Bob Meyrowitz was a co-founder of the UFC back in 1993.
All these years later, Meyrowitz will be honored with an induction into the UFC Hall of Fame.
The event takes place next month during International Fight Week in Las Vegas, which all centers around UFC 200.
Meyrowitz worked in the music industry before joining Art Davie and Rorion Gracie in creating the UFC. He was part-owner from 1993-2001.
“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” he told UFC.com.
Asked if he regretted selling the UFC to Frank Fertitta III, Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White, Meyrowitz said, “No, I don’t.”
The Fertittas were willing to invest 40 million dollars into this. I don’t know if I had that money that I would have. And the Fertittas had an incredible passion for the sport. It is quite astounding what a brilliant job the Fertittas and Dana White have done. But we didn’t even know what we were creating, and it slowly kept taking form as you were watching it,” he said. “The entertainment business is the most honest business. Only the fans choose who’s a star. You can do whatever you think you can do, but you have to see what the fans like and then you have to give them their visibility and you have to give them their visibility so that they can work their stardom.
“The other thing that I say is that people don’t watch sports; people watch people. So when I created the UFC, I knew that we had people that no one knew. So we did a tournament. And looking back, it was not really fair to ask people to fight three times in one night, but the idea was that we started with eight guys nobody knew. By the end of the night, in one night, you knew the two final fighters and you had a rooting interest.”
