Keith Jardine: The Hardest Working Man in MMA, Part One

The "Dean of Mean."

The "Techno-Viking."

The "Gatekeeper."

He might not be the next champion, the most marketable, and certainly not the prettiest fighter in the UFC's light-heavyweight division, but Keith Jardine has made himself a reputation like few others.

Originally coming off the Ultimate Fighter Season Two show, Jardine was coach Rich Franklin's first pick, and a heavy favorite to win the heavyweight class. Instead, he lost a gritty unanimous decision to the eventual winner, and the man who would soon become his teammate, Rashad Evans.

On the strength of that performance, Jardine found himself a spot on the show's Finale fight card, going against the hulking Kerry Schall, a true bruiser of a heavyweight with more than twice the experience of Jardine.

Despite this, it took Keith only until the halfway point of the second round to reduce Schall's legs to jelly with an arsenal of powerful leg kicks that would become his trademark, notching a TKO victory when Schall could no longer stand upright.

Three months after that, making the drop to his true weight class of 205 pounds, Jardine took on another highly-touted prospect from the TUF show, Mike Whitehead. Continuing what would become a trend, the Miletich-trained Whitehead underperformed and was easily outworked by Jardine en route to a unanimous decision.

Next up, two months after that, Keith went up against a proven LHW contender in Stephan Bonnar. After a prolonged war of attrition (yet another pattern emerging in Jardine's fights,) Bonnar walked away with the decision victory.

Many thought he won the fight, including commentator Joe Rogan, who lamented that the judges gave scoring preference to Bonnar's punches over Jardine's damaging strikes to the legs.

Time for a rest? Of course not. Coming off the heels of his first UFC loss, Jardine took his third fight in four months, taking on the dangerous newcomer Wilson Gouveia.

After a first round that saw Keith wobbled by a taste of his own medicine, as Gouveia dished out a barrage of leg kicks, he came back and aggressively took the second and third rounds cleanly from a fading Gouveia to win the decision.

People weren't talking about Jardine as a contender just yet, but he was raising some eyebrows and fast becoming a known commodity for both his frequency of competition and the brutality of his fights.

After a six month rest, he took what was considered to be a big step up in competition, taking on the original TUF winner and future LHW champion, Forrest Griffin.

On paper the fight looked like bad news for Jardine. Forrest was coming off a razor-thin split decision loss to Tito Ortiz, which to many signalled his arrival into the upper echelon of the division.

In addition, since that fight, Forrest had cleanly dominated Stephan Bonnar, the last man to beat Jardine. The "MMAth" said that Jardine was in over his head...but apparently no one had told him.

After nearly an entire round of exchanges, most of which Griffin appeared to be winning, Jardine stepped in and tagged the future champ on the chin with an uppercut, stunning him, and followed up with a vicious barrage of ground and pound that gave him a first round TKO over the man who was supposed to defeat him.

This was not billed as a No. 1 contender's match, but surely it had to have had some ramifications on the title picture.

However, in another theme that plagues Jardine's career, there was little mention of his advancing in the ranks. In fact, following the biggest win of his career, he was put up against a newcomer making his UFC debut.

Unfortunately for Jardine, fate had a cruel surprise in store for him. Read part two of this article to find out all about it, as the series continues!