Evan Tanner

This sport is a young one. It is growing at a ridiculous pace. It has 'crossed over.' A nebulous term meaning that people with a lot of money have taken notice of it. We've has gone from no forward pass to the one bar face mask to the HGH era in the matter of a few years. Evan Tanner showed up when the sport was still in its Jim Thorpe phase. Tanner was a high school wrestler who taught himself submissions by watching video tapes. That was it. That was his pedigree. No black belts. No super death touches. No spinning head kicks. MMA is nothing if not a sport for pragmatists. It doesn't reward mystical beliefs. It doesn't reward fanciful notions. If you buy into something that doesn't work, you find out quickly and painfully. Evan Tanner taught himself how to fight by watching video tapes and messing around in the backyard. That took him to victories in heavyweight tournaments. That took him to winning tournaments in Japan and tussling with a 250 pound Heath Herring. That took him down to 185 pounds and a UFC championship. It is easy to lose track of how much this sport has changed so quickly. Preternatural athletes with world-class training camps have taken over the sport. That is okay, they deserve it. There isn't much space left for math teachers who practice with their buddies in the shed out back like Rich Franklin or guys who start their careers on a dare like Tanner did. I always saw him as getting into the NFL with a leather helmet.

Over and above that, Evan Tanner seemed to be a decent person. Not in a way that is palatable to most people though. He was a former champion who had to dig around in his beat up old car for change to buy a can of tuna because he had tried to win enough money to pay off his debts at the black jack table and lost it all. He was a guy who bought a boat so he could learn to sail and watched it sink in front of him. He was a guy who announced he was going to give up on alcohol and make a comeback and he did. Through all of that he was absolutely honest and shared his story. Sometimes you do your own thing and you sail the Kon-Tiki across the Pacific. Sometimes you do your own thing and you starve to death two miles upstream from a river crossing. There are plenty of people that will jump on Tanner and say that him dying from running out of gas and water in the desert was moronic and will point out every way he could have prevented it. I hope they have the fortune to pass-away quietly in old folk's homes. But some of them will die in car crashes because they made a wrong turn. Some will die because they never checked for cancer. Some will die because they fall off their roofs cleaning the gutters. Some will die because they went jogging and had heart attacks. They will never get that Evan Tanner did it the hard way because that was the way he had to do it. Because the world never left him feeling satisfied. That the pain and desperation he felt allowed him to feel the love and beauty that he tried to express. That teaching yourself how to fight off of video tapes and becoming the middle weight champion is a ridiculous proposition, but, sometimes, it happens.

Congratulations Evan, you did it up right. Hope you make it to the big Steve's Rib Shack in the sky.

Here is an additional story on Tanner that is pretty good.