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I had been watching since Royce was dominating, but Don Frye at UFC 8 was the first time I was like “Damn, I want to fight like that guy. I want to be like that guy!!!”.
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For me it was also Mo. But it was the Coleman fight. Which coincidentally was the first UFC I’d ever watched.
Royce…the friends I watched the fights with thought it was all fixed, we had no idea what he was even doing when he was lapel choking guys.
Seeing Royce outweighed badly and easily beating everyone while barely hurting them was completely mind blowing.
I remember watching UFC 2 with friends and going paint balling after. We were all just fired up in adrenaline. Haha it was surreal. The next day we rented UFC 3. We all hated Royce immediately and celebrated when he couldn’t continue. We wanted blood. Not hugging.
UFC 4 wasn’t available on video and it would be years before UFC 1 was. But I watched UFC 2/3 at least 20 times waiting for the UFC 5 ppv. By then we had all become huge Royce fans. We read about UFC 4 in blackbelt magazine but could not figure out what a triangle choke was (lord we tried. Every night was fighting in one friends basement, just cranking on each other trying to figure out the holds. So many sore necks from muscling chokes haha.)
When Severn ran through the competition we were even more in awe of Royce. Beating the Beast seemed an impossible task.
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Yup, and the Tito fight was the first time we’d seen someone gameplay a 5 round fight with the specific goal of dragging someone into later rounds where their cardio would fail them.
The Frank vs Tito fight to me was the gold standard for a decade+ afterwards of epic matches.
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Royce Gracie ufc 1
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Wanderlei in Pride. the crazy staredown, big stomps, wild flurries of punches, systematic knees to the face.
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Only stare down that comes close is usman/kahmzat
At the weigh in
Imo. Then chuck vs anyone or anything
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Another for me
Ya but I definitely didn’t hold it against him at the time. I’m not sure I even do now.
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Seeing Pat Smith turn Scott Morris’s face into hamburger meat with hellbows. We just turned on the PPV event and this was the first fight we saw (I hadn’t seen UFC 1). I couldn’t believe what I just witnessed. Smith looked like an absolute monster.
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How did that MMA fight with Mirko end?
Victor Gracie.
How is anyone even going to beat him?
Royce Gracie.
Ruas
Vitor
Also, honorable mention - Frank Shamrock. What he did to Kevin Jackson & Igor Zinoviev was crazy.
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Henzo Gracie doing diving takedowns and stomping on people’s necks after winning.
Royce was for real impressive but I think the first time I saw how actually incredible graplling was when Carlos Newton fought Dan Henderson. There was a scramble in there where Carlos does like a barrel roll and Dan is right there with him and both my mother and I were both like "did you see that?
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The first was a draw. It was under special rules.
Second was of course, a KO win for CroCop.
