UFC 31
UFC mixed martial arts event in 2001
UFC 31: Locked and Loaded was a mixed martial arts event held by the Ultimate Fighting Championship at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey on May 4, 2001. The event was seen live on pay-per-view in the United States, and later released on home video.
History
The card was headlined by a heavyweight title bout between Randy Couture and Pedro Rizzo. A welterweight title bout between Pat Miletich and Carlos Newton also occurred. The card featured the first appearance of future UFC Welterweight Champion Matt Serra, the professional debut of future multi-divisional UFC Champion B.J. Penn, and Kevin Randleman's first fight in Light Heavyweight.
UFC 31 again saw reformed weight classes, adopting the current standard under the new Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, set by the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board a month earlier in April 2001. Bantamweight was renamed Lightweight and raised from 150 to 155. Welterweights were now at 170, Middleweights at 185, and Light Heavyweights at 205.
Dana White has said on many occasions that this was one of the best fight cards ever mainly due to the main event and the bout between Matt Serra and Shonie Carter which involved the infamous backfist finish.
Results
Encyclopedia awards
The following fighters were honored in the October 2011 book titled UFC Encyclopedia.
“UFC 31” enters the record as uFC mixed martial arts event in 2001. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what mixed, martial and arts can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2063365. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “UFC 31” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.