Evan Tanner’s Final Test

Wed, Jan 14, 2009

Born to be wild: Tanner took this self-portrait while on a motorcycle road trip in Oregon last summer. Photo credit: Courtesy Evan Tanner/Spike Digital/MTV/Viacom

Last fall the former UFC champ rode his motorcycle into the California desert, looking to pit himself against nature in the harshest of conditions. He saw it as testing his limits. But it was the culmination of a lifetime of battling demons.

By Matthew Teague

Evan Tanner figured he could survive the walk back to civilization. Just seven miles, the sign said. Seven miles to the nearest small town, The Dalles, here at the far end of the Oregon Trail.

So he kicked the stand from under his Harley-Davidson and heaved the bike forward. He was one of the fittest men around, a world champion fighter, but he was pushing 700 pounds of motorcycle and gear, and he was exhausted from riding 1,200 miles in three days. But he took one step, then another, bending his mind against the distance and the weight.

His mind had caused this trouble, as he saw it. He had known that little fuel remained in the bike’s tank, and there were no gas stations on this remote road near Oregon’s Columbia River. A few minutes earlier, riding along, he had mentally shrugged when he saw the sign noting the miles ahead. “Seven miles,” he thought. “I could push it seven miles.” That’s when the bike sputtered to a stop.

He saw meaning in everything, and his bike conking out was no different. “It was a challenge,” he would say later. “I had unintentionally thrown it out there at myself.” Now, trudging along the road, he considered calling the friends he had been traveling to see. But midnight approached, and he didn’t want to inconvenience them.

“It’s not going to be so bad,” he thought at first. But the road led slightly uphill from the river, and within a few minutes sweat dripped from his forehead. His massive shoulders burned, and his legs shook. Three hundred ninety-nine… Four hundred… he thought, measuring his steps between rests. Four hundred steps, rest. Three hundred, rest. Two hundred. One hundred.

Throughout his life Tanner had faced challenges — he called them “adventures,” others called them demons — and triumphed in remarkable ways. He lived with extraordinary purpose, rising from the dust of Amarillo, Texas, into the glow of Las Vegas, and along the way he helped build an empire called the Ultimate Fighting Championship. But he differed from his peers in significant ways; he studied philosophy, for one, and he felt he had a message to share with the world, something bigger than himself, bigger than men fighting for sport.

First, though, he needed to reach the next small town on this misbegotten road. He pushed the Harley for hours, interrupted only by long-haul trucks that blew past in the darkness, missing him by inches. Finally he saw a light ahead: an all-night gas station. He had survived the journey unbeaten. But along the way he had conceived his next adventure: a motorcycle trip of even more epic proportions. He would ride deep into the mountainous California desert near the Mexican border, into forgotten places where his footprints would overlap those of forgotten Spanish conquistadores.

Another journey. A new adventure. A challenge that would allow him, in the end, to chase his demons back into the lake of fire itself.

—-

Evan Tanner took on his first notable challenge — and, as became clear later, his earliest demons — many years earlier, on another remote roadside.

It was the 1970s, somewhere in Arkansas. He was about six years old, riding with his mother in the family’s Volkswagen van while his stepfather, a man he regarded as a stranger, sat at the steering wheel. A tire blew out, forcing them to the shoulder. On closer inspection the parents realized they didn’t have a working jack.

“What we need is a big, flat rock,” the mother said.

The quiet boy spoke up. “I saw a big rock back there,” he said, pointing back down the road.

“Get back in the car,” one of the adults said. They returned to the task of lifting the crippled car.

It’s impossible to say what passed through the boy’s mind in that moment, beneath his buzz cut. Almost certainly, though, he sensed in those days that his family was fracturing around him. His father had left when he was a baby, and his mother moved in with his stepfather, but the boy and the new man never developed a relationship. Later his mother, who struggled with depression, would move out when Evan was in high school, leaving him to more or less raise himself while living with his older brother.

On this day, though, on an Arkansas roadside, Evan could do something.

His mother looked up and saw her little boy staggering toward them. In his arms he carried an enormous, flat rock, so heavy that his legs bowed under the weight. A rock that could, he hoped, solve their troubles. A rock to prop them up, if only for a little while.

He differed from other fighters in striking ways. He studied philosophy and felt he had a message to share with the world.

He grew up shy, so quiet in school that his classmates overlooked him. He loved to read and surprised his friends with a memory they all — to a person — describe as “photographic.” He could learn how to replumb a house, fix a car, or analyze the major religions in just one reading. “He was an anomaly,” one friend said.

His great intelligence came with great anxiety, and he often hid in the deep folds of a big sweater and cap, even during hot weather. His mild nature made him an easy target for bullies. His friend Deana Epperson, who grew up across the street, asked him once why he never fought back, and he told her he couldn’t, “because God would be mad at me.”

Then one day in middle school a pair of boys cornered him behind a dumpster and unleashed something larger and darker in him than they could have possibly understood. “He proceeded to whip them both, badly,” Epperson remembers. “Nobody could believe it. Sweet Evan Tanner? In his penny loafers? We really didn’t understand.”

Bookmark and Share:

Page: 1 2 3 4 5

Print this article

Amarillo, Arkansas, boat, california, Crime and Punishment, desert, Doctor Zhivago, Evan Tanner, Harley-Davidson, hiking, Into the wild, jujitsu, las vegas, Mexico, motorcycles, Neo Blood Tournament, Oregon Trail, Pacific Ocean, Pride and Prejudice, sailing, San Diego, Siddhartha, The Tao of Pooh, UFC

This post was written by:

Matthew Teague - who has written 1 posts on Men’s Journal.

Send a letter to the editor

22 Comments For This Post

Todd Says:
January 14th, 2009 at 4:56 pm

Impressive and awesome article about an amazing and enigmatic man. It’s strange that the more remarkable things about him people share, the more facts and details that come out, the more mysterious he seems.

We ,miss you so much Evan. I often wonder if you had any idea how much you were loved by so many…

Men's Journal

Advertisement