For a moment, Chris Weidman, the former UFC middleweight champion and native New Yorker, was at a loss for words. He was asked why it meant so much to him to be able to legally fight in a mixed martial arts match in New York.

After a stellar collegiate wrestling career at Hofstra, where he was a two-time All-American and placed third in the NCAA championships at 197 pounds as a senior in 2007, he became a professional MMA fighter in 2009.

He’s a New Yorker to the core, but a strange law signed in 1997 by then-New York Gov. George Pataki made Weidman’s chosen profession illegal in his home state.

As Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta slowly and methodically built the UFC into a power on the international sports landscape, one by one they successfully persuaded state legislatures across the country to legalize and agree to regulate the sport.

By the end of 2015, professional mixed martial arts was legal in every state but New York.

A bevy of past and present UFC stars – including Weidman, ex-lightweight champion Frankie Edgar, ex-light heavyweight champions Chuck Liddell and Jon Jones, and former women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey – made the trek to the state capitol in Albany to lobby state senators, assembly members and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The UFC held multiple events in Newark, N.J., which is part of the New York metropolitan area, but competing in New Jersey simply wasn’t the same.

What did it matter, Weidman was asked, if the fight was actually within the boundaries of New York state, when all of his friends and family who wanted to see a UFC fight in person could easily hop a train and catch a card in Newark?

“It’s home,” he said of New York, “and I didn’t want to feel that the job I had chosen and loved doing was a crime where I lived.”

Asked the same question, Edgar had a simple answer.

“It’s New York, man,” he said. “It’s the media capital of the world. It’s the sports capital. Think of the teams in New York that are known around the world. This is the most important city in the world. Being here gives us that stamp of approval that we’re big league, too.”

The UFC was sold in July for slightly more than $4 billion, which at the time made it the biggest sale in sports history.

Not surprisingly, the massive sale occurred slightly more than three months after New York was in the fold.

Following the card in Mexico City on Nov. 5, the UFC has now staged 376 events in 36 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and 21 countries on five continents.

Of all of those shows, only one – UFC 7 on Sept. 8, 1995, in Buffalo – was held in New York.

A second event, and a far richer and more hyped one, will be held Saturday in New York when UFC 205 takes place at Madison Square Garden.

For the first time in the promotion’s history, three title fights will be held on one card. Featherweight champion Conor McGregor will challenge champion Eddie Alvarez for the lightweight belt in the main event.

Welterweight champion Tyron Woodley will put his belt up against Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson, and rising female superstar Joanna Jedrzejczyk will defend her strawweight crown against Karolina Kowalkiewicz.

It is, only four months after UFC 200 in Las Vegas, being dubbed by some as the greatest card in the sport’s history, with big names and excellent matches up and down the lineup.

New York was critical to the long-term success of both the sport and the UFC. There remains a way to go to reach full public acceptance, and the UFC isn’t yet legal in France. Paris, the 20th largest city in the world by population, hasn’t ever hosted a show because of that ban, which is being pushed by its judo federation.

So the legalization of MMA in New York and the return of the UFC to the state for the first time in 21 years is not the be-all, end-all, even if it was a necessary and critical step.

The UFC was founded in 1993, and UFC 205 will be 23 years to the day since the first event was held at McNichols Arena in Denver. The proceeds from a successful pay-per-view comedy show by Andrew Dice Clay that was produced by Semaphore Entertainment Group essentially funded the founding of the UFC.

There was no such name as mixed martial arts in 1993, and in order to sell it, it needed a marketing guru to generate interest. Fortunately for what would eventually become MMA, Campbell McLaren was the man for the job.

Now the CEO of the fast-rising MMA promotion Combates America, McLaren was the executive producer for SEG’s early UFC shows. A man with a creative and brilliant marketing mind, he pushed the edginess of two men fighting in a cage with no rules.
He came up with slogans such as “Two men enter. One man leaves,” and “Banned in 49 states.”
That second slogan became bitterly ironic when Pataki signed the 1997 bill outlawing MMA in the state. Before long, it was accurate to say, “Legal in 49 states,” but with New York the lone holdout, it was a killer to progress.

In 2001, White and Fertitta purchased a foundering business for $2 million and set about rebuilding it. They were both longtime boxing fans, and as they began to tinker with their new purchase, they kept what they loved about boxing and eliminated what they thought were its problems from a business standpoint.

One of the problems boxing didn’t have, though, was being banned. When they started, MMA was either banned or not regulated in more states than where it was legally regulated.

As White crisscrossed the country preaching the gospel of MMA, he often spoke wistfully of New York, knowing its significance.

Eventually, major territories where the sport was banned were opened up, and the question always turned to what would happen about New York.
In 2006, the UFC made a bold hire, stealing the highly regarded Marc Ratner from the Nevada Athletic Commission and naming him senior vice president of government regulatory affairs.

His hiring was critical because he was the most well-known of all the athletic commission executive directors and was universally liked and respected. It was his job, essentially, to get the UFC legalized in all 50 states and throughout Canada.

The company began its official lobbying push in New York in December 2007, so it took more than eight years, with many twists and turns and unexpected battles along the way.

No one in 2007 could have predicted that the Las Vegas Culinary Union would become a powerful political force in keeping the sport from being legalized in New York. But because Fertitta’s Station Casinos were not unionized, the culinary union – with some 60,000 members – worked tirelessly against his efforts.

Ratner, who was inducted in the International Boxing Hall of Fame in June, was confident despite the numerous setbacks that New York would eventually legalize the sport.

Ratner is a placid man with a cheery attitude who never allowed himself to be angered by the inevitable ups and downs of the political process. It got agonizingly close several times, only to slip away at seemingly the last moment.

The discussion before the final vote in the state assembly in March was peppered with some odd exchanges.

Rep. Daniel J. O’Donnell, of New York’s 69th Assembly District, is openly gay. He had a bizarre description of the sport when he spoke against it on March 22, the day of its passage.

“I thought I should learn a little more about it,” O’Donnell said. “What is it? Well, I should really like it. You have two naked hot men rolling around on top of each other, trying to dominate each other. Just in case you don’t know, that’s gay porn with a different ending.”

Despite that short-sighted, myopic view and others similar to it, the bill passed by a 113-25 vote and Cuomo signed it into law in a ceremony at The Garden three weeks later.

For Ratner, it was always a matter of doing the legwork required. He had to convince legislators who knew nothing about the sport that it was safe and that its fighters weren’t bloodthirsty ballroom brawlers.

New York politicians expressed great concerns about the safety of the athletes. In the sport’s early days, McLaren’s marketing campaign played against that.
He wanted to create a mystical aura in which there was the sense that anything could happen. He noted that there were three ways in those days to win a UFC bout: by knockout, by submission and by death.
It wasn’t true, and no fighter has ever died in a UFC event, but it left Ratner with plenty of work to do persuading skeptical legislators.

“It was about education and talking to these people over and over again before it finally got to the point where they started realizing that it is a sport and it needed to be regulated,” Ratner said on a conference call after the Assembly’s vote to pass the bill.
The years of work and anticipation will come to fruition on Saturday on a night in which eight current or former champions will compete on a loaded card.

White has often spoken of his passion for fighting and said he believes that extends to most people. He famously gave a quote in 2010 in which he said he believed fighting is in our DNA.

“I don’t care what color you are, or what language you speak, or what country you live in, we’re all human beings and fighting’s in our DNA,” White said then. “We get it and we like it. Before a guy ever hit a ball with a bat, or a ball went through a hoop, there were two guys on this planet and somebody threw a punch, and anybody who was standing around was watching it. It translates across all different barriers, and this will be the biggest sport in the world. I guarantee it.”

Legalizing the sport in New York was critical if White’s dream was ever to come true.

It’s a long way from that now, but it’s a start.
And McGregor, who will headline the show and undoubtedly garner the most attention, set the atmosphere at the kickoff news conference in September.

He was overjoyed to be headlining the card, echoing the feelings of his peers, many of whom don’t agree with him on much of anything.

“Listen, the Irish, we built this damn town,” McGregor said. “I’m serious. We built this thing. Now I’m back. Now I’m coming to claim what’s ours. It’s an honor to be here. Coming in here listening to all these fans, it truly is a dream come true. I cannot wait to perform for you. I’m going to take out one of your own.

“I’m going to cash your own money, but make no mistake, it’s all love. The Irish love New York and I’m honored to be here.”