Ultimate Fighting Becomes Huge Hit with Key Demo

The male 18-34 demographic is the Yeti of sports, an elusive, amorphous beast that marketers will go to great lengths to glimpse and then capture. There was an unlikely sighting April 15 in Anaheim as a capacity crowd of 17,000 fans -- most sufficiently old to vote, but insufficiently old to run for president -- packed the Arrowhead Pond for ... an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. The card, titled UFC 59: Reality Check, had the feel of a marriage (shotgun, to be sure) between a Vegas heavyweight fight and a Lollapalooza tour stop. Suffice it to say, the tattooed outnumbered the untattooed by a significant margin. "Maybe older people haven't even heard of UFC," says 27-year-old Andrei "the Pit Bull" Arlovski, a past heavyweight champ who was upset in Anaheim, felled by a series of punches from his 6-foot-8 opponent, Tim "the Maine-iac" Sylvia. "But people my age recognize me all the time."
The tableau in Anaheim was just the latest indication that however repugnant some may find it, UFC has entered the arena as a formidable sports property. The week before the fight, Spike TV's companion reality show, The Ultimate Fighter 3, drew record ratings for the network and, among the coveted 18-34 male demo, outdelivered the TNT NBA doubleheader and the USA Masters golf coverage that aired the same night. A Feb. 4 UFC card in Las Vegas sold out the MGM Grand and featured a celebrity row that included Charles Barkley, Cindy Crawford and, inevitably, Paris Hilton. That week, "UFC results" was the second most popular topic entered in the Yahoo! Search engine. The first was Super Bowl XL. Days after he defeated Arlovski, Sylvia threw out the first pitch at a Dodgers-Giants game. "It's a combination of the sport itself and personalities," says Dana White, UFC's 36-year-old president. "Young people see it on TV and they dig it. Boxing is your dad's sport. This is something way more exciting."
UFC is perhaps singularly well-suited to Generation Y, combining the brutality of video games with a rapid-fire pacing familiar to serial channel surfers. Unlike conventional boxing matches that routinely "go the distance," only to be determined by ringside judges, UFC fights tend to be swift and decisive, sometimes spanning no more than 30 seconds.