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Evan Tanner has spent the majority of his life seeking adventures, knowledge, and stories to tell.
He has been a slaughterhouse worker. He has built beach houses in South Carolina and worked night security at a ski resort. He has bailed water out of a sinking boat in the Pacific Ocean in a frantic attempt to make it to shore before he went down with it.
His thirst for new experiences has led him down many diverse paths in 37 years -- some of them good, and some of them less so. He took his first MMA fight in 1997 because he thought it would be a fun story to tell. That's the kind of guy Tanner is.
It turned out that Tanner was a natural. Almost 40 fights and 11 years later, Tanner battles Yushin Okami at UFC 82 on Saturday.
"It's going to be a tough fight," Tanner said. "He obviously has a very good ground game. He's very solid in the clinch. I understand he's extremely strong. I expect him to utilize that clinch work, and his strength and ground work in the fight."
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| Tanner is back, and he's focused. (UFC) |
Taking all of that into account, Tanner is the obvious underdog. But if there is one thing Tanner has proved time and again, it's that he is mentally tough. He showed it against Phil Baroni in 2003, rallying back from the brink of knockout to ground Baroni and win via controversial submission. Tanner showed his toughness again in a Baroni rematch, opting to stand and trade with Baroni and winning the fight without relying on his superior submission skills. Tanner has been trapped in tight chokes, pummeled on his feet and still come back to win fights. In light of that, Tanner (32-6, 11-4 UFC) doesn't fear being the underdog. While he respects Okami's strengths, he is not worried.
"I've been competing for many years now," he said. "I've fought guys that have weighed 320 pounds. I'm not too overly concerned about his strength. That is something I'm going to have to take into account, though. I'm sure I'll be OK."
The last time Tanner fought, he trapped Justin Levens in a triangle choke for a first-round submission. The win marked Tanner's return to the win column after a two-loss skid that began with his middleweight title loss to Franklin and continued with a disappointing TKO loss due to cuts to David Loiseau at UFC Fight Night 2. Besides Franklin and Loiseau, the only other UFC loss on Tanner's record was to Tito Ortiz, who knocked him out with a slam at UFC 30.
Rather than putting Tanner back on the path to title contention, his win over Levens ended up marking the start of a long break from fighting. It was time for another round of adventures, most of which Tanner documented with a series of online journal entries and photographs for his fans to enjoy.
In one incident Tanner wrote about, his good intentions to fix up 1939 Tahiti Ketch sailboat and take it out on the ocean ended with a harrowing experience.
"(It was) an old wooden boat that needed a lot of work," Tanner said. "I put a lot of work into it, but I was running out of time at the harbor I was in. So I had to go ahead and take it out on the ocean before it was really ready and try to get it down to a harbor around the San Diego area. I was going to try to find a place to store it more permanently, you know, so I could come back, start training, and finance the restoration of it."
His first trip in the boat would be the last.
