A movie waiting to be made

Evan Tanner was probably few MMA fans’ favourite fighter. Not in a Tim Sylvia sort of way. Tanner just registered on a different level. He fought hard, sure, and he fought well, winning the middleweight belt at UFC 51. He also fought like it was a job, didn’t take his natural talents seriously, was a flake, or so it seemed.

But after reading Matthew Teague’s story about Tanner’s life and death in last January’s issue of Men’s Journal, I realize how amazing Tanner was, so driven, self-destructive, haunted by demons – tests, he called them – that he tried to punch away, drink away and run away from.

If Hollywood were to make a movie about MMA, about the UFC, a serious movie that explored the drama of being a fighter, the humanity, the toughness, the frailty, the tragedy, not just the punches and kicks and chokes and super-slo-mo’ed action replays, they couldn’t invent a character like Tanner.

Tanner rose and fell and walked away and rose again in his 37 years before walking into the woods on some mountainside, some sort of vision quest or search for inner peace, and he died. He was a bullied kid from a broken home, a savant at wrestling, a genius student with a photographic memory who made the dean’s list and just walked away before med school, a drifter, a gypsy, a drinker, a brawler, a monk, a philosopher, a searcher for answers and higher truths and inner peace and human kindness. The movie of his life, so filled with drama and pathos, it would be Rocky meets Into The Wild and Bloodsport and The Wrestler and Rain Man and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance and Leaving Las Vegas. I’d buy my ticket to see that today. I wonder who they’d cast? Who would you cast? If only Mickey Rourke were 15 years younger.

Here are a few choice excerpts from Teague’s story, but by all means, click the link and read the whole thing for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

Encouraged, Tanner bought a videotape about grappling that featured the famous Gracie family of Brazilian jiu-jitsu masters. He lived alone in a cabin in a Texas wasteland at the time, so remote that he powered his VCR with a generator. People laughed — what sort of rube teaches himself to fight by mail order? — but Tanner absorbed the leverage, the pressure, the physics of it all, just by seeing it done. Then he proceeded to lay waste to anyone who stepped up to meet him, working his way in one year from Amarillo to Japan, where he manhandled the Japanese in something called the Neo Blood Tournament.

He only needed one thing as a fighter: better opponents.

Tanner arrived at the UFC in 1999, at a time when it was trying to rehabilitate its underground image, and he couldn’t have been better suited for it. Here came a handsome, articulate young Texan who looked like an athlete, not a street fighter.

Tanner thrived at the UFC over the next few years, bringing his professional record to 30–4, and in 2005 he gained a shot at the world middleweight title. He fought as an underdog against David Terrell, who early in the match placed Tanner in a painful “guillotine” choke. Tanner managed to escape, climbed atop Terrell, and pounded him until the referee called the fight for Tanner.

He was a world champion now living under the bright lights of Vegas, but none of it mattered to him. Ian Dawe, a Canadian fighter and friend who at one point lived for three months with Tanner, arrived to discover him living a monastic lifestyle in the heart of Sin City. Tanner had a one-bedroom apartment with one mattress — minus the frame — for himself and a futon for visitors, one plastic plate and cup for each, and a pile of books.

“He knew I wanted to see the glamour side of Vegas,” Dawe says, “so one night when he was invited to a party at the top of the Palms, he went so I could have a look.” There the young Canadian stared at UFC superstar Tito Ortiz, porn star Jenna Jameson, and other self-promoters who reflected light like disco balls, all teeth and cleavage and sharkskin. Tanner, a champion fighter, walked in wearing a T-shirt, blue jeans, and work boots. “He really didn’t care,” Dawe says. “And that shocked people.”

Tanner had triumphed in mixed martial arts, and so, true to form, he abandoned the sport. His timing couldn’t have been worse, really. The title bout had paid him only $38,000, but just afterward the UFC exploded into the national consciousness as a full-fledged sport, with millions of lucrative pay-per-view subscribers and much larger purses for its champions.

Tanner didn’t care. Fighting, to him, had been like working in a construction yard or laying cable, but with an audience. “He never really wanted to be a fighter,” his friend Brent Medley says. “That’s the irony. He was good at it, but he didn’t particularly like it. For him it was just a way of traveling the world. People recognized him on the street for his fighting, but he wanted to be remembered for his ideas.”

Tanner had one particular idea that he wanted to convey to the world, which he called “the power of one.” It’s the notion of small kindnesses, or as he later explained: “Your words and actions resonate out eternally, in a sense. It reaches one person, then two people, then four, and it expands out exponentially.”

The books in his apartment would have surprised the opponents whose faces he had pounded: Pride and Prejudice, Doctor Zhivago, Siddhartha, Crime and Punishment, and, most unexpectedly, The Tao of Pooh. Tanner had always guarded his sensitive, philosophical side. Once, when he was in grade school, his mother had found him reading a biography of Chief Joseph, the 19th-century peacemaker. The boy had turned away, with tears in his eyes.

“Right now I’m just like a student,” he said later, as a man. “I’m doing the best I can with what’s put before me. Just getting ready.”

—-

He always kept himself physically fit, but he’d been drinking hard for a dozen or more years. Once at a postfight party, Tanner — so shy when sober — picked up the wife of legendary UFC referee John McCarthy, then dropped her, hurting her head. The incident horrified Tanner, who fled further into alcoholism. Now he was drinking at an almost suicidal clip.

On the nights he couldn’t make it back to his boat in Oceanside, he stayed with Gayoso or Elliott. Elliott worked a night shift as a physician’s assistant and sometimes came home at sunrise to find Tanner starting into a case of beer. At midday he’d go out for another. Then a third, in the evening. Elliott felt powerless to stop him.

“Look,” Tanner told him. “I drink harder and deeper than most people with a drinking problem could ever understand.” He drank with a sense of purpose, calling it another challenge to himself. An adventure. He told friends he did it as an intellectual exercise, so that one day he could warn his own children — which he wanted someday, when he felt qualified — of the ravages of alcohol.

However worthy his stated aims, his actions undermined them. He sometimes slept on a park bench. His friends had to check his refrigerator to make sure he had enough to eat. His teeth started to loosen in his skull. Tanner was a good-looking guy with a strong jaw and blue eyes, but he grew a long, gnarled beard that gave him the look of a homeless man, which, in a sense, he had become. And the one subject Tanner never spoke about, even in the deepest stupor, was his own childhood: the abandonment, and the pain.

Tanner publicly set a date to quit drinking: October 10, 2007. “And he did,” Gayoso said. “He just quit.”

Tanner felt he’d had a voice as a champion fighter and lost it when he started drinking full-time. So he started training again. He joined gyms in Oceanside and Las Vegas and set up a network of friends and fans he called Team Tanner. They were his sponsors, because he refused to wear the logo of any product he didn’t believe in or use himself. Instead of slogans for energy drinks and online casinos, his T-shirts bore the phrase “Believe in the Power of One.”

That astonished the mixed-martial-arts establishment. “I’d say, ‘Evan, these people want to give you free money.’ But nope,” says John Wood, a fighter and owner of Warrior Training Center, where Tanner worked himself back into shape. “He could have made a lot of money.”

Tanner returned to the UFC last March when he took on Yushin Okami from Japan. The fight’s commentators noted Tanner’s incredible return to form. “Got himself way out of shape,” Joe Rogan said, ringside. “No training at all for two years. Just beer.”

Few people knew, though, just how thoroughly alcohol had ravaged Tanner’s body. His hemoglobin — the oxygen-bearing protein that gives blood its red color — had fallen dangerously low. On television he looked fine, but internally his body struggled to move oxygen.

The fight seemed balanced, for a while, but in the second round Okami wrapped his hands behind Tanner’s head and brought it down hard, smashing it against Okami’s upward-moving knee. Tanner dropped to the mat, unconscious.

The second fight of his comeback ended only slightly better, when Tanner lost by split decision to American Kendall Grove. None of that really mattered. Tanner had triumphed again; he had drifted into drunken, sunken despair and then, at 37 years old, fought his way back to clear-eyed validation.

He searched, once again, for a more difficult challenge.

—-

He described a plan to ride into the desert, where the emptiness of the landscape could allow him days or even weeks of reflection, like a modern Henry David Thoreau on his Walden Pond.

That sort of lofty, lonely talk made his fans nervous, and they said so online. Fighters should stay focused on their bodies. Their world is physical. And now Evan Tanner spoke of spooky things, of abstract treasures and existential congestion. Some fans wondered aloud whether he would die out there among the cacti and tumbleweeds.

Sheriff’s deputy Justin Hettich made a rare traffic stop outside Palo Verde, he received a call. A man with an Uruguayan accent wanted to read him a couple of text messages. Something about his friend. An ultimate fighter. Evan Tanner.

Hettich, other deputies, a search-and-rescue contractor, and a marine helicopter team searched the lonely countryside for Tanner’s campsite. Even knowing his general position, they took a couple of days to find the tarp and motorcycle. Soon after they found his body.

He had made it almost four miles on the walk back to camp. He had sat down and taken pictures of himself, about 20 in all, right up to the moment of unconsciousness.

Then he had laid his head against a rock as if it were a pillow; not because he was sleepy but likely because in his dizziness the rock provided orientation. A rock to prop him up, if only for a little while.

Nature, in the end, forced him to submit.