5 times UFC fans got roped into bad fights by good marketing
As the world’s biggest MMA promotion, the UFC is tremendous when it comes to making a big fight and building it up in the eyes of the fans. However, at times the organization is more than willing to build up a fight that isn’t quite as good as the marketing makes it out to be.
On numerous occasions, we’ve seen the UFC market bouts in a huge way, despite there being little chance of it delivering the goods inside the octagon.
Sometimes these kinds of fights are mismatches, and other times the fighters involved might be past their primes. Either way, the UFC has proven that they’re more than capable of sucking the fans in with their tremendous marketing, regardless of the eventual fight quality.
Here are five times that UFC fans got roped into a bad fight by good marketing:
#5. Tito Ortiz vs. Ken Shamrock – UFC 61
The likes of Dana White often suggest that the success of the UFC under the Zuffa umbrella was built on the back of the feud between Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock.
The two men had been sniping at each other since the 1990s, with a dislike built around Ortiz’s disrespect of two Shamrock-trained fighters – Jerry Bohlander and Guy Mezger. Zuffa were finally able to put the fight together in 2002 at UFC 40.
UFC 40 ended up being the promotion’s first big pay-per-view hit, and the fight turned Ortiz into a megastar as he dominated Shamrock en route to a third-round stoppage win. Basically, it was clear to anyone watching who the better fighter was.
Somehow, just over three years later, the UFC, Shamrock, and Ortiz were all able to convince fight fans that a rematch was necessary, despite the initial meeting being a thoroughly one-sided beatdown.
Shamrock managed to sell the fact that he had a serious knee injury coming into UFC 40. Despite turning 42 in February 2006, he had some fans believing that he stood a better chance against ‘The Huntington Beach Bad Boy’ the second time around.
The UFC used the third season of The Ultimate Fighter to build up to the fight, and the event they booked the rematch on – UFC 61 – ended up shattering the UFC’s pay-per-view buyrate record at the time, drawing 775k buys.
Ortiz unsurprisingly won the rematch, again in one-sided fashion, but a semi-controversial referee stoppage meant that, incredibly, there was a clamor for a third fight between the two. The UFC duly obliged – and another one-sided Ortiz beatdown managed to pop a huge TV rating three months later.