Harvey's "book report" on the Ultimate Fighting Championship

The favorite thing about creating and nurturing my characters is giving them what they need to expand them to the point of being realistic.  And where these features come from could literally be anywhere.

Harvey is one of my newer characters.  I immediately revealed a few things about him; among them, he was a wrestling star in his teenage years.  I had him reach the quarterfinals of the 165-pound class in the North Carolina high school state tournament.  (This is in the collage on the bottom right.)

Until a few years ago, there were few options for wrestlers once their high school - or for the best ones, college - career ends.  There's always the chance to go to the Olympics, but then what?  Real Pro Wrestling was an option, with freestyle wrestlers competing in a pro team franchise format, but it only lasted one season before it went away.  Of course, learning the choreographed style of professional wrestling is an option, but only those who are very big and who have the personality can succeed in the transition.

But in the last few years, another choice has emerged - mixed martial arts, and specifically the big dog of the industry, the Ultimate Fighting Championship.  Chuck Liddell and Brock Lesnar are probably the most famous of those who have made the transition from the mat to the octagon.

Harvey has a desire to one day compete in the UFC, but realizes that his full-time duties on the family farm will most certainly prevent that from happening.  Nonetheless, that hasn't stopped him from following the UFC and learning all he can about it.  Here's his all-too-brief history:

It's hard to believe how the Ultimate Fighting Championship started and how fast it has entered the public consciousness of sports fans.  When it began in 1993, it was literally style versus style in an eight-fighter tournament.  Royce Gracie, who helped invent Brazilian jiu-jitsu, was the first tournament winner.

Back then, there were no weight classes and very few rules.  It got so brutal that state regulators wouldn't allow the fights to happen, and television providers would not carry the pay-per-view.

What saved UFC were a few rules changes and a new and bold change in direction at the top.  First, by UFC 21 in 1996, weight classes were introduced and matches broken down into rounds, just like in boxing.  But the biggest move was when Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, two brothers who owned a Las Vegas casino, purchased UFC.  They then installed Dana White, a family friend, at its president.  The bald-headed Bostonian has since defined "tireless," spending every hour possible promoting the UFC and its fighters.

UFC not only attracted fighters with boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, jiu jitsu and other backgrounds that combined their skills to make an entirely new sport called mixed martial arts, they also attracted their fans.  Even the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, which had specialized in pro wrestling coverage, has covered UFC and other forms of MMA in depth over the last decade.

As UFC 200 approaches, the sport is one of the most-watched in the second tier in sports (that's the group behind the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball, and on par with NASCAR, the PGA Tour, and Major League Soccer).  For its cards, UFC can draw on a pool of some 600 fighters, men and women from all over the world and of all shapes and sizes.

And I firmly think UFC is here to stay - and I'm not alone!

(The files accompanying this article are screen grabs from a personal project in which I summarize all 199 of the numbered cards UFC has run so far.)

In upcoming, I will name Harvey's favorite moments and fighters from the UFC.