Next month will mark 25 years of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a quarter-century of major mixed martial arts in the U.S. There will be plenty of retrospectives, reviews and evaluations of everything that has taken place since that first night in Denver, back in a time when nobody knew what the hell to expect. Turns out, we still don’t. In some ways, the sport is far more refined and professional than it used to be. In others, it continues to devolve.
While the in-cage action has never been better, athletes have moved to extremes in promoting their careers, saying outlandish, even offensive things in hopes of pushing their careers forward.