“I just remember standing up there like, ‘You fight until the end! If you don’t fight until you’re knocked out, I’ll dock your pay!’” It wasn’t until weigh-in day arrived on the American side of the border - and the pre-event fighter meeting unfolded - that Bader and his buds started realizing they may have been sold a false bill of goods. The fighters were going to be treated like kings, he claimed. The promoter of SE Vale Tudo had sold the boys hard on what he framed as a dream event. “It was just chaos back in those days.” - Ryan Bader It still felt as if almost anything was possible on any given night, so the excursion south of the border was simply supposed to be par for the course. The scene was still growing out of its lawless roots during the late aughts. He was supposed to fight MMA, and he just basically changed it, wouldn’t come out until it was basically boxing with small gloves.”
“And Tommy Morrison was on that card, the HIV-positive boxer. “It was just chaos back in those days,” says Bader, who was living a double life working a 9-to-5 job doing sales during his weekdays. If ever Bader needed a pre-fight confidence boost, the sight of that clown show certainly did the trick. But not any more surreal than three weeks later when his next opponent injured himself backstage by whipping himself in the eye with his own ponytail. “Then they’d stop and they’d come in with towels and they’d wipe it off, and you’d go again.” When Bader won by choking his foe unconscious with an early arm-triangle, he basically drowned the poor guy in a pool of his own filth. “I went to go throw a leg kick and it looked like I was sliding into home plate,” Bader remembers. Because the fights were held outdoors and the promoter cheaped out for a junky vinyl canvas, rainwater pooled up in-cage like a shallow creek. In just his third month of fighting professionally, Bader competed for pocket change in a rainstorm on a pier in the Cayman Islands. ”īellator heavyweight champion Ryan Bader and his cohorts - fellow recent Arizona State University wrestling grads Dollaway and Cain Velasquez - may have been new to their MMA careers in the fall of 2007, but they’d already seen plenty of absurdity in their short times on the job. We didn’t give a f*ck really,” says MMA veteran C.B. None of them knew any better back then anyway. After all, who sends three naive kids trekking out on foot across the U.S.-Mexico border all by their lonesome? Who promises a sold-out show with big-time sponsors at a big-time venue, then starts fight day off like this, a trio of Arizona wrestlers wandering across the Nogales desert with their gear slung over their shoulders like bindles?Īh, the joys of regional MMA. In retrospect, there were so many red flags. So let us now go backwards to October 2007, to a small show with big expectations in Nogales, Mexico: SE Vale Tudo. Today’s comes from Ryan Bader, who fights Corey Anderson in a hometown affair in Phoenix as part of Bellator’s light heavyweight grand prix on Saturday at Bellator 268.
We like to document those stories here on Tales From The Smokers. Nearly every fighter who comes up in this game has at least one story of an adventure they’ll never forget from their time on the early circuit. The regional scene in combat sports can be a bizarre and unpredictable place.
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