The number within the name of this Saturday’s volatile MMA event, UFC 200, is big and round and glittery, but its significance is imprecise. The fight card in Las Vegas is not the 200th show in UFC’s history. The company attaches numbers to just its pay-per-views, so when you count all of the assorted fight nights on network and cable TV over the promotion’s two-decade history, this weekend’s fisticuffs will constitute its 363rd event.
Moreso than any landmark number, testimony to the growth of UFC can be found in the anticipation of Saturday night’s card despite a tumultuous week leading to it. On Wednesday night, Jon Jones, who had been scheduled to fight Daniel Cormier in the main event, was ruled ineligible because of a failed drug test.
Quickly, Anderson Silva was lined up to be Cormier’s opponent, meaning the card still will feature seven former UFC champions. And while the original co-main event — Brock Lesnar against Mark Hunt — was initially moved to top billing, the marquee was changed the next night to read “UFC 200: Miesha Tate vs. Amanda Nunes,” a nod to a defending champion and a feather in the cap of women’s MMA.
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“Tate is the woman who beat the woman who beat the woman,” said UFC President Dana White, referring to her bantamweight belt-winning victory in March over Holly Holm, who four months earlier had knocked out Ronda Rousey. “She’s the champ. What she accomplished a few fights ago, you can’t disrespect that. She should be the main event. She deserves that.”
Suffice to say that all the additions and subtractions did not do a number on UFC 200. The enterprise that began in 1993 as an unfettered testing ground to determine which martial arts discipline would prevail in a fight has become a sports juggernaut reportedly on the verge of selling to Chinese investors for $4.2 billion.
It can be argued that Lesnar is as responsible for that rise as anyone. The crossover star from professional wrestling, who also has credentials as a 2001 NCAA wrestling champion, was once the sport’s biggest attraction, both literally and figuratively. Within three fights of his 2008 UFC debut, Lesnar won the heavyweight belt, becoming the biggest champion in the biggest promotion in MMA. He was commonly acknowledged (and self-proclaimed) as the baddest man on the planet.
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But that was before multiple surgeries to address an intestinal illness slowed him down and abruptly halted his fighting career.
To put Lesnar’s absence from the octagon in perspective, here’s another number relevant to UFC 200: 1,653. That’s the amount of days it will have been, on Saturday, since Lesnar last stepped into the cage. It’s been just more than 41/2 years since the onetime leading man’s feeble swansong against Alistair Overeem, his second straight first-round TKO defeat.
But though diverticulitis took Lesnar out of the fight game, it didn’t take the fight out of Lesnar. He spent the past four years in the WWE, where the fighting is staged but the money is real, and the competitor in him was unfulfilled.
“It haunted me for a long time, so, well, what do you do?” said Lesnar, who turns 39 on Tuesday. “Here I am. Before it’s too late, I want to get back in the cage and have some fun with it. This is all about having fun.”
It’s debatable whether stepping into a cage with Hunt constitutes fun, especially for a ground fighter such as Lesnar. During his first stint in the UFC, he did not always react well when punches were aimed his way.
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And throwing punches is Hunt’s forte. Six of his seven UFC victories have come by knockout, and the former K-1 kickboxing world champion has authored those KO’s with style. He’s become known for the walk-off knockout — felling his foe with one punch, then turning and walking away in confidence that his job is done.
The high-level wrestler-versus-striker matchup will be an attention getter, which was the whole point of adding the fight to the card just weeks ago.
Lesnar brought a huge WWE fan base the first time he crossed over to MMA. Of the five UFC PPVs in which he fought in main events, four of them reportedly surpassed 1 million buys — they’re said to be four of the 10 top-selling PPVs in the company’s history. (The UFC does not reveal PPV numbers, but multiple outlets report on sales.) The 1.6 million households that watched Lesnar batter Frank Mir in the marquee fight at UFC 100 (the promotion’s 133rd card) in July 2009 remains the promotion’s high water mark.
Eventually, new stars have come along, most notably Rousey and Conor McGregor. But Rousey has not been heard from since she was upset last November. And while McGregor, the featherweight champ, originally was booked for the UFC 200 main event, the loquacious Irishman was pulled after he declined to travel to the United States for promotional appearances.
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Still, there will be significant glimmer shining forth on Saturday night in the UFC’s inaugural appearance at the new T-Mobile Arena.
In the main event, Tate will make the first defense of the title she won in March, stepping out from the shadows of Rousey and Holm and under the hot lights. Lesnar-Hunt will be an explosion, Cormier-Silva an unforeseen spectacle. And two of the card’s other ex-champs, former featherweight alpha male José Aldo and ex-lightweight belt holder Frankie Edgar, will collide to determine who’ll be McGregor’s next opponent in a sure-to-be-lucrative fight.
From top to bottom, the intrigue is an endorsement not just of Saturday night’s fighters but of the organization’s growth over the past two decades.
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