We're all going to have pretty similar stories. Unbeknownst to me, I had friends who were more familiar with the UFC than I was, and not because of the sport itself but because of the Playstation games. One friend was a huge Tito Ortiz fan and I had no idea about any of it. I only vaguely knew "ultimate fighting" was a thing because I loved Ken Shamrock in the WWF. He was my second favorite wrestler after Stone Cold. So one night in late 2004 IIIRC, all my friends were at my house and I was flipping through the channels and that friend told me to stop and go back because he saw some UFC stuff on SpikeTV. As it turned out, it was Ultimate Knockouts 3, and the last fight on that special was Ken Shamrock/Kimo II from UFC 48. We just happened to land on the broadcast at the end, and since I recognized Ken Shamrock, I figured I'd check it out. I was immediately hooked. But it was 2004/2005 and I knew nothing beyond what I'd just seen. I didn't actually become a fan of the sport until closer to UFC 52 in April of 2005. And it wasn't because of TUF, but because DirecTV had this looped promo thing on the PPV channel that would broadcast UFC 52 that included pre-fight interviews, highlights, and most importantly the full first fight between Randy and Chuck from UFC 43. I watched that fight like 20 times over a couple of days and told my friends that we HAD to get that PPV. And then stupid me didn't realize until later that UFC 52 was coming off of the heels of something called The Ultimate Fighter, so I ended up going to Spike after the show had already aired and caught a marathon of it one day. Then, icing on the cake, I learned that Ken Shamrock was fighting in the main event of the TUF Finale. That was life-changing stretch of time, and even though Ken and Randy, the two guys I was rooting for, both lost, I loved the sport so much that I developed an obsession that hasn't persisted as the sport as (d)evolved to today but that hasn't lost any of its intensity for the sport's first decade and change.
And yeah, the being in the high school part is the trippiest. Whenever a class of mine would go to the "computer lab" for goofy assignments/activities, I'd immediately log on here and just start posting about how Cro Cop would KO Arlovski (I still say prime-versus-prime Mirko finds and shatters Arlovski's glassy jaw), how GSP would never get good enough to handle Hughes' grappling (I was
very wrong on that one but it was fun seeing it play out all the same)
, and all the other fun mid-00s MMA topics.
I also loved how when the UFC bought PRIDE in 2007, a friend of mine who wasn't even in my grade came into my classroom as the day was starting because he just had to talk to me about it, and when my teacher noticed him, rather than me telling him to leave, I got up and left the class so we could continue our conversation in the halls, as obviously this breaking MMA news was more important than anything that I'd be discussing in high school sociology
Though I still have never forgiven my one friend, who
I introduced to both MMA and to Sherdog but who created an account on here before me and without telling me. He created his account in October of 2005 but didn't tell me until January of 2006. As soon as he told me that he was on here, I signed up, but that motherfucker got the 05 join date while I had the 06 join date. Sneaky little fucker
