Media Which fighter made you a fan of MMA?

[Huligani]

Ken Shamrock

 

[Kryptt]

Royce but it goes back even further to Kung-Fu Theater, etc... if were talking foundations...

 

[Royce's Gi]

Now lets not start that lol.

i think he meant bruce lee got him into martial arts in general, which for sure he got millions of people worldwide into martial arts, including many mma greats.

If i hadn't seen any Bruce Lee-movies in the 70s, i don't think i even would have started training MA in the first place, which in turn made me interested in MMA

I would probably had focused on being a Lawyer or Doctor instead like my parents wanted

So Bruce was the catalyst for me:

70s
Bruce -> Traditional Martial Arts

80s
Trained TKD, Wing Tsun, Xin Na
Idols at this time were Jackie, Yuen Biao, Sammo, Wang-In-Sik, Benny the Jet Urquidez, Dennis Alexio, Chuck, Bill "Superfoot" Wallace, Jun Chong, James Lew, the Rhee Bros, Hwang Jang Lee, Grandmaster Heee Il Cho etc

Early 90s
Trained Wushu (Jet Li and Donnie Yen inspired me), Xin Na as well as Muay Thai but started gaining more interest in implementing Grappling at this stage.
Followed K-1 (and regular Muay Thai) alot and watched Crocop, Ignashov, Peter Aerts, Samart, Diamond Dekkers, Glaube, Cobal etc

Mid-Late 90s
Watched Pancrase and UFC and later Pride and was hooked, started implementing Wrestling and Jiu Jitsu in my repertoir.
Idols at this era were Shamrocks, Igor Vov, Sakuraba, Enson, Bas Rutten, Wand. (i'm sure i have forgotten a few)

 

[Steve Fox]

 

[FreddieRoachsVoice]

Ken Shamrock easily. The UFC tapes at the movie store were right next to the WWF tapes and it was a no brainer. War Shamrock forever.

 

[Tornikidou]

Of course everyone here is a master of the sport and nobody gonna say Conor.

 

[Sgt Smith]

 

[Bigboot]

1 Pride Shogun
2 Fedor
3 Chuck with that look in his eyes.

 

[n2xs4life]

I'm old......and I actually got turned onto PRIDE before UFC, so seeing CroCop, Wanderlei, Fedor, etc got me interested - and then watching mohawk'd out Chuck Liddell smashing people, that sealed it for me.It took me a little while to appreciate the nuances of the smaller fighters, the submission specialists, etc.
All I knew was guys like Tito that wanted to lay on you for 15 minutes, well, they sucked. Let's bang or see someone get tied into a pretzel.
I want to say I came along maybe somewhere around 2006, for reference.

 

[Hitdepruns]

One fight in particular: Randy Couture vs Pedro Rizzo.

 

[FloydMayweatherMMA]

There were two; Frye and Takayama.

Watching the fight now it looks fucken ridiculous and was probably staged, but to a twelve year old me who had only recently grown out of WWF, Frye looked like the baddest man on the planet, it was the craziest fight I'd ever seen, and I wanted to watch more of whatever the hell that was.

I got hooked on VHS tapes of PRIDE with my friends and have been the same way since. I miss the spectacle of old PRIDE events, but the standard of in-cage action is much higher now from a technique standpoint... mostly.

 

[Bowel-forged Stool]

My grandmother got my brother and I watching UFC 1 on vhs back in the day, which led to us getting in to tae kwon do. We did that for a few years until our chins were cracked and we grew into D minus level athletes, so we moved on to more mainstream sports. Well, fast forward to college, some buds of mine used to get together to watch pro wrastlin. That wasnt really my cup of tea since Kevin Nash destroyed my childhood by turning on Bill Goldberg, but one night the guys decide they want to watch Ken Shamrock fight for real instead, so I said I’m in! We didn’t know much about chins or primes, so we had all these crazy theories about how good this 40+ year old man might be after training ufc all through the 90s. We were shell shocked to see him beaten by Franklin, and everybody had such a good time with it that we all started getting together for UFCs. So I reckon really Shamrock..

TLDR: Shamrock coming back got me consistently watching

 

[SuperNerd]

Hughes vs Trigg

 

[Cptn1NSAN0]

Chuck Liddell

 

[Rank Squatter]

 

[DatSamboKid]

George St-Pierre

 

[Rank Squatter]

 

[FloydMayweatherMMA]

I didn’t particularly become a fan of the sport by Conor himself, but me and I know a lot of guys my age started to watch MMA around the time McGregor had a lot of success.

He for sure attracted a lot of eyeballs to the sport and he helped to lift it to the international level it’s on right now

Word. Watching Conor's rise up until the Mayweather fight got so many of my friends into MMA who previously hadn't given a fuck about any combat sports since pro wrestling. I found Sherdog through Conor articles hitting Google news and Facebook.

If nothing else, I feel like he bought a lot of attention to the sport, for better or worse.

 

[RemyR]

Randy Couture when he beat Belfort (the first time)

 

[Boomb]

Cro Cop