Grappling in the 2000s
Let’s take a trip down memory lane to my humble origins in wrestling and MMA. Here’s a throwback to 20 years ago to the mid-2000s when the UFC boomed, Nickleback was on the radio and AOL instant messenger was a thing.
Ah, the 2000s… emo bands and “crunk” hip-hop, cell phones without touch screens, and Mad Dog 20/20. Wikipedia describes the 2000s as the UFC’s “period of growth and expansion.” It was purchased by Zufa in 2001, The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) reality series launched, other organizations were absorbed, and notable fighters became household names like a real professional sports athletes.
To put the acceleration in perspective, UFC 100 took place in 2009. That’s 100 UFC events in ~20 years. In the 15 years since then there have been over 200 events. When I graduated high school in 2006 this hot new thing called a “Paleo Diet” (along with this chap named Robb Wolf), and something called “CrossFit” were all the rage.
I recall one fateful evening when the wrestling team was at a bar watching names like Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell, and Tito Ortiz, when someone stood over our table and yelled “fuck you Matt Hughes!” Things did not go well for that gentleman thereafter. What an eventful evening to never be captured on camera or posted on TikTok.
Going all the way back to my roots then, I didn’t start wrestling until I was a sophomore in high school; late. I had a decent record and was captain my senior year when we won the conference and regional title for the first time in school history.
I went on to wrestle half of one season at a very small Division III school before breaking my hand, and then the program was cut as part of Title IX. For the sake of brevity I’ll skip over the following three years of drinking, drugs, fast food, and bad decisions. Suffice to say that when I graduated in 2010, I knew things needed to change.
So, I did the most rational thing a broke, unemployed, former college wrestler living with his parents could do — I signed up at an MMA gym! As a bonus, I mopped mats and donated plasma to make my dues, hiding the bandage under my gi because of course I “wasn’t supposed to exercise for the rest of the day.” Fun times.
In his book “Scars and Stripes” — which I highly recommend (!) — Tim Kennedy talks about meeting Chuck Liddell for the first time and there being blood on the walls and puke on the floor at the gym. The first gym I trained at wasn’t quite like that, but it was definitely trial by fire. Of course, once you were in, you’re family for life… kind of like the mafia.
On any given Saturday’s sparring session, it was 12 rounds (always), and it wasn’t uncommon for names like Dan Hornbuckle (Bellator) and Kyle Watson (UFC) to travel through. The gym has grown quite a bit since then, but I still train there if I’m in town for the holidays.
What do you do when you’re a restless 23-year-old with a promising semi-pro fight career in a small city? Get in to lots of trouble, that’s what! Again, I’ll let Tim’s stories (link above) enchant you because he describes the era pretty well.
If you couldn’t tell from the promo-poster above, we still fought at bars in those days. There were no arenas. The event was in my hometown and my parents didn’t support me fighting, so they didn’t come watch. I didn’t even get a free beer, a fan bought it for me. They even botched my walkout music and spelled my name wrong on the DVD recording of the event.
I went on to compete in boxing and obviously multiple BJJ tournaments, but even those feel like a lifetime ago. The “closest” event we could attend was 3 hours away in Chicago, once or twice per year. I don’t thing IBJJF Opens were even in St. Louis yet at that time.
Google Maps was a “new” thing(!) and I kept records of my wins and losses in a spreadsheet because SmoothComp didn’t exist either. I forgot to mention that this was all as a white belt, before turning 25!
That photo above was taken a couple months after I moved to Georgia in the late summer of 2012. The next “era” of my Earth-time was marked by a lot more climbing than grappling, until I eventually left (and found myself at) the crag and returned to grappling in January of 2019.
If you dig deep through the archives of this site you can still find an article or two I wrote about climbing and various mis-adventures on the road. You can take the cowboy out of the rodeo, but you can’t take the rodeo out of the cowboy.
The rest, as they say, is history.
