Hate is a strong word there. Let me just say this much: I'm not fond of how it started, or how it turned out.
--Ok, so honestly, in the lare 1980s and early 1990s, traditional martial arts like karate and aikido (and to be fair, Judo too), needed a counter balance. Somebody did need to show up and offer folks a reality check. But I really dislike the way the Gracies went about things--promoting their UFC and their jiu-jitsu style as if they were one and the same thing. Not to mention, hmm, let's see...early on...
1) You had athletes in a sport-style of jiu-jitsu picking random fights with relatively out-of-shape people. Non-athletes.
2) You had the early UFC take place in an unfamiliar "octagon" that is smaller than a mainstream boxing ring and padded quite heavily--definitely favoring grapplers from the get-go.
3) And more to the point...you never saw the early Gracies go after Judo people, or Russian Sombo people, or collegiate wrestlers--the folks who train in some sort of ground fighting on an alive basis, much as they do. It was always apples versus oranges--in fights designed to favor the orange. Never mind the more-than-regular encounters with rhubarb (your Tae Kwon Do and kempo folks and the like, who spent as much time in business seminars and in babysitting younger students as they did in training anything--if what's typical of schools now was also true back then). So to speak.
So in the early, first three years or so of the UFC, there was ample evidence to suggest that the game was soft-rigged. People weren't paid to lose, but the deck was severely stacked against them, and need I mention again, many of these early folk were casual or non-athletes fighting paid-for sport jiu-jitsu competitors. Have _you_ owned anyone from the NBA on a basketball court lately, Gentle Asker? Me neither.
--Here comes the punch line: And _Then_ Congress got a hold of it. I really don't like how this mess turned out either, after Congress got a hold of it to make this a "safe sport". Honestly, the Pride FC rules--which allowed knee drops and soccer kicks to grounded opponents--were much more realistic and actually made the fights a LOT less rigged in favor of the grapplers. A double-leg takedown only _looks_ invincible when the rules don't _Allow you_ to hit the guy coming in. Ditto with the 12-to-6 anti-elbow rule. Elbows are not easy to land anyway, and the Congressman who brought that one up based his judgement on a _breaking demonstration_. That wasn't the brightest idea--bricks don't routinely move, or hit back, and many breaking demos are rigged anyway (it's all in how you do it, and in how you prepare the materials....very few people actually do breaks the honest, correct way, against the grain anymore, and it's so rare many folks don't even know it).
In short: Congress overreacted to what they perceived as barbarism. They had no idea how dry, technical and bloodless actual grappling could be, or how rigged the thing already was in favor of groundfighting. Nobody anticipated "lay and pray" stalling tactics like what's rampant in the UFC now. Instead, people looked at boxing, at how people routinely beat each other's brains out, and based their decision-making on an amped up version of that, at best. If not complete ignorance at worst.
So yeah, Congress brought a bad punch-line to something that was already a bit of a joke. A well-paying, world-famous joke, but still...a joke. Some 90 percent of Randy Couture's wins would be disqualifications now--because he won them early on, and had the rules changed out from under him literally from one match to the next. Over half of the "illegal moves" that are in the UFC rulebook, and by default in the MMA rulebook here in the States, came about because of something Couture did to win. North-south (knees to face) ground and pound? Check. Open-handed strangles? Check.
Now don't get me wrong. I have nothing against grappling. I loved watching Olympic Judo and Greco-Roman wrestling, the real, competitive stuff, as a young man. But I don't like dishonesty, not when people insist they're clean and honest and "ultimate". I don't _hate_ anything about the UFC but the attitude--the "I'm better than all y'all" attitude.
It just makes me sad that well....the success of it all didn't actually do much to promote schools that teach real, practical skills. All it seems to do is feed itself as a sport promotion. And the egos of roughneck men of a certain, brash young age when they think their bodies are perfect.