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

As he grew his physical prowess became undeniable. He excelled at pole vaulting, cycling, football, snowboarding, surfing, and even bowled a good game. He ran home from school each day, five miles. Midway through high school he took up wrestling, and in his junior and senior years he won back-to-back state championships. He appeared out of nowhere, the finest wrestler in the state of Texas.

“It was unprecedented,” says Brent Medley, a close hometown friend who wrestled as well. “Most of those guys had been wrestling since they were knee-high, but none of us understood what Evan was doing.”

As quickly as he had taken up the sport, he dropped it. Tanner’s physical skill couldn’t calm the restlessness that drove him, eventually, to become a self-described drifter — someone who, as he put it, had “gypsy blood.” He left Amarillo to attend tiny Simpson College in Iowa, thinking of becoming a doctor, and he triumphed there by making the dean’s list. Then, with no explanation, he left.

He roamed. He visited towns that interested him and made money doing hard, physical work: construction jobs, laying cable, day labor. He traded the strength of his body for a chance to feed his mind. And when anxiety came, as it did from time to time, he would find a poorly lit corner of some local bar and drink until the demons fell silent.

In 1997 he passed back through his hometown, Amarillo, to do some work climbing telephone poles, and he attended a fight of the sort that would eventually be called mixed martial arts. Tanner didn’t particularly care for fighting as entertainment. But he did love the sense of battle. What could be more existential than two men grappling in a cage?

People in town still remembered Tanner for his wrestling as a kid, and a fight promoter approached him about climbing into the ring again. He gave it a try — and swiftly dispatched every hard-swinging hoodlum in sight. He fought three times in one night, winning a hometown tournament.

Encouraged, Tanner bought a videotape about grappling that featured the famous Gracie family of Brazilian jujitsu 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.”

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Tanner decided to try the life of a sailor next, even though he’d never sailed. He tackled it in two steps. Step one: He bought a series of books about knots, rigging, navigation. Step two: He bought an antique 30-foot wooden-hulled, two-masted ketch.

His friends advised him against it. “It was crazy, but hey,” says Jorge Gayoso, a Uruguayan boat repairman who worked with Tanner on his ketch in Oceanside, California. The two men, along with another friend, Dan Elliott, sanded and filled and painted the 70-year-old wooden hull and repaired the engine, and with time the three grew close. “That boat needed a lot of work,” says Gayoso with a laugh.

Tanner and Gayoso hit it off particularly well. They were both wild men and scholars, tattooed thinkers who spent their days working on the old sailboat, riding their Harleys along the beach road, surfing, and arguing existential questions.

And in the evenings, Tanner drank himself into oblivion.

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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.

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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…

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