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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief The UFC has been through many ups and downs throughout it's 16 year history. From the beginnings of the sport as "anything goes, which style is better" contests, to the dark ages with little pay-per-view coverage to this booming mega sport garnering millions of dollars in live gates and pay-per-view buys, it's been a long road getting to UFC 100 on July 11th. With this series we will highlight many of the key numbered events, in chronological order, that have led to this historic pay-per-view card. New events will be covered daily as we come up on the July 11th event.
At UFC 100, Brock Lesnar and Frank Mir face off to unify the UFC Heavyweight and Interim Heavyweight Championships. This will not be the first time in UFC history that a championship needed to be unified after the creation of an Interim belt.
At UFC 44, Randy "The Natural" Couture met Tito Ortiz to determine the one and only Light Heavyweight Champion in Las Vegas on September 26th, 2003. The Interim belt was created after Ortiz was inactive for what was deemed a frustratingly long period of time due to injury and movie he was filming, and accusations that he was ducking the #1 contender Chuck Liddell were flying. Randy Couture had lost a Heavyweight Title bout to Ricco Rodriguez at UFC 39 and made the move to light heavyweight to face Liddell. Couture defeated Liddell in the first of what would become a trilogy of bouts at UFC 43 to set this unification fight up.
Ortiz was interviewed in multiple outlets in the buildup to this fight, including appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and did what Ortiz does best, trash talk. He would use a line that Brock Lesnar has been using recently about Frank Mir's Interim Title, calling it a "fake belt," to which Randy was quick to retort, seeing as he'd beaten the guy Ortiz was ducking for so long.
The bout would finally take place in September, with Randy outwrestling Tito for a full 25-minutes to become the Undisputed Light Heavyweight Champion. The crowd at the Mandalay Bay Events Center ate it up that night, though, especially in one of the most memorable closing scenes to a fight in UFC history with Randy turning Ortiz over to deliver a spanking to the brash young, now former, Champion. And that's not a figure of speech.
This card also featured two of the Heavyweight fighters that would become fixtures in the UFC Title picture for a couple of years in Andrei Arlovski and Tim Sylvia. Both picked up TKO victories in less than two minutes, but Sylvia's successful Heavyweight Title defense was marred by controversy when he tested positive for steroids following the bout. He was subsequently stripped of the Title and suspended, though due to the way the commission was set up at the time they did not have the power to overturn the bout, so it has remained as a win on his record.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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Frank Hyden - Rich Hansen
Chris Park - Matt Pelkey
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