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Los Angeles, California "I knew once we got a TV deal, we would blow up. I knew we needed to just get it out there - thank God for reality TV."
Chuck Liddell – in a 2006 interview with HOFN.com It was sports and television history unfolding in our living rooms. It was the "Iceman," the "Natural," a tough-talking company president, the eye-spinning Willa Ford and 16 hopeful fighters with thoughts of stardom in their eyes. It was a gamble. It was a new brand of reality - bloody, brutal, wild and unflinching. It was as influential as a television show can be - changing pop culture, the world of sports and cable TV. On Jan. 17, 2005, "The Ultimate Fighter" premiered on Spike TV - and mixed martial arts was never the same again. "It was huge," says the aforementioned tough-talking UFC President Dana White of the reality show that featured 16 aspiring MMA fighters living and training together, while literally fighting boredom and each other for a UFC contract. "That was the show that started it all." Forrest Griffin's dream of Ultimate Fighting Championship glory began modestly enough. The fall of 2001 saw him lose his mixed martial arts debut to UFC Hall of Famer Dan "The Beast" Severn at a small show in his home state of Georgia. Just two years later - for all that Griffin aspired to make it into the burgeoning UFC - he had come to terms that his dream would remain just that. "I just kind of quit," Griffin recalls. A fight in Brazil saw him walk away with a victory and a broken arm just as well. With a 9-2 record and some quality wins, he was "out of the game."  Dana White and his partners at Zuffa resurrected the UFC and brought the sport of MMA to prominence. While Griffin was out of the game, White and the UFC were devising an all-new one. As White recalls, he and a slew of UFC staffers entered a room at 8 a.m. and emerged at 4 a.m. With their emergence, they had an idea that would take the UFC to the next level. There was just one little problem. "Everybody told us it would be impossible to get a television deal," says White, who had elicited the aid of reality TV guru Craig Piligian to get the show rolling. "Networks were fucking terrified of us." So White and the Fertitta Brothers, co-owners of the UFC, decided to take the biggest gamble in their Las Vegas-based organization's history. With stations worried about the controversy surrounding the violence of the sport, they would produce, finance and package the show themselves, hoping the whole time, at the conclusion of filming, one of the networks that had turned them down would see an ultimate deal in front of them. "It was a crazy fucking time," White says. "While we were shooting, we were never sure it would even see the air." The craziness began before the show even aired, when Griffin didn't show up. "He didn't show up," White remembers. "He had decided to be a police office in Georgia, have the white picket fence and all that. I talked Forrest Griffin into coming." Griffin did show up - had he not, who knows where the UFC or MMA would be. Chuck "The Iceman" Liddell, currently the most recognizable superstar in the sport, did as well. But even that came into question, when his then-manager advised him to hold out for more money. But Liddell didn't hesitate to join a project he knew would take the sport he would soon dominate into the mainstream. "That people could see what we do, that a network was going to show fights for free on television, seemed to be exactly what the sport needed to break through," Liddell writes in his autobiography "Iceman: My Fighting Life". "It was going to be important, and I didn't think I could miss out on it."
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