Bruce Buffer's "It's time!" is the line that tells a UFC crowd the main event is about to start, and it exists because Buffer couldn't legally use the much older catchphrase his half-brother Michael made famous in boxing. The two men built separate signature calls in separate sports, and together they turned fight announcing from a simple name-and-weight reading into a piece of theater the broadcast builds toward.
Before the Buffers, there was Rich Goins
UFC 1 didn't have an announcer tradition to protect, because it barely had an announcer. The November 1993 event in Denver used local ring announcer Rich Goins, known around the city as "The G-Man" after he'd spent 33 days living on a billboard during a Denver Broncos losing streak a few years earlier. Goins called the night the way a regional boxing or wrestling show would have — functional, not theatrical — and he returned for a handful of early UFC events as the promotion figured out what it wanted ring announcing to be.
Michael Buffer builds a catchphrase first
Long before his half-brother ever stepped into a cage, Michael Buffer was already boxing's best-known ring announcer, and by 1984 he had settled on the line that would define his career: "Let's get ready to rumble!" The phrase caught on across boxing broadcasts through the 1980s, and Buffer eventually secured a federal trademark on it in the early 1990s — one of the rare examples of a spoken catchphrase becoming protectable intellectual property. That trademark mattered later for a reason that had nothing to do with boxing.
Bruce Buffer needed his own line
Bruce Buffer and Michael Buffer are half-brothers who didn't grow up together and didn't meet until the late 1980s, when they were both adults. Michael became something like a mentor and business partner to Bruce, but when Bruce started working toward a full-time announcing role in the still-young UFC in the mid-1990s, he ran into the obvious problem: his brother's signature phrase was legally off-limits to him. Bruce made his UFC debut at UFC 8 in February 1996, calling the preliminary card, and worked his way into the promotion's sole full-time ring announcer role within a few events after that. Rather than borrow anything from Michael, he built his own two-word signature to open a main event: "It's time!" The line became distinctly his — and distinctly the UFC's — in a way "Let's get ready to rumble" never could be, precisely because it had to be original.
From a tagline to a ritual
What turned "It's time" into a ritual rather than just a catchphrase is repetition married to staging. Buffer doesn't say it cold — he builds to it with a rising delivery, timed to the moment the house lights come up and the camera finds him mid-Octagon, right before he introduces the two main-event fighters by record and nickname. Over three decades of UFC pay-per-views and fight nights, that structure became as recognizable as any walkout song: the crowd knows the line is coming, and the broadcast is built to let the moment breathe rather than talk over it. Buffer later used the phrase as the title of his own memoir, "It's Time! My 360° View of the UFC," underscoring how completely the line became his professional identity rather than just a piece of showmanship. On today's broadcasts he's introduced as the UFC's "Veteran Voice of the Octagon," a title that exists because there was, eventually, only one voice doing the job for every numbered event for decades.
Why the ritual matters beyond the words
The Buffer brothers' split — one trademarked phrase in boxing, one original phrase built around it in MMA — is a small case study in how combat sports built their own sense of occasion. A fight needs a referee, judges, and a bell or horn to function; it doesn't strictly need a signature announcing line. But the ritual does real work: it marks the exact moment a broadcast stops being a preview and becomes an event, and it gives a crowd a shared cue to get loud together. That's the same function other sports get from a national anthem or a tip-off horn, compressed into two words that one specific person made sure nobody else could legally claim.
The takeaway
"It's time" exists because a trademark forced a choice, and the choice happened to produce something better suited to the UFC than a borrowed boxing line ever would have been — a short, original cue that the broadcast could build an entire moment of silence and anticipation around. The next time you hear it before a main event, that two-word pause is doing the same job Rich Goins's straightforward announcing did back at UFC 1, just with thirty extra years of ritual built on top. For more on how the broadcast around that moment has changed, see the commentary booth, explained and fight-night walkouts explained.