'Is This Legal?' book excerpt: The frantic few minutes immediately after UFC 1

In his new book, “Is This Legal?,” UFC co-founder Art Davie (along co-author Sean Wheelock) recounts the very first UFC event. In an except he’s shared with MMAjunkie, Davie discusses the frantic few minutes immediately after the event.

While most fans have heard the stories and probably even watched the 1993 event, Davie takes us behind the scenes of the groundbreaking UFC 1 show for never-before-heard tales.

Davie and partners Campbell McLaren, Rorion Gracie and Bob Meyrowitz created what would ultimately become a sporting phenomenon in North America, but the first installment of the MMA series was anything but a cakewalk.

As they learned, broadcasting and cage announcing proved far more of an adventure they could’ve imagined, and then were the logistics of what to do with the UFC 1 cage once they were done with it. And heck, at first, Davie couldn’t even find that big $50,000 check for tournament winner Royce Gracie.

So check out this excerpt from Chapter 11 of “Is This Legal?,” which is now in bookstores:

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We’d had an oversized prop check in the amount of $50,000 created for the championship ceremony, which I was now supposed to present to Royce Gracie. But I couldn’t find that either.

I spotted Kathy Long, and yelled at her, “Where’s the fucking giant check?”

Calm and organized as always, she told me that it was backstage, and being brought out as we spoke.

Brian Kilmeade conducted the postfight interview with Royce, who said, “I’m just Royce, I’m always going to be. There’s no change in me, money or no money. I’m not here for the money, I’m here for the honor of the family.”

There was no doubt in my mind that he had indeed honored his family.

I handed Royce the huge check, and Rorion Gracie put the tournament winner medal around Royce’s neck. Surrounded by his dad and brothers, Royce finally allowed himself to smile –the first time that I had seen him do so all week.

Immediately afterwards, I walked back to the TV production truck to congratulate Pillot, Campbell McLaren and Mark Lucas. They seemed pretty happy, especially that we’d gone off the air in just under 1 hour, 55 minutes. Campbell said that this would make selling the rebroadcasts a lot easier for them. Michael Pillot wanted to tear down our beautifully constructed fighting area, and throw it away. He told me it was like a concert set, and that you always build a new one for the next show.

“Are you crazy?” I asked him. “Leave it to me, I already rented a storage place. We’re not throwing it away.”

I loved the job that Greg Harrison and Jason Cusson had done in creating it. It was perfect, and I thought it would be insane to go through the ordeal and the expense of building a new one.

Pillot, Lucas and Campbell all agreed that the commentators had a pretty rough night, especially our play-by-play man Bill Wallace. I knew that there were some awkward moments and gaffes from my constant trips back to the production truck, but I had no idea as to what extent, until they played back some clips for me.

Wallace opened the PPV broadcast in a very matter-of-fact tone with the words “Hello ladies and gentleman. You are about to see something that you have never seen before – “The Ultimate Fighting Challenge. Hello, I’m Bill Wallace and welcome to McNichols Arena.”

At this point he belched into the microphone, which made “McNichols Arena” sound like “Mcniquoolz Oreeda.”

Wallace then continued with, “excuse me, McNichols Arena in fabulous Denver, Colorado. Along with me is Jim Brown, and I’d like to introduce you to what is called the Ultimate Fighting Challenge.”

In his opening lines, Wallace had said the name of our event wrong – twice – and sounded like he almost threw up in his mouth, live on air.

And that set the precedent for Wallace’s night.

He gave a wide array of pronunciations – all wrong – for Teila Tuli and Gerard Gordeau. He consistently mispronounced Jimmerson as “Jimm-AH-son”, and Rosier (correctly Roe-zher) as “Roe-ZEER.” Ignoring the Portuguese pronunciation of Royce, in which the R is said like the English H, as in “Hoyce,” he called him Royce with a hard R – like Rolls Royce. He also referred to as him “Roy.”

Wallace didn’t fare much better with the names of his on-air colleagues, calling Rod Machado “Machacho,” Brian Kilmeade “Kilmore,” and Rich Goins “Ron” and “Rod.” Not once in the entire broadcast did he correctly refer to him as Rich.

Our tournament bracket was “the chart,” the instant replay was “the rematch,” our fighting area was “the octagonal octagon,” and our location in Denver was mentioned numerous times as being “a mile high up in the air,” as though we were floating around in that cloud city from “The Empire Strikes Back.”

And over the course of the broadcast, Wallace had these gems as well:

“Sumo is very formal, because it’s a very national sport of Japan.”

“You have a Kenpo stylist against basically a kickboxer that uses the boxing techniques along with the kicking techniques of taekwondo of kicking.”

“Pain hurts.”

“It kind of discomboberates you.”

“We’re having boxing who is basically at a disposition.”

“I’m an old person, if you want to wrestle we can wrestle.”

“Most fights do (end up on the ground) because you’re in a bar room and that bar’s kind of slippery with all that, with all that beer on the ground, and all that glass down there and everything.”

“The mouth is the dirtiest part of the human body. You wouldn’t think so but it is.”

“Now you’re going to think how maybe those kicking techniques can set up some grappling techniques, or maybe create the opening that you need for the, what you might call the kaboomer.”

“Most boxers when they enter the ring, they’re nice and wet already.”

And, “It’s kind of ironic that Royce Gracie’s going to wear his judo top.”

Of course it was not a “judo top” and there was nothing ironic about Royce wearing it.

I knew that we had thrown Wallace in the deep end of the pool by asking him to switch with Jim Brown, and move from color analyst to play-by-play. But he had been so incredibly arrogant from the moment he arrived in Denver: dismissing Gracie Jiu-Jitsu at their seminar, not doing his broadcast prep work, acting like a know-it-all, and generally taking a condescending attitude with everyone in sight. It was hard for me to have any sympathy.

I’d hoped that Kathy Long would give it back to Wallace all night on air, as an adversary or contrarian, but she was just kind of bland.

Kilmeade was absolutely clueless in his fighter interviews, asking questions that would have seemed inane coming from an 8-year-old.

Machado and Goins were decent, but both seemed nervous, and a bit overmatched.

For his part, our superstar Jim Brown had very little to say, especially anything of real substance.

But towards the very end of the show, Brown did utter something extremely profound, “What we’ve learned tonight is that fighting is not what we thought it was.”