Is This Legal? co-author Sean Wheelock talks about the birth of MMA.

Sean Wheelock remembers where he was November 12, 1993. Wheelock, then a 19-year-old fan of all things fighting, had seen a poster at the Westport Gold’s Gym, advertising the first Ultimate Fighting Championship pay-per-view. And he persuaded his mother to pay $14.95 so that he could watch.

“This was a huge unknown,” Wheelock says now. “I didn’t know one name on the poster. I didn’t recognize any of the sports. I just knew that it was a fighting event, and I hoped that it was real.”

Wheelock, who lives in Shawnee and is now the voice of Bellator MMA, still has a VHS recording of that night’s bill. And that’s fortunate because he has just co-written Art Davie’s memoir, Is This Legal? The Inside Story of the First UFC From the Man Who Created It.

Casual fans may not know the name Art Davie, something Wheelock readily admits (Davie, too). “If you said, ‘Who is the creator of the UFC?’ they would either say Dana White or the Gracie family. Who is this Art Davie guy?” Wheelock says.

The Pitch caught up with Wheelock to discuss how Is This Legal? and UFC came together.

The Pitch: How did you get the idea for the book?

Wheelock: A few years ago, I got into my head that I wanted to meet Art Davie. This would have been around ’08 or ’09. Nobody knew where to find him. With all humility, I’m a really good Google researcher. It took me about 10 minutes, and I found the number, called it, and Art Davie answered. I was like, “Hi, Mr. Davie, my name is Sean Wheelock. I’m an MMA commentator. I just wanted to let you know that you’re my hero.” And we hit it right off.

So, in the summer of 2011, I said, “Let’s just start getting you on tape. I don’t know what we’ll do with it yet.” I just thought it was fun, and he was having a blast telling these stories and reliving these memories. We decided a book was the right vehicle. As I figured it out, I was like, “Art, I think you’re the story here. Everybody who is anybody in the story here, you discovered. All roads lead back to you.”

One thing that struck me about this is the serendipity of it all. Davie moving to Torrance, California, not far from the Gracies. All of these players are there: John McCarthy, John Milius. But it’s still a struggle to pull it together.

The fact that there’s John Milius, a guy who was nominated for an Academy Award, and he’s just a student [at the Gracie Academy]. It’s total serendipity. You think if Art was in New York and not L.A., and he reads that Playboy article on the Gracies, maybe he does something, maybe he doesn’t. But he’s probably not going to take a six-hour flight. When it’s a 10-minute drive, he tracks them down. It’s total serendipity, and then one serendipitous moment after another.

Another striking thing was that Davie was still negotiating the PPV deal with SEG on the day of the event.

It’s almost like you bury your lead. “You what? Really? Are you teasing?” I got the whole story out of him. For some reason, in 20 years, that had kind of receded in his memory. What’s fresh in his mind is the struggle that he went through raising the money and finding the fighters. That was kind of an afterthought. That’s the whole linchpin of the book. It’s kind of like this ticking time bomb that’s going and going and going.

It seemed so fragile, and Davie is playing everyone against one another.

He was an advertising guy. He’s always trying to spin it to his best possible play. It was a total house of cards. I told Art that this was destined to fail. This wasn’t destined to succeed. It’s pretty amazing that it succeeded. All the way up until an hour and a half before the show, and you’re on the phone with Bob and David Meyrowitz.

It was a total game of chicken. Art is saying these Semaphore [Entertainment Group] guys have put up their reputation. They have all of these cable operators across the U.S. and Canada, and they’re going to kill their reputation. They’ve invested all of this time and money and flown out here, so they’re going to cave. And Bob and David Meyrowitz are saying, here’s this guy who has promised TV to his sponsors and his fighters — if he doesn’t cave, he’s dead in the pay-per-view industry because we’ll kill him. Art just held out longer. But they were driving 100 miles per hour headfirst at each other. It just happens that Meyrowitz swerved at the last second.

What was the one thing you learned that surprised you?

What shocked me was, the martial-arts community — the fight community — was against Art. Nobody wanted to be involved with this. The fear was that they were going to be exposed. And what is the legacy of mixed martial arts? It has shown in real fights which of the martial arts and combat sports work and which ones absolutely do not work. You’re not seeing a lot of hapkido guys or aikido guys or tae kwon do guys dominating MMA, right? You’re seeing jiujitsu, wrestling, kickboxing and muay Thai, and guys who learned how to box, and maybe some judo and some sambo thrown in.

But all of these mystical, Bloodsport martial arts — where are they? They were exposed. That, to me, is the real legacy of MMA — how it changed the culture from Karate Kid and Bloodsport and Kung Fu to what we know is really fighting now. Where is somebody landing all of the spinning back elbows and knocking people unconscious and giving the dim mak death touch and yanking their heart out of their chest and flying 40 feet? It was what works: a base with grappling and good fundamental striking, where you have to punch and kick and elbow.