My First Fight: Fighters Discuss the Beginning of Their Careers

For the first year or so of her introduction into mixed martial arts, former Strikeforce 135-pound champion Sarah Kaufman trained once a week, and, by her own estimation, "very poorly." For a lot of people, that’s how it might have stayed. Just a hobby. Something to do and somewhere to go. But not for Kaufman, whose mad obsession with perfecting every little detail made it impossible to do anything just a little bit.

It had been that way since she started dancing at age two, Kaufman said. By the time she was a high school senior in 2002, living on her own and splitting time between school and a job as a tutor, she was searching for a new physical pursuit to throw herself into. She found it, a little bit at a time, at Victoria, B.C.’s Zuma fight gym.

"I guess my competitive side took over and I wanted to perfect everything," Kaufman said. "Pretty soon pad work wasn’t good enough, so I wanted to spar. Then that wasn’t good enough and I wanted to spar with people I didn’t know."

You see where this is going.

As Kaufman got more and more immersed in the martial arts world, she started doing grappling and kickboxing tournaments, gradually getting to know the few other female fighters in the area until a fellow competitor named Liz Posener suggested her name to a local fight promoter who was looking for female mixed martial artists.

"I’d competed with Liz in grappling tournaments, and I guess she put my name out there and said I might be willing to fight," Kaufman recalled. It didn’t seem unusual at the time. Since there were so few female fighters in the area, they almost had to set up their own fights and compete against the same small circle of opponents. Kaufman had no objections, and so she and Posener agreed to meet at the North American Challenge 23 on June 3, 2006.

"It was such a different experience getting into that kind of training," Kaufman said. "We really got serious. We did sparring with the small gloves, which meant I always had black eyes from then on. But come the fight, I still didn’t know what to expect. People tell you what you’re going to feel, but you don’t know until you’re out there."

While warming up in the locker room, Kaufman felt the usual mix of excitement and nerves, but that was to be expected. What really surprised her was when she looked over at her coach, Adam Zugec, and realized he was going through his own interior struggle.

"I was nervous, but my coach was absolutely petrified. I remember being in the back room and I had to massage his shoulders. He was so tense and so nervous."

The fight was at a small venue on a reserve in Vancouver, and as Kaufman made her out to the ring in front of a crowd of maybe 1,000 people, she started to feel more relaxed.

"I remember I walked out and was really having a good time, really enjoying it. Then Liz walked out and she looked so serious. She was doing the bounce back and forth thing, this serious, mean look on her face, trying to stare me down. It made me laugh. I couldn’t help it."

The way Kaufman remembers it now, the fight was a back and forth affair, with both fighters collecting their share of bruises. Even in the midst of the action she realized how much she still had to learn about this MMA stuff, and the lessons were painful.

"In the second round I got kneed in the head and I remember thinking, hey, maybe get your head away from her knees so that doesn’t happen. That’d be a pretty good idea."

In general though, Kaufman felt like she was getting the better of the striking. Then in the third and final round, Posener made a costly mistake. With Kaufman advancing, Posener backed into a corner and threw a pawing jab. Kaufman came over the top with an overhand right that settled the matter beyond all doubt.

"It’s the first and only time I’ve knocked anyone out clean cold. It didn’t even feel like I’d connected. She just fell over. Just straight down."

It took a moment for her to realize that the fight was really over. One moment, she’d been in the midst of an all-out war. The next, her opponent was splayed out on the canvas, unconscious, and her MMA debut was officially done.

"It was kind of a feeling of elation, because I did it. It was relief and excitement all at once. It was just a lot of fun."

It was also a memorable night for other reasons. For instance, as Kaufman and Zugec were leaving, a fight broke out in the parking lot and one of the participants threw a rock through the back window of Zugec’s car. All that chaos aside, Kaufman knew right away that she’d found a home in the crazy world of MMA, and all she could think about was when she’d get another chance at it.

"As soon as I fought, I knew I wanted to fight more. I had been following the girls who were fighting, like Tara LaRosa and Shayna Baszler and Roxanne Modafferi and Julie Kedzie -- even Marloes Coenen -- so I knew there were quite a few girls who had been around and who were around my size, so that was really exciting to think I could work up to fighting them one day."

When she woke up the morning after her first fight, however, she realized there were consequences to this brand of fun.

"I actually had knuckle marks all the way across my forehead, like very clear knuckle marks. It was amazing. You could count them."

For a man, it might have been more socially acceptable to walk around with an imprint of someone’s fist on his face. But Kaufman soon learned that people react very differently when they see the same bruises on a woman. It’s one thing that hasn’t changed over the course of her six-year fighting career, though she has learned how to have fun with it.

"You definitely get those looks from people. I find it hilarious, but Adam, not so much. Especially coming back from fights, walking through the airport, people always look. They don’t want to make it too obvious, but you can see them thinking, ‘Oh, that poor girl. She must have gotten a terrible beating.’ I don’t blame them for that reaction; it would probably be my reaction too. But that’s why I like to make sure I walk next to Adam through the airport. When he turns to look at me, I flinch. Then he gets the rude looks, not me."

A couple weeks before his pro debut in June of 2002, Diego Sanchez went to a party with his cousin. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea, he can admit now, but so what? He was 20 years old and had energy to spare. And it’s not like he was there to get crazy. Sure, he had one or two drinks, but nothing that would hinder a 20-year-old’s ability to show up at Greg Jackson’s Albuquerque-based fight gym in the morning. Everything was fine. Right up until the cops showed up.

"We weren’t drunk or anything, but we were underage and we’d had a couple of drinks, so we ran out the back door," Sanchez says. "We were jumping fences, just trying to get away."

Like a bad dream, Sanchez just happened to jump into a backyard with three large Rottweilers in it. The dogs immediately took off after Sanchez, who knew only that he needed to jump the next fence as soon as possible.

"What I didn’t realize was, the next fence that I jumped was like a 20-foot drop down to the ground. I felt like I was falling forever. I landed with my legs locked out. I had those Nike shoes with the air pockets, and when I landed one of the air pockets popped. That’s how hard I landed."

He didn’t get picked up by the cops that night, but by morning Sanchez had a deep bruise on his heel. He could barely walk or put any weight on that foot, and he certainly couldn’t run. Still, he knew that staying home from the gym was not an option.

"Back in the old school days at Greg Jackson’s, there was no not coming to practice if you were hurt," he says. "You went to practice no matter what. If your arm was hurt, we’d tie your arm to your body and you’d go with one arm. That’s just the way we did it. It was, take some ibuprofen and let’s train."

Even though he was limited in what he could do, Sanchez managed to finish up the last couple weeks of his training camp and nurse his heel almost back to full health.

What he didn’t do, however, was come clean with his coach about how he’d injured it. For obvious reasons, he didn’t want to tell Jackson that he’d been running first from the cops, and then from three Rottweilers after having some drinks at a party just before his first professional fight. Instead, he claimed that he’d fallen off a ladder while at work at the Doubletree hotel. It was a harmless lie, he reasoned, and one that kept the peace well enough to justify itself.

By the time fight night rolled around, the sore heel was the least of Sanchez’s concerns. He and some friends had made the seven-hour drive up to Denver for an event dubbed Ring of Fire 5: Predators. By the time they showed up at the Radisson North Graystone Castle, where the fights were being held, the nerves were starting to take their toll on Sanchez. He’d wrestled competitively and trained for around ten months in MMA, but he’d never done anything quite like this.

"I was extremely nervous," he says. "The only way I could think to get past the nervousness was to get crazy. I was extremely pumped up, like this is World War III. I was headbutting the wall before I went out there."

His opponent that night was a guy named Michael Johnson (not the same Michael Johnson who currently fights in the UFC) who was also making his pro debut. They knew almost nothing about one another except for a vague idea of what gym the other trained out of, though it quickly became apparent that Johnson knew a little more about striking than Sanchez did.

"Right away, he hit me with a straight right hand. Just, boom! I’d been in street fights, and we did sparring, but we were mainly grapplers. My punches were more like uppercuts and hooks and overhands. I’d never really learned the straight right. This guy hit me with the cleanest straight right. Bang, right on the button, right on my nose. So flush that it cut my nose right on the bridge."

Sanchez recovered and managed a takedown, but Johnson reversed him and got in some good ground-and-pound before Sanchez regained top position. According to records on the internet, this is about where the fight ended, in the first round. But the way Sanchez remembers it, they scrapped back and forth in that opening frame, with his opponent likely getting the better of it, and then the round came to an end.

It was a good thing, too. Bloodied and sucking wind, Sanchez needed the break. Both the ringside doctor and his coach came in to check on the state of his nose, but Jackson assured the doctor that his fighter was fine and the man left convinced.

"After he’s gone Greg looks at me and says, ‘He got you with a good one, huh?’ We laughed, and then I remember saying to him, ‘Greg, am I sure this is what I want to do for a living?’"

It was a joke that had the sting of truth to it at that very moment. There he was, bleeding from his nose and with welts already swelling up about his face, trying to get enough of the thin Denver air to go out there and get some more punishment. Who did this? Who thought this was a good idea?

"At the same time I was like, well, I can’t let this guy kick my ass," Sanchez says.

In the second round they went at it some more, and again Sanchez got the takedown. This time he made the most of it, taking his opponent’s back and sinking in the rear-naked choke for the submission finish. He left the Radisson that night with a perfect 1-0 record as a professional.

"I remember I got paid $600 for that fight, and I went straight to the hospital. My bill was $486.24. I still remember it exactly. My friends drove up to see me fight, and they were all broke. I was the only one who had gas money, so I had to put gas in the car. I had maybe $40 by the time I got home."

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t terribly profitable, but it was, in Sanchez’s words, "a life-changer." After that first fight he felt certain he’d found his passion in life.

"I knew it. I loved it. I loved the feeling. It was such a rush, and it made it so much better that the guy had gotten some good shots on me. He hurt me and I had to come back. It was tough, and it made it that much more rewarding for me. ...Now it’s ten years later, and I’m still doing it, still loving it. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else."

Eventually, he even came clean to Jackson about how he’d injured his heel. It just took some time.

"It was about three years later, and I was already in the UFC. But I said, ‘Greg, I have to get something off my conscience,’" Sanchez says. "He just laughed. He probably knew all along. You can’t fool Greg."

For past installments of the 'My First Fight' series on MMAFighting.com, including trips down memory lane with Rashad Evans, Mark Coleman, and more, click here.

One look at Jason "Mayhem" Miller and you can tell he was probably never the prom type. Just picturing him doing something as normal as pinning a corsage on a date or squeezing into a rented tux seems wrong, like imagining a dog eating with a knife and fork.

That's why it shouldn't surprise many fight fans to learn that while his high school classmates were attending the senior prom in April of 1998, a 17-year-old Mayhem was fighting a man named Al "Superman" Dill for $300 cash in Virginia Beach, Va.

His girlfriend at the time? She was in the audience watching, Miller says. And she didn't even mind missing the prom since, as he puts it, "We were weirdo kids. We weren't going to the prom, anyway."

For Miller, this night had been years in the making. He'd wanted to be a fighter ever since he knew it was a real thing people did without going to jail. Maybe he'd seen too many Van Damme movies as a kid, he admits, or maybe he just enjoyed unarmed combat a little too much. So much, in fact, that it got him kicked out of his first high school.

"I was kind of just an idiot kid," he says. "If somebody was trying to mess with me I would step up and fight them, and with very little provocation. Like, okay, let's go."

After Miller was expelled for fighting, his family had to move 40 miles to a new school district just so he could finish high school, something he now realizes he might owe his family an apology for. At the time though, it might have been the best thing for him. He discovered high school wrestling, which only stoked his desire to learn other martial arts.

"I would go to karate schools and try to fight the guys. Looking back I see how stupid I was. But I really thought that all the karate people, the goal was to be a fighter, to be able to fight people. And I didn't care so much if that was their goal, because my goal was to test my skills against theirs. I didn't get that nobody wanted to do that; they just wanted to have a karate school and make some money."

It turned out that local karate instructors did not want to fight some gangly, wild-eyed teenager who came in off the streets, asking them to "put on the little bootie things and kick me." The people in the judo classes inside a local gymnastics academy were slightly more accommodating, but only to a point and only for a little while.

"The problem was, at the judo school all I wanted to do spar. I kept breaking all the dorks noses and stuff. They were trying to do this traditional martial arts stuff, and I was trying to tear everyone's heads off. I thought, we have to treat this like a fight, because that's what it is. It's a fight."

Even though Miller was paying his membership dues, eventually the instructor decided it was better for business to lose one crazy student rather than a bunch of normal ones.

"He pulled me aside and said, 'Jason, I know you want to be an ultimate fighter, so there's a gym right down the street, like a block away. Go there.' I was like, what? Why didn't you tell me this before?!"

Miller went that very night, now that he was no longer welcome at judo. The gym was closed, but as he cupped his hands around his face and peered through the glass he saw walls covered in pictures of Frank Shamrock and Royce Gracie, cutouts from magazines and early MMA promotional materials. Right away he knew he'd found a home.

"I started going there every day, and I would not leave," he says. "The summer before that, I spent all my time on skateboarding, something I was terrible at. Then the next summer I spent learning how to fight, which I was pretty good at. It was a crazy time in my life."

The gym, Miller says, turned out to be "a tax write-off for some veterinarian," but it had what he needed, which was mostly a matter of attitude and a little skill here and there. He got boxing lessons at the hands of a man known only as "Boo-Boo," though the sparring sessions were so punishing he had to wear a chest protector just to survive them. There was another man who had learned what submissions he could from the 'Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in Action' VHS tapes. A "fat dude who was in the Army" stopped by from time to time. A real dream team of trainers and sparring partners, in other words.

Miller soaked up everything he could, but he knew that in order to take it to the next level he needed a real fight against a real opponent. This is how he ended up in the ring with "Superman" Dill on prom night.

"He was a grown man, and I was a little boy. I was 17 years old," he says, though that wasn't what worried him the most. Dill not only showed up wearing a gi, which right there suggested some level of jiu-jitsu sophistication that was unknown to Miller, but he also had a colored belt around his waist.

"To me, it seemed like he was almost magical. I think he had a blue belt or a purple belt, and I was like, oh no. I was a little concerned. There was no blue belts or purple belts in my neighborhood. Nobody knew that stuff. It wasn't until months later when I went to a Gracie school and was tapping out blue belts and purple belts that I realized, oh wait, that doesn't actually matter that much."

Once the fight got started, the gi and the belt soon became the least of his concerns. Miller might have been a skinny kid with "a blonde afro," but Dill had put a little more time and thought into his appearance that night.

"I realized when I threw a punch at his head that he had a Superman logo painted on the back of his head. At first I thought he was bleeding, but then I realized I had paint all over me. It was just like, what the hell? Paint?! You come in here with paint on you?"

The fight went the full eight minutes, during which time Miller mostly relied on his high school wrestling skills, taking Dill down, punching him every now and then, but mostly "holding on for dear life."

When it was over, he raised his own hand, was pronounced the winner, and enjoyed a few brief moments of joy and relief. Later, while relaxing in his free hotel room with the girlfriend who seemed not at all impressed with the idea of professional fighting in general, Miller finally had a chance to reflect on what had happened.

"It was the same thing as today when I win a fight. I just thought about all the things I could have done better. I thought it was boring, I didn't do any of my moves. I was nervous and I played it safe. It didn't feel right. I told myself I'd never win a boring fight again. I'd take risks and try stuff, whatever happened."

The difference between Miller and most 17-year-olds was, even then, he knew this was the start of something. The sport may have been in its nascent stages in the U.S., but he knew without a doubt that he had a future in it.

"I knew that there was a long career in this for me, and I also knew that mixed martial arts was going to be a huge sport eventually. My dad was telling me I was an idiot, and at the time he made a lot of sense. If you're not in the sport, you can't see how things are taking shape. He told me to go to computer school. I told him, 'Kiss my [expletive], I'm going to be a fighter.' And he said, 'Well, you're an idiot. Get out of my house.'"

Miller did, eventually, though not by choice at first. He eventually worked his way to California, where he lived in his van in the gym parking lot and began the long process of becoming the fighter he is today. The girlfriend who skipped out on the prom to watch his professional debut? She lives in San Francisco now, he says, and is still not particularly impressed with anything he's accomplished.

"She always thought fighting was just this stupid thing I was doing. She just loved me for my Justin Timberlake curls. She didn't care what I was doing."

Check out past installments of My First Fight, including Yves Edwards and Matt Lindland, plus many more.

If you had asked Mark Coleman what he was up to in early 1996, he probably would have told you he was gearing up to earn a spot on another U.S. Olympic wrestling squad after his seventh-place finish in the 1992 games. But looking back now, "The Hammer" can admit that this is only partially true.

"I was still trying to be a competitive wrestler at 31 years of age, but really I was fooling myself," he said. "I just wasn't putting in the grind and the time I needed to put in. I wasn't really training like an Olympic champion. I was training like a bum, to be perfectly honest."

When he lost in the semifinals of the Olympic trials that year, Coleman knew he had only himself to blame. He hadn't worked hard enough, hadn't wanted it badly enough. Now his wrestling career was over and he had no idea what he was going to do with his life next. He didn't have to wait long before he got an offer that changed everything.

"I went and lost at the Olympic trials, and that's when a manager approached me and said, 'You want to fight in 30 days at UFC 10?' He also put this to [American wrestlers] Mark Kerr and Tom Erickson the same day and asked them the same question. I don't think they gave him the right answer. I think they wanted to take the contract home and show it to some attorneys or something. But I talked my way into the UFC. I told this guy, I'm the man for job."
Take these cats down and pound them out. That was the plan from day one.
-- Mark Coleman
That guy was trainer/manager Richard Hamilton, who'd already helped shepherd several decorated wrestlers into the UFC. He was at the trials looking for his next big pickup, Coleman said, after his past relationships with fighters had fallen apart.

"Everybody had a falling out with this guy for a reason. I won't give what the reason was, just a reason. Dan Severn left him. Don Frye left him. I'll say this for him, he did notice that wrestlers were the wave of the future and he did go after us."

After watching the UFC on TV for the past couple years, Coleman had a vague idea of what to expect. The first time he saw a UFC fight, he said, he thought "it couldn't be real." The concept of cage fights with no rules and no weight classes just seemed too far out there, yet the fights themselves also seemed too brutal and too messy to be choreographed. Once he realized it was legitimate, it seemed like a wrestler's dream, and Coleman couldn't wait to try it. He wanted a spot in the tournament so badly, in fact, that he said he didn't closely examine the contract he'd signed with Hamilton.

"I just wanted in UFC 10. I wanted in there and thought the ramifications for signing a bad contract was something I'd deal with later, which I did."

In the month between signing the contract and stepping in the Octagon for the first time, Coleman didn't have a lot of gym time to learn striking technique or submission defense. He did, however, have a pretty solid game plan.

"Take these cats down and pound them out," he said. "That was the plan from day one."

On July 12, 1996, Coleman showed up at the Fairgrounds Arena in Birmingham, Ala., feeling pretty good about his chances. He'd have to win three fights in one night to claim the UFC 10 tournament title. His first opponent was Israeli heavyweight martial arts champion Moti Horenstein, who Coleman felt couldn't possibly stop him.

"All the wrestlers, we were a family and we really felt like we were unappreciated, like we were some of the toughest cats in the world. Not just me -- a lot of my friends. So I walked in with a lot of confidence, especially knowing I was fighting a stand-up guy. I knew the game plan and I knew it was going to work. I walked in thinking, this really isn't going to be fair. But as I was walking to the cage, that worm of doubt worked its way into my head. It got pretty tense then."

With just over 4,000 people in attendance and a meager pay-per-view audience at home, it wasn't the bright lights of the big time that had Coleman nervous. After all, he'd wrestled in the Olympics and won an NCAA championship at Ohio State. He had plenty of experience in big matches with big stakes. What had him worried was a sudden fear of the unknown. Despite his long career as a wrestler, he'd never done this before. Maybe he wasn't ready for what was about to happen.

"I was very confident walking in, until right when I got on the ramp and that's when it hit me: holy s--t, I'm fighting a karate world champion. What if he does have some Bruce Lee crazy spinning back kick or something that's going to knock me out?"

If Horenstein had such a move in his bag of tricks, he never got to use it. Coleman took him down and pounded him out exactly according to plan. A little under three minutes after it had started, Coleman's MMA debut was in the books and he was on to the semifinal round at UFC 10. There he would face "Big Daddy" Gary Goodridge, who, with five UFC fights to his credit, was a veteran compared to Coleman.
What if he does have some Bruce Lee crazy spinning back kick or something that's going to knock me out?
-- Mark Coleman
In the years since, Coleman and Goodridge have become close friends. They spent time together on the Japanese circuit in Pride Fighting Championships, and they really got to like one another. But that night in Alabama, there was no fellow feeling. There was money at stake, after all, and they spent a grueling seven minutes in the cage together to decide who would go home with it.

Coleman's superiority on the mat and conditioning edge eventually proved to be the difference-maker, as Goodridge finally gassed out and submitted. The bout took its toll on Coleman too, but he still had one more fight before he could claim the tournament title. This time he'd be going up against the man his manager had conditioned him to despise: UFC 8 winner Don Frye.

"[Hamilton] had a student come in and tell me Don Frye broke his knee on purpose and this and that. Honestly, I'm not a hateful person, but they tried to create some anger and some hate in me towards Don Frye and it kind of worked," Coleman said. "I thought Don Frye was a bad guy, a cocky guy, and I went in there with bad intentions. Nothing more than normal I guess, but I really wanted to beat him for this guy who had his knee broken. But I think in the end it was all made up. I don't know for sure."

Both men came into the cage for the final fight looking worn down and battle weary, but after a combined 15 minutes in the cage between his two earlier fights, Frye seemed to be the worse off of the two. Coleman quickly put Frye on his back, pinned his head against the fence, and went to work with right hands on Frye's already damaged face.

When the action drifted over toward Coleman's corner, Hamilton was there to berate Frye from outside the cage, screaming for Coleman to punish him from the top. Even when the fight returned to the feet, Frye couldn't keep it there against the much larger Coleman.

But no matter how Coleman tried, he couldn't make the other man quit. Frye kept taking whatever Coleman dished out, and soon even Coleman had to admit that he was dealing with one tough individual, no matter what he'd been told about him before.

"At the eight to ten minute mark, I was looking this guy in the eye and feeling a lot of emotions go through my body," Coleman said. "Like jeez, why aren't they stopping this fight? I wanted them to stop it. I wasn't really enjoying it at that point. But back then, you know, you had to tap out. They didn't like to stop it unless you tapped out. I wanted them to stop it because I couldn't finish the cat."

After a brutal and exhausting eleven and a half minutes, a couple of Coleman headbutts (totally legal at the time) finally convinced referee "Big" John McCarthy to call a stop to it. Frye had taken a severe beating at the hands of Coleman, but he'd also made a lasting impression on the man who'd come into the cage hating him that night.
Stopping was the furthest thing from my mind. I couldn't wait until the next show.
-- Mark Coleman
"There's a difference between the best and the toughest. Don was very good, but he wasn't the best. He was certainly the toughest guy I ever fought in my life though, and he proved that many times. Thank God Big John stepped in and stopped it."

Though Frye and Coleman gained a measure of begrudging respect for one another that night, they didn't exactly become best friends. Not yet, anyway.

"Don Frye, as I understand, did not like me for a long time after that," Coleman said. "He hated me, in fact. He wanted a rematch real bad, because that's just the kind of cat he is. By the time we rematched four or five years later over in Japan, by that time we were good buddies. To this day, I respect him about as much as I respect anybody."

After it was all over, Coleman was utterly exhausted from his frantic first foray into MMA. He was also "addicted" to the budding sport, and he knew he'd found his new career, even if he had no idea that it would one day take him across the Pacific to Japan and into the UFC Hall of Fame. All he knew at the time was that victory in the cage was a great feeling, and he had to have more.

"This was something I grew up wanting since I was five years old, even though there wasn't this sport then," Coleman said. "It's respect, I guess. It's knowing no one's going to mess with you. Stopping was the furthest thing from my mind. I couldn't wait until the next show."

Check out past installments of My First Fight, including Joe Benavidez, Matt Lindland, and Jorge Rivera.

On Sunday night in Milwaukee, the internet would have you believe that bantamweight Joseph Benavidez will be participating in his 17th professional bout at UFC Live: Hardy vs. Lytle. The Internet would also have you believe that his first professional fight was against Brandon Shelton in June of 2006.

The Internet is wrong.

Then again, maybe it depends on what your definition of 'professional' is. If you mean professional in terms of the overall quality and credibility of the event, some vaguely official quality that separates the serious promoters from the amateurs, then okay, the Shelton fight might have been it.

But if you mean professional in the sense that it was a fight for which a fighter was paid (and to the man who is or is not going home with money in his pocket, this distinction often matters a great deal), then no way.

For that definition of professional, and for the very humble beginning of Benavidez's MMA career, you've got to go all the way back to 2005 in Silver City, N.M., and into a slightly terrifying bar called the Brown Derby.

"It's this place where it's actually kind of scary to go in there by yourself," Benavidez recalled. "And then they just put a boxing ring in the middle of the bar, which only made it scarier."

Benavidez might never have ended up there that night had he not had a job as a screen printer in Las Cruces, N.M. It was a good job and he liked it, mostly because he could make his own clever T-shirts when the mood struck him. But one day a man came in looking to make some posters advertising a kickboxing event, and Benavidez started asking him about it.

"He looked at me and was like, 'Hey, aren't you that wrestler?'"
I was literally bouncing his head off the ground -- boom, boom, boom -- and his corner threw in the towel.
-- Joseph Benavidez
In Las Cruces, Benavidez was that wrestler. He'd won a state championship in high school, which was the kind of thing people in a relatively small town tended to remember. The man asked Benavidez if he'd be willing to help out his teenage son, who'd been kickboxing for a while but wanted to move into MMA. First he needed someone who could help him with his wrestling, and who better than a former state champ?

It sounded like fun to Benavidez, but after two months of training with this rag-tag MMA club, he decided he'd like to find out whether he could win an actual fight. He was beating all his training partners, and he'd seen the sport on TV, so how hard could it be?

"I figured that if I was fighting guys around my size and from around my area and my state, and I was the best wrestler in my state, that at the very least I could out-wrestle them," Benavidez said. "Even if I didn't know a whole lot else, I had that."

Benavidez asked around and, sure enough, someone was putting together a night of MMA fights down at the Brown Derby in Silver City. It wasn't the kind of deal where they offered you an opponent and you could accept or decline. Instead it was the kind of deal where you were either in or you were out. And if you were in, it meant you showed up an hour before fight time and got a look at your opponent for the first time across a crowded bar.

No weigh-ins. No rules meeting. No sanctioning. Not even a locker room to warm up in.

"I get there, and I'm the first fight, so I'm warming up in the bar," said Benavidez. "There's people around me drinking beers. There's this old drunk Mexican dude in my face, telling me what to do. And this is probably 20 minutes before I'm going to go out, and he's totally drunk, trying to give me advice and tell me what to do. It was bizarre."

It probably didn't help matters that, instead of normal fight trunks, Benavidez was wearing a pair of underwear he'd bought at Target. That was a trademark of his all the way until he entered the WEC, he said. Even in his fight at Dream.5 in Japan he came in sporting the Target underwear.

"I just thought they looked so good, no one would know," he said.

When the event was finally ready to get started, Benavidez and his opponent, who at least looked to be around his size, were called into the ring. There were chairs set up at ringside, but the bar patrons quickly ignored them in favor of crowding as close to the action as they could get.

"The people just ended up hanging off the ring like it was Lionheart, the [Jean-Claude] Van Damme movie. There's no security, nothing like that, so they're just all up on the ring."

Once the fight started, Benavidez wasted no time. He threw a leg kick, went for a takedown, then stood over his grounded opponent and started hammering him with elbows to the head.

"I was literally bouncing his head off the ground -- boom, boom, boom -- and his corner threw in the towel."

The whole thing took maybe a minute and a half. One of Benavidez's teammates acted as the referee -- not that he was actually called to do any officiating other than peel Benavidez off the guy once the towel flew into the ring.

"So I'm happy, I got my first win. Then some cops come in. They'd been watching the whole thing, and they went up to whoever was in charge and said, okay, you guys can keep doing this, but all the fighters from here on out have to wear headgear."

Apparently the police were a little taken aback by the brutality of Benavidez's fight. When the fighters complained that no one in MMA wore headgear, the cops gave them the choice of gearing up or getting shut down.

"All my teammates were pissed at me then, because they had to do MMA with headgear after my fight," said Benavidez. "I thought it was pretty funny and unique. It just showed how bush league the whole thing was. Like, oh no, that was too hard and too violent. Wear headgear and it's okay. I guess the drunk people cornering me was totally fine, though."

Bush league or not, when the night was over Benavidez left the Brown Derby with two hundred dollars in his pocket. Considering that he was pulling in around a thousand bucks a month at his screen printing job, it was a nice boost to his regular income. It also had him thinking about how far he might be able to take this thing with a little more practice.
I had a little 'Lionheart' moment of my own where I was like, man, I'm a prizefighter now.
-- Joseph Benavidez
"It felt good and it gave me some confidence, like I could do this. I had a little Lionheart moment of my own where I was like, man, I'm a prizefighter now. I'm getting money to beat people up."

It wasn't more than two or three weeks later that Benavidez had his second fight, then his third and his fourth. By the time he fought Shelton in what the internet records identify as his debut, he'd already had five bouts.

"So I actually have five fights that aren't on my record, which kind of sucks because it would look a lot cooler if I was 19-2 than 14-2," he said. "They just weren't documented, and honestly, some of them probably shouldn't be."

Things didn't start to get serious for Benavidez's MMA career until he went to visit a friend in Sacramento in November of 2006. They bought tickets to UFC 65, where they watched Georges St. Pierre take the welterweight title from Matt Hughes.

For Benavidez, it was a glimpse of what the big time really looked like, though he didn't know if a 135-pounder like himself could ever even dream of getting there. The UFC had only recently reopened its doors to 155-pounders. Below that, the best you could hope for was the lesser-known WEC, and even that seemed far away.

Before he left Sacramento and returned home to New Mexico, Benavidez made it his mission to seek out the then-WEC featherweight champ Urijah Faber, who he'd heard ran a gym in the area. If Faber could make a living as a smaller mixed martial artist, then maybe he was someone who could help, or at the very least, give Benavidez some idea of where he stood as far as skill level.

So he looked in the phone book for Faber's gym, but couldn't find it.

"I went into the first gym that I found and basically beat up everybody, all the instructors, whoever. Those guys told me, hey, we got nothing for you. You need to go get with Urijah and his guys."

When Benavidez explained that this was exactly what he'd been trying to do, they gave him Faber's contact info. By then, however, it seemed too late. He had a 7 a.m. flight back to New Mexico in the morning. He was out of time, and he hadn't even managed to lay eyes on Faber.

But when Benavidez showed up to the airport in the morning, he became the rare traveler to regard it as good news when he saw that his flight was cancelled. He took the opportunity to stay three more days in Sacramento, which allowed him the chance to finally get on the mat with Faber.

"I definitely think it was fate," he said. "I went in and we had a roll, and Urijah basically told me, 'You need to come out here and get serious about this. You've got a lot of talent, so stop wasting time.' That was pretty much it."

After that, Benavidez returned home only to get his things and head for California. He was about to start a new life in MMA. From here on out, all the fights would be for real, with no doubt as to what counted and what didn't. From this point on, he was definitely a professional. Even if he was still fighting in underwear he bought at Target.

Check out past installments of MMA Fighting's 'My First Fight' series, including Rashad Evans, Pat Miletich, Matt Lindland and more.

Looking back now, Jens Pulver can't say exactly what he was expecting that day. A test, maybe. A way to find out something about himself that he'd only guessed at before.

The name of the event – The Bas Rutten Invitational 2 – sounded official enough. If the Dutch Pancrase fighter was affiliated with it, and if they'd already done it once without anything terrible happening, how bad could it be?

But since this is small-time MMA in 1999, we're not talking about a fancy event at a civic center. We're talking a couple hundred people packed into a Muay Thai gym in Littleton, Colorado, a town where just four days earlier two heavily armed teenagers had walked into Columbine High School and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives.

It seemed like an unusual time and place for grown men to gather and beat one another up for sport, but the date had already been set and the tournament participants had been rounded up. No one knew what to do except proceed as planned.

"It was really strange," Pulver recalls now. "Columbine had just happened, so we went out and visited what was basically a memorial. I remember all the news trucks out there and all the flowers. We went over there and paid our respects, and it was pretty heavy. We were out there trying to do this sport, and right there something as horrific as Columbine had happened."

Pulver had come to Colorado because although he knew a little bit about fighting after his wrestling career at Boise State and assorted "underground" fights against local tough guys, he knew there was a whole other world to it that he had barely touched. In the late 90s, being a professional MMA fighter was still more a state of mind than anything else. If you arrived at the fight reasonably on time and put your hands up when the bell rang, you were a pro. Aside from being able to tell your friends about it afterward, there weren't a lot of other rewards involved.

But when Pulver heard about the tournament in Colorado, he knew he had to go check it out. He'd hit a heavy bag in a boxing gym a couple of times. He'd been introduced to the idea of submissions, even if he was far from well-versed in them. But at his core, Pulver says, he was still just a wrestler with a chip on his shoulder. That's how he planned to fight, right up until he got an unexpected pep talk a few minutes before he was scheduled to go on.

"It was crazy because I was just sitting there and I remember [former UFC matchmaker] John Peretti coming up before the fight saying, 'All right, you've got to be exciting. You've got to do this and that.' I was just like, oh my God. But at the same time, okay, I guess I can do that. It just seemed like so much. It was like, you want me to do what? Stand up? Okay. It was wild to me."

Still, something about it appealed to him. There had been plenty of times during his college wrestling days when he'd thought to himself, this match would go down very differently if they'd let me punch you in the face. Now here was his chance. The only problem was that the other guy would be punching back.

"I was really nervous, because I knew they could do more to me than just wrestle. All I could do was just hold on to my britches and go. I was a wrestler, born and raised, but I got in there and just started blasting punches. Just swinging. I had great conditioning because I was a wrestler at Boise State, and I just got after it. I just went wild. It was crazy."

His first fight was a furious three minutes against a guy named Curtis Hill. Pulver remembers hitting him with a big left that wobbled him, then moving in close for an uppercut. After another left hand Hill was sent reeling, and that's when his corner stopped the fight.

"It was a rush," Pulver says.

He didn't know it at the time, but it was that aggressive, slugging style he'd come to be known for later in his career. His love affair with power punching started that day, and the relationship wasn't always a healthy one.

"I think I took it too far later on because of that. Like Pat [Miletich] said, early on my base was getting people down and pounding on them. But then I got into always wanting to stand with everyone. I wanted to stand there and hit you. But it gets costly. You're basically just shooting the lights. They can catch you and you can catch them."

While he was glad to get the win in his first fight, Pulver was equally glad that the tournament structure would allow him another chance to fight that same day.

"I just wanted to keep going, keep figuring it out," he says.

He got his chance against a fighter by the name of David Harris, who was practically an MMA veteran compared to Pulver. Harris had gone 4-0 earlier that same year when he made his own debut at the first Bas Rutten Invitational. Harris had submitted John Alessio in his first round bout that day, but Pulver was determined to give him more of a challenge.

"We went for what felt like forever, and I threw this kid everywhere," Pulver recalls. "I'm tossing him this way and that way and man, that kid was so tough. I hit him with everything. I about brought the kitchen sink down on him. Then I remember he shot in for a single-leg [takedown] and I just thought, there is no way you're taking me down. I had my wrestling shoes on and everything. I just thought there was no way."

By then they'd been at it for almost twelve minutes without any round breaks. Pulver's cardio was holding up well, and he felt certain that there wasn't a man in the room who could take him down with something as basic as a single-leg. The fact that Harris was even attempting it seemed like a sign of desperation.

"All of a sudden he wraps around my knee and I feel my foot go in a different direction, and it was like, what in God's name? What is this? I didn't know anything about footlocks. To me it was just wrestling with punches until I got caught in that."

Confused, and in an increasing amount of pain, Pulver was forced to tap out from a toe hold 11:57 in. He'd had his first win and his first loss in the same day, and by the time he left the little gym in Colorado it was fair to say he was hooked on MMA.

He had no idea that he would make a career of it for the next decade and then some, becoming a UFC champion and a fan favorite in the process. All Pulver knew was that he wanted more, though he had no idea where that pursuit would take him.

"I had no clue. You had to be a fool just to want to do it. I had a job. I was coaching wrestling at a high school. I told my family, you know, this is what I want to do. They were like, are you insane? Again, it's legal in like three states at this time. They don't even have my weight class. This doesn't have retirement or benefits. But my desire to want to compete and be an athlete was just too much. I had to do it."

When Rashad Evans showed up to his very first MMA training session, he was pretty sure one of two things was going to happen: either he was going to learn to fight, or he was going to get robbed at gunpoint.

He was really hoping for the former, but from the looks of the alleged gym a stranger had just driven him to, the latter seemed more likely.

"It looked like a set-up," Evans says, looking back. "I looked at the building and was like, this sh-t cannot have a credible gym in there."

It was the kind of moment that one arrives at after making a series of decisions that seem reasonable enough in the moment, but when looked back upon as a whole start to seem profoundly dumb.

It began, as such things often do, with some guy in a bar. Evans had just graduated from Michigan State, where he was a stand-out wrestler, and had been trying to get a job as a police officer. In the meantime he was working nights as a security guard in a hospital and taking the occasional bouncing gig when special events at local bars sparked the need for a little extra muscle. Not surprisingly, during one such bar detail a fight broke out. After the troublemakers had been escorted out with a little help from Evans, one of the patrons referred to the move he had just witnessed as a rear naked choke.
It was a bad part of town, and I walked in there like, well, I'm about to get robbed.
-- Rashad Evans on his first MMA gym
"At the time, I was following the UFC and Pride," Evans says. "I was actually a big fan of 'Rampage' [Jackson] and I had followed it from the beginning, so I knew the terminology. But at the time it was still kind of underground, so I heard that and I was like, 'Hey what do you know about NHB?'"

The guy knew more than Evans, as it turned out, because he told the future UFC light heavyweight champ about a gym in nearby Lansing. When Evans expressed interest in checking it out, the man offered to pick him up and drive him to a training session there.

"I was thinking it would be this martial arts gym with all this discipline and stuff. It was this dilapidated, wore-down warehouse underneath a bridge in Lansing, Michigan, next to these nasty railroad tracks that nobody even used anymore. It was a bad part of town, and I walked in there like, well, I'm about to get robbed."

He followed his new friend up a rickety staircase, the smell getting thicker and mustier as they ascended. He could hear the unmistakable sounds of men yelling, punctuated every so often by the ringing of a bell.

"Then we got in there and the room was funky as all hell. There was blood and booger smear on the wall. It was like a nine-by-twelve-foot room, just really small, and these guys were rolling around like crazy, taking turns and rotating in on each other, just beating the hell out of each other. It was like a real life 'Fight Club.'"

Whatever it was, it was a long way from the Spartans wrestling room. There were no windows, and the poor ventilation and insulation made for uncomfortable sessions in the winter time, when the condensation from the heat on all the bodies would drench the walls and ceilings.

"It was this awful little room, but we got some good work in that room," Evans says.

After about six months of MMA training, Evans got talked into making his debut at a one-night, four-man tournament in November of 2003 for the local "Danger Zone" promotion in Angola, Indiana.

Officially, it's still listed as his amateur debut, with his first pro bout coming the following April, but as Evans can tell you now, there weren't exactly amateur ranks in Angola back in 2003. It was just that the pro bouts paid so little that you might as well have been fighting for free.

"I knew the stakes were a little higher than wrestling, but I was still in that mode so it felt a little bit like another wrestling match to me. But I knew the stakes were higher since we'd been beating the hell out of each other and I knew you could get caught with a punch at any time. I just didn't want to get embarrassed."

His first fight was against a guy named Kris Calmese. Evans still doesn't know what martial arts discipline he was trained in, or whether he was trained in any at all.

"He didn't really know what to do. I just wrestled him down, slammed him a couple of times, and he tried running out of the ring, so I grabbed him and pulled him back in and he ended up tapping. ...It was kind of weak."

Even though the first fight of the night didn't prove to be much of a challenge, Evans found himself surprisingly winded when it was all over. It wasn't until later that he realized why.
I got $200, and I was happy. That was a lot of money to me then.
-- Rashad Evans on his first paycheck
"It was this ring in the middle of this Bingo hall, and everyone was smoking cigarettes. I mean, everyone. And you're so high up all the smoke just rises into the ring. I was pretty much breathing smoke the whole time. I remember throwing punches and thinking, oh my God, I trained hard but I'm out of shape. I didn't realize I probably couldn't breathe because of all the damn smoke in there."

His second and final fight that night was supposed to be the big one. Evans was taking on George Crawford, who had been victorious in Danger Zone's previous event that September.

"George was supposed to be pretty good," Evans says. "He had won the tournament before. The guys who did the tournament, that was all his friends. The guy who was putting the tournament together was his uncle or something. He was supposed to win it all."

When it came to overall skills, Evans didn't have a lot of diversity in his game to fall back on. He'd punched and been punched enough by then to know that exchanging on the feet was dangerous for a guy without a lot of striking experience, so instead he put his wrestling skills to work against Crawford once things started getting hectic on the feet.

"We went at it and exchanged a little bit, then I picked him up and slammed him and then picked him up and slammed him again. One of the times I slammed him, his rib popped out when we hit the ground. He just started tapping immediately."

Evans had expected his pro debut to be a little tougher, but he didn't mind going home with two wins in one night, regardless of how he got them. He even got a meager payday for his work that night.

"I got $200, and I was happy. That was a lot of money to me then," he says. "I knew I'd keep doing it. It just felt like something very fun to do, because I was still active and still wanted to be an athlete. It was a good outlet. Afterwards, I just felt very, very peaceful. I had an outlet to get that aggression out. But I felt like I'd never, ever make enough money to make a living at this."

Evans would go on to win five straight fights the next year before being selected to compete on season two of 'The Ultimate Fighter.' There was only one problem: at 5'11" and just a little over 220 pounds, Evans wasn't much of a heavyweight.

"I ate mashed potatoes every single night, trying to get as big as I possibly could," he says. "There was no way I was going to pass that up."

Say what you will about the merits of mashed potatoes as a training diet, but Evans went on to win the finale as a heavyweight before dropping down to 205 pounds and eventually becoming the UFC light heavyweight champion. As for the fear that he'd never make enough money to live on as a fighter, well, let's just say those concerns have subsided too.

Read more 'My First Fight' stories on MMA Fighting.

When Frank Shamrock paroled out of Folsom Prison in the early nineties, he had narrowed his career choices down to three possibilities.

"I was going to be a physical therapist, or an exotic dancer, or I was going to do this no-holds-barred fighting thing that Ken [Shamrock] was doing. And I didn't know anything about any of them."

Shamrock had spent most of the last decade in one institutionalized setting or another, whether it was group homes, youth crisis centers, or prison. His adopted father, Bob Shamrock, pointed him in the direction of the Lion's Den, then an unknown gym for a mostly unknown sport, and run by Frank's adopted older brother Ken. The first day Shamrock walked in the door, he was told he'd be getting a "tryout."

"You did 500 squats, 500 sit-ups, 500 leg-lifts, 250 push-ups, then you fought Ken for 20 minutes," Shamrock says. "After that it took me about four days before I could walk down the stairs again. I was just traumatized, and I didn't know you could tap. Ken was tearing my ankles and knees out, and I was just taking it. I didn't know you could tap and I was trying to be this tough guy. That was my intro to it."
The ten minutes seemed like literally 40 seconds. Then they rang the bell and it was over.
-- Frank Shamrock
For reasons even he can't fully articulate, Shamrock kept coming back. The next thing he knew, his brother had arranged for him to spend eight weeks living and training in a dojo in Japan.

"I had spent three years in jails and prisons, and then all of a sudden I'm in Japan in this dojo. It was just so surreal. I was this young kid and nobody even knew what I was doing there."

What he was doing, as it turned out, was preparing for a fight in the King of Pancrase tournament in December of 1994. Along with his brother Ken, the 22-year-old Shamrock joined early MMA luminaries such as Matt Hume, Maurice Smith, and Vernon "Tiger" White on the fight card that night in Tokyo.

In the first round of the tournament, and for his first professional bout, Shamrock drew a Dutchman by the name of Bas Rutten.

"What I remember distinctly is being so freaking scared and nervous," says Shamrock. "It seemed like I could feel the lights in the building, like I could feel the electricity running into my body. It was the weirdest thing in the world. Then the fight started."

Rutten was more experienced in the sport, having already had eight fights in Pancrase by that point. When they locked up early in the bout, Shamrock remembers being awed by Rutten's raw power.

"He had that old man strength. He was just super strong, and he absolutely smacked the sh-t out of me five or six times."

At one point, Rutten snapped a front kick directly into Shamrock's nose. He heard it crunch and he knew right away it was probably broken. It occurred to him that he had to shoot for a takedown and get the fight to the ground.

"I had maybe two or three moments of clarity in the whole fight," says Shamrock. "One was when I took him down, and I remember the feeling of kind of floating through the air. Another was when he was front choking me and he said, 'Aha, I've got you!' You know, in that booming Bas voice of his? He was weird like that; Bas was always talking to me. He's the one who taught me to talk to people in fights."

And yet, even as Rutten was telling Shamrock that he was done, Shamrock could feel himself slipping out of the choke. In his corner his brother Ken was shouting instructions, but to Frank it might as well have been in another language. The experience was so bizarre, he was struggling to understand it even as it was happening.

"I remember a couple points in the match kind of looking up and thinking, my God, I'm fighting this crazy bald guy in front of a bunch of people in Japan. How did this happen?" Shamrock says. "The ten minutes seemed like literally 40 seconds. Then they rang the bell and it was over."

Shamrock walked back to his corner after the fight and met with the begrudging approval of his adopted older brother.

"He was like, 'You did good,'" Shamrock says. "All I could say was, 'He broke my nose!' That was the first time I'd ever had my nose broken. It was like he caught me right on the tip of it with his wrestling shoe and kind of snapped the cartilage. It's still in the same shape and form that Bas put it in. That's what you see today."
I still thought everybody in this sport was crazy, and I was wondering if I was a little bit crazy too.
-- Frank Shamrock
Though it was as big a surprise to him as to anyone, when the fight was over it was Shamrock who got his hand raised. Then he had to go back to the locker room and prepare himself to fight again that same night, though the fear and confusion still hadn't worn off.

"My first ten fights or so it was like that. I was just so scared. You can see if you go back and watch them that there are moments where I just stop and look around, like, what's going on here? I was so scared for all those fights," he says.

"You have to remember, I had come from a pretty hard life. There was all this abuse and everything else, so the idea of fighting for sport was pretty heavy. Fighting to me was about fighting for your life, you know. It was about killing people or protecting people or stopping people from killing you. That's what it had been for me. So I went into those fights thinking, they're trying to kill me."

He would go on to lose via submission against Manubu Yamada later that same night. It was a bittersweet way to follow his first win with his first loss, but already Shamrock knew he had found something he wanted to be a part of, even if it all seemed to go by in a blur. There was no way he could have known that this was how he'd spend the next fifteen years of his life.

"I still thought everybody in this sport was crazy, and I was wondering if I was little bit crazy too," he says. "The whole thing was like a dream. I had to go back and watch it on tape. Then I was like, yeah, we're all freaking nuts."

In 1995 Pat Miletich had one long-term goal: getting into the UFC. His short-term goal? To make at least enough money so that he didn't starve in the meantime. Something called the "Battle of the Masters" could help him achieve both, or so he hoped.

Battle of the Masters was a one-night, eight-man, no-holds-barred (with the exception of biting and eye-gouging) fighting tournament at St. Andrew's Gym in Chicago.

It was also winner-take-all. The prize for second place was little more than a pat on the back and a free bag of ice for your swollen face.

"I needed the money worse than any of those guys," Miletich says now. "I don't think they knew what they were getting into."

Of course, neither did Miletich. Not really. He'd studied a variety of martial arts. He'd done some boxing, a little Muay Thai, and he knew the basic fundamentals of jiu-jitsu. Naturally, he knew how to wrestle after growing up in Iowa where, in his words, "you learn to sprawl before you learn to walk."

Still, street fights were the closest thing to MMA that Miletich had ever done at that point, and none of them featured matches against one well-trained opponent after another with $5,000 on the line. This was different than anything he'd ever done, and he knew it. He just didn't know how different.

"Back then it was no weight division, no time limit, no rules," he says. "It was a little unnerving, to tell you the truth."

The day before the tournament Miletich and a friend drove over from Iowa and spent the night in "a crummy little motel on the south side by Midway airport," and there Miletich plotted his game plan. Since the tournament winner would have to win three bouts by the end of the night, Miletich wanted to make sure he spent as little time in the ring as possible for each fight.

"In tournaments, my mentality was to go out and go a hundred and ten miles an hour the whole time until I got the guy out of there," he explains.

That's why he was slightly dismayed when he saw that his first official MMA opponent on October 28, 1995 was the much larger and more experienced Yasunori Matsumoto, who was a champion in judo and full-contact karate back home in Japan.

"They deliberately matched me against Yasunori Matsumoto because they thought he'd beat me," Miletich says. "The guy was a freak, number one. He was tougher than hell. But I was really freaked out by the fact that I was fighting a guy who had a ton of fights and I had never had an MMA fight before. He'd never had an exact MMA fight either, but a lot closer to it than I had."

But things looked good for Miletich early on. He caught Matsumoto in an armbar and felt sure that he might be about to end his first fight early. Only Matsumoto didn't tap. Not even when Miletich could feel the man's elbow popping loose.

"When I broke his arm -- when I caught him in a joint lock and dislocated his elbow -- and then he escaped and started choking me with the arm I just broke, that's when I went, okay, now I know what MMA is all about," Miletich laughs.

Looking back, he's still not sure if it was the guillotine that Matsumoto applied that he briefly struggled with, or if it was the sense of pure shock at what his opponent was able to withstand. Eventually, however, Miletich escaped and went on the offensive again. As Matsumoto began to fade, Miletich locked on a rear naked choke and finally forced the submission after nearly eight minutes of battle.

It wasn't exactly the quick finish he was hoping for, but at least it was over and he was through to the next round, even if he was unsure what awaited him there and beyond.

"I remember thinking, this is going to be a long, rough career if all the guys are like [Matsumoto]," Miletich says.

Fortunately, they weren't. At least not on that night.

Though the next two fighters Miletich faced in the tournament were both significantly larger than him, they were also less skilled and already fatigued from longer fights earlier in the evening. Miletich was able to put Angelo Rivera away with a rear naked choke less than two minutes into their fight, and then in the finals he downed Kevin Marino with the same move a little less than four minutes in.

And just like that, Miletich was the tournament winner. More importantly, he was also $5,000 richer.

It would be another three years and more than fifteen fights (including a second meeting with Matsumoto, which Miletich won via doctor stoppage) before Miletich would get his first shot in the UFC. In the meantime there were more one-night tournaments, more winner-take-all purses, and more chances for Miletich to prove to himself just how badly he wanted to make his dream come true.

"When you look back, I thought I got some experience out of it," says Miletich. "I thought, at the time, that I had a future in it at least. But like with any fighter, once you've got thirty or forty fights you look back at those first few and think, I knew absolutely nothing. Just nothing."

By the modern standards of the sport, fighting three times in one night just for a shot at a relatively meager paycheck might seem foolish – even insane. But back then, says Miletich, it didn't even occur to him not to try. Having been through them, he doesn't romanticize those early days of MMA the way some fans might, but at the very least he can still appreciate them for what they meant to him at the time.

"When you're the smallest guy in the tournament and it's three fights in one night, it wasn't that much fun, to be honest with you," Miletich chuckles. "But when it's ten grand or whatever for the winner, hell, young guys will fight to the death for ten grand. When you're thinking about your refrigerator at home and there's one slice of baloney in it, you're going to kick the hell out of some people for ten grand."

If you walked up to a 175-pound fighter with no pro bouts to his credit and asked him if he wanted to fight 205-pound Quinton "Rampage" Jackson for a hundred bucks on a week's notice, chances are he'd look at you like you'd just declared yourself to be the rightful king of England.

That's today. That's the state of the fight game in 2010. But back in Memphis, Tenn. in 1999, that exact same proposal didn't seem so bad when it was put to Mike Pyle.

"I was set to fight someone in my weight class," Pyle remembers. "I was 175 pounds soaking wet, with my gi on. My opponent had gotten hurt at a jiu-jitsu tournament a week before. Why the hell he was doing a jiu-jitsu tournament a week before, I don't know, but the promoter...called me and said, 'Hey, there's a problem. Your boy got hurt, so how about Rampage?' I was like, okay, let's do it. That was all it took."

Back then Pyle, now a UFC welterweight on a two-fight win streak, was just 24 years old. He'd been doing jiu-jitsu for the last few years in the gym he created inside a shed behind his mother's house in Dresden, Tennessee. After a few amateur fights and a heap of jiu-jitsu tournaments, he wanted to find out if he had what it took to hang with the pros.

And in Memphis in the late 90's, the pros could be found down at the New Daisy Theatre on Beale Street.

"You could smoke and drink beer in there, all that," Pyle says. "It was a crazy place, but the New Daisy was great. It gave you a great start. ...People would see the early UFC's, and by that point I think they were only on their 10th one or something, and you'd think, man, I want to do that. The New Daisy would give you the opportunity to get in there and really see if you were cut out for it or not."

Though Jackson would go on to become a Pride veteran and a UFC light heavyweight champion, back in 1999 he was just as much of an MMA newbie as Pyle was. Still, since the two of them had run in the same circles for a couple years, Pyle had a good idea of what he was getting himself into when he agreed to the fight.

"I knew who Rampage was due to local jiu-jitsu tournaments and stuff. He was in a different weight class, but he was wrecking people, picking them up and slamming them and sh-t. So I knew who he was, and he'd already patented his howl at the time. At all the tournaments, when he would beat someone he would howl. You notice a guy like that, so I knew it was going to be an interesting fight."

Pyle weighed in for the fight at 175 pounds, he says. Jackson clocked in at 205. In addition to the size disparity, Pyle also had two broken fingers to contend with. The plan, he says, was to rely on his submissions skills off his back and, if he had to strike, to do so only with the palm of his hand to avoid aggravating the existing injury.

Neither strategy played out the way Pyle thought it would.

"We just got in there and started getting after it. We were trying to put each other away. Probably in the entirety of the fight I had him in like 10 or 15 different [submissions] – triangles and guillotines and everything I could think of. He was just picking me up and throwing me around like I was nothing."

At one point, Pyle recalls, Jackson actually threw him out of the ring.

"I don't remember what round it was, but I was ejected from the ring, unwillingly," he laughs. "Over the top rope, WWE-style."

The problem for Pyle was that, while he was able to lock on several submissions, Jackson's strength advantage allowed him to power out of all them. As the fight wore on his palm strikes turned into closed-fist punches – broken fingers be damned – and his choke attempts got more and more desperate.

"I was close a few times, and that's when the powerbombs would come," says Pyle. "That's how you'd know you were close to a sub, when you started earning some frequent flier miles. I'd think, okay, I've got a hold of him, and then he'd slam his way out. Man, we were both exhausted after the fight."

After a grueling three rounds of slams and submission attempts, the fight finally went to the judges. All three scored it for Jackson, though to this day you won't convince Pyle that he deserved to be pegged a loser that night.

"I thought I'd won it because I had so many attacks, and he was basically just defending everything. He never shook me or hurt me during the fight, but I never hurt him, either. I guess he was on top mostly, but I was going for subs the whole time. In my heart I felt I had won because I was trying to finish. But it is what it is."

Once the fight was over, the pain started to settle in. After abandoning his palm strike idea in favor of full-scale punches, Pyle's hand had swollen to the point where his cornermen had to cut his glove to get it off him.

Still, the fight had been "a lot of fun," Pyle says. Not only did his ability to hang with a bigger, stronger opponent confirm that he had what it took to compete in this sport, it also taught him some important lessons.

"One thing I learned from that Rampage fight is that just jiu-jitsu wasn't going to cut it. I was going to have to learn to wrestle, get my boxing and my kickboxing down, everything. It was kind of an eye-opener."

Pyle spent the next few years making the necessary improvements to his overall game, but he had to learn fast. His second pro fight came in 2002 against a little-known fighter named Jon Fitch.

Almost a decade later, all are UFC fighters, slugging it out on pay-per-view events in front of packed arenas – and for considerably more than a hundred bucks. For Pyle, who started out training in a 13 x 15-foot shed behind his mother's house in a small town in Tennessee, it seems almost too bizarre to be true.

"I never thought I'd get the chance to go do anything like this. I just really liked the idea of it," he says. "I just wanted to practice hard and train hard and learn, and now...who'd have thunk it, right?"

On Saturday night 40-year-old Matt Lindland takes on Robbie Lawler at Strikeforce: Henderson vs. Babalu in St. Louis. It's a fight Lindland admits that he needs to win in order to keep his career moving in the right direction, and it's also one that he intends to turn into, as he puts it, "a gritty, messy fight." But before he finds out what his future holds, Lindland sits down with us to talk about his past, including his very first taste of MMA.

He has no problem admitting it now: back then, Matt Lindland had no idea how to even begin to prepare for an MMA fight. Then a 26-year-old wrestling coach at the University of Nebraska and an aspiring Olympic team member, all Lindland knew was that other Greco-Roman wrestlers had done it and it looked like a fun way to make a couple dollars.

One day he ran into Royce Alger, a well-known wrestler for the University of Iowa who was dabbling in MMA and was said to be headed to the UFC soon. Lindland told him he'd been thinking about taking the same path, and wanted to know how to get started.

"He was like 'Oh, you can't do this. You wouldn't be any good at it,'" Lindland recalls now. "I kind of said, 'Okay, but I think I want to give it a shot.' You know, thanks for the non-advice. But then he just kept going on and on about how Greco guys couldn't do this. I was just looking at him like, are you drunk or something? It was just this weird conversation. Finally I told him, 'I would fight you right here, right now.' He said, 'I only fight for money.' So I pulled out my billfold and I went in there and laid it all down on the counter. He just kind of laughed and walked away."

By that point Lindland had his mind made up and nothing was going to change it. In February of 1997 he got his first chance when he signed with the World Fighting Federation to compete in a sprawling 32-man tournament that would take place over the course of many events.

"It was an open-weight tournament, and I had no idea who I'd be fighting," says Lindland. "There were guys like Gary Goodridge, "Big Cat" Tom Erickson was in that tournament, "The Ghetto Man" Joe Charles, a lot of guys. It takes me back a few years just to talk about them."

His first draw came on February 14, when he was slated to take on an Armenian fighter named Karo Davtyan in Birmingham, Alabama. Since he had no idea how to train for an MMA fight, Lindland prepared by signing up for a wrestling tournament as a heavyweight so he could get used to dealing with bigger guys.

That's it. No submissions training. No striking.

"I figured boxing was just punching people," he says. "I'd punched people before."

The arena was "huge," according to Lindland, packed with upwards of 7,000 people, which was quite a turnout in the late '90's. But he wasn't the least bit nervous, he says. Only excited, and perhaps a bit too eager.

"I was so excited to get in there and compete that I ran across the ring and almost got my head kicked off. I finally took the guy down and kind of pounded him into a wrestling stoppage," Lindland says. "On the way back to the center of the mat to do the old hand raise thing in the middle, the guy was complaining that the fight shouldn't have been stopped. So I told him to go back to his corner and we'd start over."

And that's how, just like fellow MMA veteran Dennis Hallman, Lindland ended up fighting the same person twice in his MMA debut. Rather than listen to his opponent's grumbling, he offered to give him a second chance. And why not?

"There was no commission to tell us we couldn't do that in Birmingham, Alabama in 1997," Lindland says. "The referee and his corner and my corner were all very confused as to what was going on. I went back to my corner to start over and they were like, 'What are we doing?' I said, 'I told him I'd fight him again.' So we fought again."

Lindland won that one too, only via a more decisive TKO stoppage this time. There was no more complaining from Davtyan. Lindland, having now had a taste of mixed martial arts, was officially hooked.

His only thought after the fight was, as he puts it, "when can I do this again?"

"I did two more fights in '97 and then I realized that I would actually have to learn some skills if I wanted to do this," he says.

Though Lindland went on to realize his Olympic dreams at the 2000 games, winning a silver medal for the U.S. team, he still managed to break into the UFC before the year was out and had two more UFC bouts the following year.

As for the World Fighting Federation, the organization that had inked Lindland and other early MMA luminaries for it's ambitious open-weight tournament?

"They folded," he says. "The contract wasn't as good as the paper it was written on."

The internet will tell you that Yves Edwards' first fight was against a guy named Todd Justice at the World Pankration Championships on Oct. 26, 1997.

"That's not right," Edwards says. "I fought a few weeks, maybe a month before that, in the same building. I fought this guy, I don't remember his name, Kelly something."

It hardly needs to be said, but they did things differently at "pankration" events in Dallas, Texas back in 1997. For one thing, there were the weight classes. They existed, in a way, but they didn't exactly work in Edwards' favor.

"There were no weigh-ins whatsoever. I showed up and the guy I was supposed to fight was probably about 185 [pounds] or 190. He was huge. I was probably about 160. It was just kind of like, okay. Here we go."

This is where the average person might start to wonder what he'd gotten himself into, or at least come to a sudden realization regarding the necessity of weigh-ins. Not Edwards. He was too busy enjoying himself.

"That whole day was kind of tripped out. It was fun, though. Frank Trigg also fought on that card. I forget who he fought, but he and Guy Mezger got into an argument and he shoved Guy Mezger. Don Frye was there too. It was kind of weird, but really fun."

Edwards had just turned 19. He was studying accounting in school and working two jobs -- one as a bank teller and one as a waiter at Chili's. Somewhere in there he had found time to go down to a local gym with a friend.

One day in the gym Edwards faced off against a visiting fighter from New Mexico in what was essentially an in-house amateur fight. In the other guy's corner? Famed MMA trainer Greg Jackson. Though of course, there was hardly such thing as a famed MMA anything at the time.

"Nobody knew who Greg was back then. He was cornering this guy and the guy had wrestled some and I didn't really know much, but he had me in a kimura for like 18 minutes of the 20-minute match. I just refused to tap. My arm was basically touching the back of my head at some points.

"My buddy asked me afterwards, 'When you heard the ref say there was two minutes left, what were you thinking?' I was like, 'I was thinking I've got to find a way out of this and sub this guy or knock him out, and I don't have much time.' I guess just that mentality is what got me hooked. After that I went back to the gym as much as I could, just trying to get better, and I wanted to fight again as soon as possible. I think that kind of mentality is the reason why I wanted to do it."

When the chance presented itself in the Dallas fight card, Edwards jumped at it. Weight classes were hardly a concern. Until he stepped into the ring and got a look at his opponent, that is.

"I was nervous, for sure. It was weird being backstage and getting ready to go out and fight. It was the first time I'd been in a dressing room or locker room like that. I'd fought amateur and what not, but those were all on mats in gyms. It was nothing like this. It was kind of strange going out there and standing opposite a guy, and really the size didn't mean anything to me until I saw him and thought, man, that guy is huge. But at the time I was just happy to be fighting."

Fortunately for Edwards, on this day he had enough skill to negate his opponent's size. His grappling game was still developing, but a little jiu-jitsu went a long way in 1997.

"I just took his back and choked him out about three minutes in," Edwards recalls. "I think I got paid about $200. ... It's kind of funny, man. My dad found the video of it a couple months ago. Just watching it takes you back and puts a smile on your face. It reminds you of when you were a kid."

Edwards is no kid anymore. Now he's a 34-year-old veteran of the sport with over fifty pro fights to his credit. When he tells these stories to his younger counterparts, they soak it up with eager enthusiasm. It makes him wonder if they truly realize what the sport was like back then.

"It's funny to me when I talk to guys like Cole Miller or some of the other young guys. It's weird to me when they tell me they've been watching me since they were in high school. And it's funny when I hear them say, 'Man, I would love to fight one of those fights with no gloves and basically no rules.' I mean, now I think about those days and it seems crazy. I fought guys that were like, 220 [pounds], and I've never been above 170 in my life, and I fought them with no gloves and no rules. These guys think they would love to do it and I'm thinking, no you wouldn't. That's crazy."

This Saturday at UFC 123 in Detroit, welterweight Dennis Hallman faces Karo Parisyan in a battle of two MMA veterans who have 25 years worth of experience between them. For the 34-year-old Hallman, it will be his 62nd pro fight, at least according to one version of his record, though the true number is a little tougher to pin down, even for Hallman. Now, in the second installment of MMA Fighting's new feature "My First Fight"), Hallman looks back at his initial foray into the sport that would one day become his career.

In the winter of 1995 Dennis Hallman got a strange phone call. He didn't know what to make of it at first, though in retrospect it probably changed the course of his life.

"There was a kid named Bobby Jacobsen who was a couple years older than me, and he was sending videotapes into [MMA organization] Battlecade of himself sparring and fighting and stuff," Hallman remembers. "He got my number from someone in our high school and he called me up and said, 'I want to fight you on tape.' I was like, what? You want to fight me? For what? I don't even know you."

Hallman was 19 years old and a former high school state champion wrestler in Yelm, Washington. The latter was what interested the aspiring fighter who had called him up in search of a competent opponent for his audition tape. Once Hallman heard it explained, it actually didn't seem like such a bad idea.

"I came to his garage and fought him and I guillotine choked him," Hallman says. "He was like, 'Hey man, you'd be good at this. You should train with us and try to compete.' I was like, 'Okay. I like wrestling and I guess I'm not terrible at this since I just beat you, so teach me.' It took me a minute to figure out how not to get triangle choked, but then it just kind of rolled downhill for me."

Three months later Hallman did a brief exhibition bout against 15-year-old opponent who he still remembers for his almost unreasonable toughness, then a few months after that, in the spring of 1996, he got his first "sanctioned" MMA bout.

"May 18, 1996," Hallman says without a moment's hesitation. "It was at Matt Hume's gym, AMC Pankration in Kirkland, Washington. There was probably 300 people in there. They did a lot of kickboxing shows back then, and there would be three or four pankration bouts on every show."

Modeled after the Pancrase bouts in Japan that made early MMA fighters like Bas Rutten famous, the fighters wore shin-guards but no gloves. Strikes to the head were open-handed, but strikes to the body were closed-fisted.

Hallman's opponent that night was a Japanese shootfighter by the name of Hiroki Noritsugi.

"He was like the 1992 Japan shootfighting champion or something. He came to AMC to learn from Matt Hume, and I was just a local kid," says Hallman. "My dad was there, and he was super worried because he was watching these other fights happening before mine."

Hallman's was over fairly quickly, or at least it seemed that way at first. Noritsugi shot for a takedown in the opening seconds and Hallman locked up the guillotine choke, which was quickly becoming his go-to submission.

"He tapped out, I think like, 20 seconds into the fight," Hallman says. "He was really bummed and he said something along the lines of, you know, he didn't want to tap out. The language barrier was kind of tough, so I'm not sure. But I said, 'Okay, let's fight again, then.' Then the whole crowd got excited by that, and we just went ahead and fought the rest of the fight."

The second time they went the distance – which at the time consisted of one five-minute round – and Hallman won a decision. His record lists only the second win, as if he had nullified the first by offering to continue the fight.

But that kind of thing was not so uncommon back in 1996, Hallman points out. MMA was such a new sport in North America, everyone seemed to be making it up as they went. Back then, he says, no one thought it would turn into a legitimate sport and steady source of income for the fighters. Most of the time they were just hoping they wouldn't get into trouble for it.

"In 1998 I fought a fight in Canada against a guy named Leigh Remedios, and they told us before the fight that if the cops came to say we were filming a TV show," Hallman says. "It was just...we were allowed to kick in the balls in these fights, the rules were whatever we wanted. It happened to be my fight though that, in the middle the Mounties came in and we had to stop and be like, 'Yep, we're just shooting a video here.' Then they left, we restarted the bout, and I finished it. So it's like, back then we were worried about going to jail. That wasn't that long ago, really. It's funny how money changes everything."

That's why it's so strange to him that in 2010 he's in the UFC, fighting in front of sold-out arenas with pro athletes and movie stars watching from the audience. He's had so many fights by now that it's hard to keep track of them all, he says. Sometimes he'll see a fighter at an event and know that they faced each other once, even if he can't remember the guy's name right away.

He still has the VHS tape of that first fight against Noritsugi, he says. Sometimes he even gets it out and watches it. Maybe by the time his four kids are grown it will be a priceless family heirloom. Or maybe it will just be a relic that can always send him back in time.

"It's pretty choppy, but it's interesting to go back and watch yourself," he says. "My skills were pretty terrible back then. But I guess it was good for 1996."

On Nov. 13, MMA veteran Jorge Rivera will attempt to extend his three-fight winning streak against Alessio Sakara at UFC 122 in Oberhausen, Germany. But before he finds out what his future holds, Rivera took a look back at his past with us for "My First Fight," a new feature on MMA Fighting where fighters revisit their very first professional MMA bout to tell us what they remember now, and what they've learned since.

The year was 2001. Jorge Rivera, then 29 years old, had come down from Milford, Mass. to Chester, W. Va. for one simple reason.

"I really just wanted to know how good I was, because I honestly had no idea. It turned out the other guy was much better."

By that point he'd had, by his own estimation, seven or eight amateur bouts. He'd done well, but he couldn't be sure whether it was just because he was facing a lower order of competition.

So to find out he turned pro and showed up at Reality Fighting's "Attack at the Track" event to face Branden Lee Hinkle, who by then had been a pro for three years, fighting often in Brazil and Japan throughout the late nineties and early part of the millennium.

Rivera knew Hinkle's resume going into the bout, he says, so he was expecting a tough test. That didn't stop the butterflies from fluttering in his stomach when he first stepped in the cage.

"I was extremely nervous. At that time he had Mark Coleman in his corner, who had been the UFC [heavyweight] champion, Pride [2000 Open Weight Grand Prix] champion. I remember looking over at Coleman in his corner and just being in complete awe. Then I said to myself, put your head down and f-ck it, let's go."

Things started off well enough. Hinkle seemed content to stand and trade early on, which was exactly what Rivera was hoping for.

"I landed a good right hand that knocked his mouthpiece out and I had him on queer street for a second," he says. "I could hear Coleman screaming at him, 'Take him down!' He shot in with a double-leg and picked me up over his head and I was just thinking, 'Oh God, here we go.' I tried to grab on to the fence to hold on, but he slammed me hard. Then he just beat the piss out of me."

The fight was pretty one-sided after that, Rivera recalls. Hinkle kept pummeling him with punches and he kept taking them. This continued through the first round and into the second before Rivera's corner finally stopped it just short of the two-minute mark in the second frame.

"You know, they should have stopped it sooner, honestly," he laughs now. "Din Thomas was the referee and he told us before the fight, 'Look to your corner to stop the fight, because I'm not going to stop the fight.' Of course, when you're in a fight, you're stupid. You don't ever think they should stop the fight. But honestly, he should have stopped that fight."

Afterwards, Rivera says, he felt very much like a man who had just taken a severe beating. He looked like one too when he returned home to Milford, trying to hide his bruises behind a pair of sunglasses.

"My eyes were so swollen. My nose was broken. My face was all bruised up. I was a mess, man. I remember my son looking at me and it was like he was afraid of me, seeing my face like that. It just gave me more fire to train harder and to come back."

And yet, truth be told, the pounding he took at Hinkle's hands sowed some doubt in his mind. Losing like that was an inauspicious way to begin a career, and it made him wonder whether he was really cut out for this business.

"I was second-guessing myself for sure. I was like, 'Man, I just took a serious beating. Do I really want to continue to get beat up like this?' I was questioning myself. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't. But I just got back into training hard, beat a couple of people in the smaller shows, and just kept building myself back up."

Nine years later, Rivera is 18-7 as a pro, with 12 of those fights coming in the UFC. Even if his career got off to a rocky start, he went on to have memorable battles with fighters like Rich Franklin, Anderson Silva, and most recently, Nate Quarry.

It's been a good ride, he says, and one that's made him grateful he didn't pack it in after that one painful June night in West Virginia back in 2001.

"I've had great fights. If my career were to end today, I'd be happy with what I've done. Do I want more? Of course. It's human nature to always want more. But I can be happy with the fights I've had."

(Editor's Note: Check out Rivera's recent interview on The MMA Hour below.)