UFC founder Art Davie revealed that he had one particular match in mind for the earliest days of the world’s biggest MMA promotion, as he wanted to get Aleksandr Karelin to fight against Rickson Gracie. It would undoubtedly have been the biggest match in the MMA world at the time and if he had managed to pull it off, it would probably have gone down in history as the biggest crossover fight of all time. Back in the early days of the UFC, Rickson was a legendary figure in the Vale Tudo world and Karelin was right in the middle of his incredible wrestling career.
According to Davie, the whole idea from the matchup came from a sparring match that took place between Rickson and Mark Schultz. Although Schultz would go on to have a short but impressive MMA career of his own, this sparring match took place before UFC 1. Davie got the opportunity to see the footage of that meeting and it inspired him:
“I watched the tape for 25 minutes. It took Rickson 20 minutes to get Mark’s arm and make him tap. For me it was like ‘wow!’ I went ‘oh my god, the guys I’ve gotta get to this event eventually are the wrestlers.’ They maybe don’t know all the holds and the chokes… but they know how to do a single-leg and a double-leg takedown, they understand that grappling. Watching that video was a revelation to me.”
Although a sparring match between the two might seem hard to believe at first, Rickson himself actually said that Schultz was the toughest person he ever rolled with. Although Schultz was an incredibly successful and decorated wrestler in his own right, Davie set his sights even higher:
“The guy that I wanted to get was (Aleksandr) Karelin from Russia.”
It seemed like a great idea at first, but Davie was quickly told otherwise:
”You don’t have enough money to get Karelin out of Russia… you’d have better luck getting Mike Tyson out of jail.”
The match between Aleksandr Karelin and Rickson Gracie never came to fruition of course, but Davie wasn’t the only one who was eager to make it happen back then:
“When I brought up Karelin to Rorion (Gracie), that was the only time that Rorion said to me ‘if you ever get Karelin, I’ll make sure that Rickson fights.’ Isn’t that interesting?!”
The full interview with Art Davie where he reveals his plan for a fight between Aleksandr Karelin and Rickson Gracie was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of the Lytes Out MMA Podcast.
https://youtu.be/pX1OA7Bjr1k?si=BuCHsu4Am8q8yy6S
