Six seasons on, the show is averaging a respectable 1.1 percent share of viewers in its time slot, skewed heavily to the prized eighteen-to thirty-four-year-old-male demographic. “I call it the wwe–Vince McMahon theory,” says “Showdown” Joe Ferraro, host of a Toronto sports radio talk show dedicated to mma. “Every commercial, coming out of a break, you see an ad for a ufc pay-per-view. Then when you watch the pay-per-view, you see an ad for the reality show. It’s a mass-marketing machine.”

Pay-per-view revenue for ufc’s ten events in 2006 was $220 million (US), surpassing the takes of both boxing and wwe. Attendance is typically in the 15,000 to 20,000 range, and ufc is set to add Canada to its growing list of successful markets on April 19, when two-time welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre of Saint-Isidore, Quebec, headlines ufc 83 at the Bell Centre in Montreal. The event, which will take place before ufc’s largest-ever crowd, sold out in record time.

To many in this generation of TV-inspired fighters, though — and to the more informed of their fans — the rise of their syncretic sport represents not a triumph of marketing, but the fulfillment of a martial arts tradition that goes as far back as 648 BC, to pankration, a homoerotic mishmash of wrestling and boxing first staged at the xxxiii Olympiad. Pankration pitted nude, unarmed combatants against each other in no-holds-barred matches that lasted until someone submitted or was knocked out, severely injured, or killed.

Although we tend to think of fighting styles as originating in particular countries — boxing from England, karate from Japan, kick-boxing from Thailand, and so forth — in fact most began as hybrids. Karate, for instance, was systematized in Okinawa after its upper classes fused influences from elsewhere in East Asia with their own style, ti, in the late nineteenth century.

It was around the same time, on the heels of the age of imperialism, that martial arts began to cross-pollinate via the high seas. One of the first (and unlikeliest) amalgams was Bartitsu, the eponymous brainchild of Edward Barton-Wright, a British engineer who had worked in Japan. Barton-Wright devised his style as a way for London’s cheekier gentlemen to settle disputes with ruffians without having to remove their top hats. With roots in jiu-jitsu, stick fighting, and boxing, Bartitsu was popular enough for a time to turn up in the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Adventure of the Empty House,” in which Holmes vanquishes Moriarty using what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle erroneously describes as “baritsu.”

A more lasting example is judo. Rooted in Japanese jiu-jitsu (itself a seventeenth-century coinage covering a range of grappling styles), the style incorporated ideas from everywhere, including Western wrestling. It also became the basis for the first twentieth-century attempt to create a truly interdisciplinary combat system, sambo, which blended folk-wrestling styles from across the Soviet empire before being codified by the Red Army in 1938.

The direct progenitor of North American mma, however, is vale tudo (anything goes) competition, which began in Brazil in the 1920s. For decades, vale tudo was dominated by Rio de Janeiro’s Gracie family, which created and refined a style called Brazilian jiu-jitsu (bjj), a blend of Japanese jiu-jitsu and judo that emphasized joint locks and chokeholds. The Gracies brought their sport to North America in 1993, staging the first Ultimate Fighting Championship, a round-robin tournament without weight classes or time limits, in an eight-sided cage at an arena in Denver.

ufc 1 was promoted not as a showcase of a merged style, but rather as a way to settle the debate over which martial art was best — a meme that had gained traction among young North American males thanks to Bloodsport, the 1988 genre flick that brought Jean Claude van Damme to fame, and to the releases of the wildly popular arcade games Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, in 1991 and 1992, respectively. ufc’s first champion was Royce Gracie, who easily defeated bigger opponents with his bjj submissions. bjj soon became the base style of choice for most fighters, with other disciplines layered in to create the amorphous mixed martial art seen today.

As the 1990s progressed, ultimate fighting developed both a cult following and a seamy reputation, the latter owing in no small part to Arizona senator John McCain’s high-profile campaign to ban the sport in all fifty US states. The disrepute began to change in 2001, when the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts were established in New Jersey, the first of many jurisdictions to adopt them. Among other strictures, the Unified Rules prohibited thirty-one especially violent actions, including headbutting, eye gouging, and striking the groin, spine, or back of the head. This made the sport friendlier to advertisers and, crucially, to legislators.

Quebec was the first Canadian province to stage mma events. Initially, the athletic commission there was loath to endorse the sport, so starting in the mid-1990s First Nations reserves acted as hosts, at first illegally and then under an agreement with the provincial regulatory body. These events — and the financial windfalls they were reaping — paved the way for Quebec to start officially sanctioning fights in 1998. Municipalities in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia later followed.

In Canada’s largest and stodgiest province, meanwhile, mma remains illegal despite an abundance of top-notch pugilists such as Nick Denis. Debate has been rancorous, with advocates charging that Ken Hayashi, head of the Ontario Athletic Commission, is gumming up the legalization process because he’s biased against the sport’s violence. With Hayashi adamant that sanction is not forthcoming, a group of Ontario promoters decided late last year to follow the Quebec model of legalization, setting up the province’s first-ever “legal” mma event on the Six Nations reserve near Hamilton.

It’s a crisp Halloween morning in southwestern Ontario, three days away from the Rumble on the Rez. A few doors down from Crystal Wedding Chapel and Drive-Thru, in a strip mall in the heart of London, the Punishment Pound has been operating at near-capacity since 8:30 a.m. Chester Post, one of three members of the Pound, finished his shift on the loading dock at a heating and cooling supply company at 4 a.m., and now he is here, launching lumbering high-impact kicks at a heavy bag while Gaston Jarry, his teammate, wrestling coach, and boss on the dock, hugs it in place. The room, shared with a karate club, is littered with mats and pads. Long wooden bo staffs hang on a white wall embellished with painted belts and martial arts platitudes.