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Originally Posted by pornmasta
and what did he do to solve this issue ?
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I am not looking this up as i type to sound smart so i am probably not 100% accurate. but initially when the L.A. Gracie guy started it, the idea was "style vs style" and every martial artists dream to finally see every style against another. What happened was that apart from the few really cool and often brutal fights, Hoyce and others like Taktarov, Severinson and other grapplers made it really boring. Strikers didn't know how to grapple. Grapplers didn't know how to strike. There were no rules basically, no rounds, no weight classes, no mouth guards, no gloves and so on. When White and his partners bought it, they implemented a bunch of rules to insure the sport wouldn't get shut down right away as it seemed it would (safety related stuff - gloves, mouth guards, can't hit back of head, can't gouge eyes, destroy someones groin etc etc), they implemented rounds to stop the 25 minute rolling around on the ground stalemates, they created fight pay structures to reward exciting fights/fighters, knockouts and so on.
I don't remember specifics really. I just remember being super excited about it as i was completely obsessed with Karate at the time and owned a school and also thought it was awesome to finally put style vs style to finally shut everyone up about how awesome one style is against another. It was the first real, legit "lets see who is talking shit and who has a practical fighting style" type competition so it was a big deal to anyone who practiced any sort of martial art. I remember after the first 5-6 or so we lost interest and it was more or less just kinda boring to watch. Tons of crazy hype and goofy theatrics, then they usually turned out to be largely unskilled fighters doing little to nothing in the cage.. and grapplers taking it to the ground for long periods of time which was boring.