Colorado history

Thursday, November 12, 2026

A night with almost no rules in Denver, a Golden kid who helped invent the modern beer can, and the Lakewood engineer who chased storms until one caught him.

UFC 1 opens at McNichols and Denver becomes the accidental birthplace of modern MMA

1993 · Denver

On November 12, 1993, the first Ultimate Fighting Championship is held at McNichols Sports Arena because Colorado has no state boxing commission to say no.

The advertising was not subtle. The poster said sumo versus kickboxing versus karate versus jiu-jitsu versus tae kwon do versus boxing versus savate versus shootfighting, and then asked who would be the ultimate fighter. The answer, it turned out, was a slender Brazilian in a gi named Royce Gracie who submitted three men in a single night and walked away with $50,000.

Colorado got the event because the state had no athletic commission with the power to stop it. There were almost no rules: no weight classes, no time limits worth mentioning, and the only real prohibitions were eye gouging, biting, and groin strikes. The first bout ended in 26 seconds when a Dutch kickboxer launched a head kick that sent a sumo wrestler’s tooth spinning across the canvas. Two more teeth ended up embedded in the kicker’s foot.

About 7,800 people showed up at the old Big Mac next to Mile High Stadium. Roughly 86,000 more paid to watch on pay-per-view. Neither of Denver’s daily newspapers sent a reporter. The whole thing was treated like a curiosity that would fade. It did not. The octagon that debuted that night is now the standard enclosure of a global sport, and Denver still gets credit for hosting the night the rules mostly went out the window.

Sources: Wikipedia: UFC 1 · Denver Public Library: Denver's Forgotten Role in the Birth of the UFC

Joseph Coors is born in Golden and grows up to help put the family brewery and a political movement on the map

1917 · Golden

Joseph Coors, grandson of the brewery’s founder, is born in Golden on November 12, 1917. He will later run the company, invent large-scale aluminum can recycling, and help found the Heritage Foundation.

Joe Coors arrived in Golden the same year the United States entered World War I. His grandfather Adolph had started the brewery in 1873; his father Adolph II ran it. Joe graduated from Cornell with a chemical engineering degree in 1939 and went to work in the porcelain side of the business that had kept the family afloat during Prohibition.

With his brother Bill, he refined the cold-filtered process that became the Coors signature and launched what is generally credited as America’s first large-scale aluminum can recycling program (you got a penny back). He served as president of the brewing company in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period that included a long, bitter strike and a subsequent union-decertification vote.

Outside the brewery he put money and energy into conservative causes. He helped start the Heritage Foundation with Paul Weyrich, served a term as a University of Colorado regent, and was a longtime supporter of Ronald Reagan. The man born in Golden on this date died in California in 2003 at 85. The brewery is still in Golden. The beer is still cold-filtered. The political arguments he helped underwrite are still with us.

Sources: Wikipedia: Joseph Coors

Tim Samaras is born in Lakewood and spends the next five decades trying to get instruments inside tornadoes

1957 · Lakewood

Engineer and storm chaser Tim Samaras is born in Lakewood on November 12, 1957. He designs probes that measure the inside of tornadoes and becomes one of the first chasers killed by one, in the 2013 El Reno storm.

Samaras first got interested in tornadoes at age six when he watched The Wizard of Oz with his mother. The tornado scene hooked him; the rest of the movie did not. He never earned a college degree, taught himself engineering, and built instruments out of whatever was handy. At twelve he was already an amateur radio operator constructing transmitters from old television sets.

In the late 1990s he founded TWISTEX and designed small, tough probes nicknamed turtles that he would place in the path of a tornado to record pressure drops, wind speeds, and video from inside the vortex. He appeared on the Discovery Channel series Storm Chasers and received multiple National Geographic grants. His work produced some of the first reliable measurements from inside a tornado, including a record pressure drop.

On May 31, 2013, near El Reno, Oklahoma, Samaras, his 24-year-old son Paul, and colleague Carl Young were overtaken by a multi-vortex tornado that was at times 2.6 miles wide. They became the first storm chasers known to be killed by a tornado. The man born in Lakewood on this date is remembered as the engineer who treated the most violent storms on Earth as a measurement problem.

Sources: Wikipedia: Tim Samaras