
Murray, at the time, was making some waves on the UK scene and had been travelling to the US to train with Pat Miletich and his camp, which included fighters such as Hughes, fellow UFC champion Jens Pulver, and contenders like Tony Fryklund and Jeremy Horn.
The story goes something like this. Following an after-party following the UFC event, a number of fighters – the Miletich team including Murray and a couple of his friends, as well as Ortiz and Liddell – were waiting for a bus to take them back to their hotel. From there the story gets a little twisted, depending on who you hear it from, like the very best myths.
According to Matt Hughes, who retold the story in his book Made In America, the issue began when one of Tito’s friends jumped onto the back of Pat Miletich and pretended to slap a chokehold on him. Tony Fryklund, thinking Miletich was really being choked, stepped in and really DID choke Tito’s friend.
Miletich managed to pull Fryklund off, but Tito’s friend took exception and went for Fryklund, and one of Murray’s friends took exception to that and then all hell broke loose. Somehow this ended with Murray and Ortiz squaring up. Ortiz threw a punch that missed and Murray dropped him with a combination and then soccer kicked him in the head, Wanderlei-style.
Or so Matt Hughes says. And even his re-telling is via Pat Miletich, as Hughes – victorious over Newton that night – was in his hotel room at the time! To hear Tito tell the story, as in the video above, he only got dropped by Murray because he slipped due to wearing dress shoes.
The one funny part of the story that seems to be a constant in each re-telling is that a heavily drunk Chuck Liddell somehow got involved – possibly to defend Tito – and ended up KO’ing three or four men while leaning against a wall to keep himself vertical. Even if it’s not true, I wish it was!
Honestly, who knows what really happened? All parties were apparently drunk, the story has been re-told countless times via different people, and obviously it wasn’t in the UFC’s interest to confirm that their Champion was knocked out.
Clearly, something happened, though – Tony Fryklund was supposedly blacklisted from the UFC due to the incident and only fought there one more time as a late replacement, and Murray was signed by the UFC shortly after.
Rumours of Zuffa matching him and Ortiz flew around at the time but the fight never came around, largely due to Murray’s constant legal issues. Still, it’s a classic MMA myth and maybe my favourite of all.
#4 Krazy Horse vs. Wanderlei Silva
From one unsubstantiated confrontation/fight to another, we go to PRIDE in 2004 for a supposed brawl between the notorious Charles ‘Krazy Horse’ Bennett – like Lee Murray, no stranger to legal issues – and then-PRIDE champion Wanderlei Silva, some 50lbs heavier than Bennett.
Bennett had been brought into PRIDE to fight Takanori Gomi during his run as the Lightweight kingpin, largely on the strength of some entertaining fights in King of the Cage rather than his skills. The hope was that he might end up becoming a cult star in Japan in a fashion similar to Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson.
Bennett lost to Gomi, naturally, but he was brought back by PRIDE for a fight on New Year’s Eve 2004 against Japanese fighter Ken Kaneko. After beating Kaneko via armbar, Bennett was reportedly involved in a confrontation backstage with Brazil’s Chute Boxe team – not the type of guys to mess with.
Chute Boxe at the time were arguably the best team in Brazilian MMA, housing bad dudes like Wanderlei, Murilo ‘Ninja’ Rua, his brother Shogun, Assuerio Silva, Anderson Silva, and others. Their reputation was fearsome, with their sparring sessions apparently being as brutal as a lot of official MMA fights.
Not that it mattered to Krazy Horse.
What we do know – as it’s on tape and is linked at the top of this page – is that Bennett got into a brawl with Chute Boxe’s Cristiano Marcello, and the future UFC fighter put Krazy Horse to sleep with a triangle choke during the melee.
The rumour, however, was always that Krazy Horse actually got into a fight at some stage with Wanderlei Silva – supposedly after he’d come round after being choked by Marcello – and knocked the PRIDE champion out cold. It’s still Krazy Horse’s calling card to this day – after a win this past December, Bennett called Wanderlei out again.
Is there any truth to this myth? I’m not 100% sure. Firstly, you can see during the Marcello/Bennett clip that it’s during the Dan Henderson/Yuki Kondo fight from that show (Shockwave 2004) which means that if Wanderlei did get knocked out, he probably went out afterwards and fought MARK HUNT to a decision, which doesn’t make much sense.
Something clearly happened, though. One rumour I heard on mma.tv at the time was that Krazy Horse had knocked ‘Silva’ out, but it wasn’t Wanderlei and was actually Jean Silva, another Chute Boxe fighter. Who knows, though?
The myth persists today and if it is true, it must definitely be one that haunts a proud guy like Wanderlei Silva.
#5 Tank Abbott vs. Big John McCarthy
We go back to the early days of the UFC for our final myth.
Tank Abbott had made his name in the UFC as a tough street fighter. He’d come into the promotion at UFC 6 and immediately made a splash, knocking out John Matua and Paul Varelans violently before coming up short in the finals against Oleg Taktarov.
He went on to have infamous fights with the likes of Don Frye, Maurice Smith and Pedro Rizzo, but perhaps his most notorious moment came during his rivalry with iconic referee ‘Big’ John McCarthy.
McCarthy, for those who don’t know, isn’t just a referee. He’s 6’4”, 260lbs, a former LAPD officer and a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt under Rorion Gracie. Not the type of guy to be messed with, hence he’s such a legendary figure in the MMA world as one of the men who can separate the baddest men on the planet during a fight.
The incident between McCarthy and Tank Abbott purportedly started at UFC 8, which took place in Puerto Rico back in February 1996. Abbott wasn’t fighting at the event, but he was there as he was one of SEG’s favourite UFC personalities. Also attending the event was BJJ black belt Allan Goes, acting as a cornerman for a couple of the fighters.
Goes and Abbott had done some training together previously, and supposedly it hadn’t gone well for Abbott, who was trying to improve his jiu-jitsu game. Goes had told anyone that would listen that he’d handled Abbott in their sessions and Tank wasn’t impressed by this.
At UFC 8, when Abbott spotted Goes, egged on by his girlfriend, he apparently tried to confront him. This was of course during the period where the government were looking to shut the UFC down, and so the last thing they needed was a cage side brawl.
UFC officials stepped in and prevented the confrontation from escalating, and McCarthy’s wife Elaine who was also cage side admonished Abbott’s girlfriend for encouraging Tank. This caused Tank to turn on Elaine, threatening to kill her and according to most sources scaring the hell out of her.
McCarthy – who missed the whole incident as he was refereeing the Ken Shamrock/Kimo Leopoldo fight – found out later and was furious.
Then-UFC head honcho Bob Meyrowitz apparently said he thought McCarthy would genuinely kill Abbott if he could get to him, but thankfully Tank was nowhere to be seen; apparently he also had issues with Ken Shamrock’s Lion’s Den crew and decided too many people were after him.
McCarthy threatened to quit the UFC unless they got rid of Abbott, but faced with the prospect of losing their best referee and one of their poster-boys, SEG engineered another way out.
They suspended Abbott for a year and then had him write a letter of apology to Elaine McCarthy and the UFC for his part in the incident. The McCarthys accepted the apology, and the show went on.
What would’ve happened had Big John fought Tank? Who knows. We know that McCarthy is a big dude who can clearly handle himself, particularly on the ground, and he must’ve been seriously angry as his wife was threatened. But he wasn’t a pro-fighter, while Abbott was.
It might’ve been interesting, actually, but it’s probably better that it never happened. Still, it’s another classic myth from the early days of MMA.
Got any more myths you’re aware of? Please let me know!
Until next time....
Send us news tips at [email protected]
