 How was the start of UFC a learning experience?
UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions. UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work. UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art.
 Assumptions about which fighting styles would be most beneficial in the real world were challenged
 The fighters learned the hard way that not restricting to one combat type was too dangerous  It turned out that new types of combat sports are not favored on network TV, and there was not enough of a following for it to ever be popular  Assumptions about which fighting styles would be most beneficial in the real world were challenged  It turned out that the octagonal style of the ring was much harder to fight in than the square of a boxing ring