MMA: How I Came to Love Rashad Evans

It was August 2005.

While walking to work, I passed a bus shelter adorned with a photo of Forrest Griffin, in a flying pose, and visibly beaten up.  The purpose of the display was to herald the upcoming premiere of the second season of The Ultimate Fighter.

Now I had watched the first season, but only sporadically—and for some reason, right there and then, I decided that would not be the case this time around.

So, the show began, the fighters and coaches—Matt Hughes and Rich Franklin—settled in, and one of the first things I noticed was that one of the heavyweight fighters wasn't even as big as half of the welterweights!

What was this—some kind of a joke?

And the "joke" only seemed all the more ridiculous after an injured Kerry Schall had to leave the house and Dan Christison was brought in to take his spot. 

There was Dan, who goes 6-foot-8, standing just inside the front door, engaged in a conversation with this man who was half his size.  (It never occurred to me at the time that I would actually meet them both someday).

The weeks moved along, and in Week 5 it seemed for all the world as if this sawed-off impostor was going to be sent packing, as he was picked by the other team to fight.

But only did he not lose the fight, he dominated it so lopsidedly that he was able to go in this dance routine right in the middle of the octagon!  For this, he came under withering, even malicious criticism, not only from Matt Hughes and one of his fighters (not the one he had "disrespected," who didn't seem offended by it at all), but from a broad cross-section of cyberspace as well.

That clinched it for me.  All my life I could never abide self-righteousness and judgmentalism—which I saw being practiced here, in all its holier-than-thou, hypocritical horror.  From that moment on, I would support this man with every fiber of my being.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, I'm talking about Rashad Evans.

Where the story goes from here is well documented in the annals of mixed martial arts.  After winning three more fights, the third being the live finale where he overcame nearly a foot in size, Rashad earned the obligatory three-year, six-figure contract with the UFC.

In his second fight thereunder, I met him for the first time, at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, along with several members of his family and his coaches.

I would go on to see him fight live three more times (also traveling to Albuquerque to visit him at Jackson's in April 2007), culminating in his light-heavyweight title-fight win over the same Forrest Griffin whose image on that poster set all of this in motion, after which I was accorded the privilege of hanging out with Rashad and his entourage at the post-fight after-party.

Allow me to state that never have I met a group of finer and just plain nicer people than Rashad and everyone associated with him, and never at any point have I looked at him and seen a "black fighter." 

It is absolutely no exaggeration on my part to assert that the totality of my experience with Rashad has changed my life.

This is a story with multiple morals: Judge not, lest ye be judged; it's not how big you are, it's what you have inside you that counts; and oh yes, never underestimate the power of a bus-shelter ad.