IntroductionThree days after Christmas 2007, thousands of fans were at the Mandalay Bay Event Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, to see the Ultimate Fighting Championship top star, he Iceman�Chuck Liddell, square off with the fearsome xe Murderer�Wanderlei Silva. The crowd was loud and boisterous as the competitors stripped down and got on a scale. That right. These fans weren there for the fight; they were there for the weigh-ins. It was a clear signal of just how far the sport had come. Just ten years earlier, the ufc was lucky to draw a few thousand fans to backwater locations like Alabama and Mississippi. To make matters worse, it was banned from pay-per-view television nationwide. Even after the mega-rich Fertitta brothers bought the company in 2001, the ufc had come close to going under. A fortuitous cable television show called The Ultimate Fighter had given the promotion a new lease on life. Now the fledgling sport of mma was being hailed as the next big thing. Almost every news medium that mattered covered the story of the sport rise like a phoenix from extinction with various degrees of accuracy. The most important point was clear. mma was hot and ufc 79 was proof positive. Not only did the ufc sell out the arena and draw a gate of almost $5 million, they sold more than a thousand additional tickets to see the fight on closed-circuit television. can tell you the last time I was this excited for a fight,�ufc President Dana White said. It was a fight he had traveled around the globe to set up in 2003, entering Liddell in the Pride Middleweight Grand Prix, only to be bitterly disappointed when he5
