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The UFC fighter who tapped out first
BACKSTAGE AT UFC 1, Art Jimmerson was sure he was going to win the whole thing. Like, very sure. The boxer outweighed his first opponent by a good 20 pounds, and he laughed out loud when he saw that the guy -- a young jiu-jitsu black belt named Royce Gracie -- was going to be wearing what looked like a bathrobe into the cage.
"Easy money," he thought.
So easy, in fact, that he decided to wear only one boxing glove into the cage the night of Nov. 12, 1993. He had both gloves with him. But he figured he was so much more skilled than the other guys who showed up at UFC 1 that he would KO his way through the tournament bracket by peppering each of his opponents with his jab, then fire his ungloved right hand and put their lights out with one punch. He couldn't wait to make a quick $70,000.
Jimmerson had won 15 straight boxing matches, with a possible fight against Thomas Hearns in the near future. That made him a huge get for the inaugural Ultimate Fighting Championship as his sport's representative.
The UFC began with a very direct question as its organizing principle: Which combat discipline is the best? So the fighters weren't just competing for themselves; they were elected as torchbearers for their entire sport. Jimmerson was boxing's senator at the first-ever bare-knuckle congress.
But as he warmed up, Jimmerson had a haunting exchange with an LAPD officer he ran into backstage. At the time, a few years before he became MMA's most famous ref, Officer John McCarthy was a friend and sparring partner of Gracie, and Jimmerson approached McCarthy when he saw him.
"You're with my opponent, right?" Jimmerson asked.
McCarthy nodded, and Jimmerson stepped back and squared him up.
"What's he going to do with this?" Jimmerson asked. Then he threw out his jab -- bam-bam-bam -- a few times in rapid succession. "How's he going to get past that?"
McCarthy smiled. At the time, boxing was king of combat. If you could have bet money on which skill set was the best for hand-to-hand fighting, boxing would have been about -1,000, and boxers would have all bet their houses on their craft as the best.
But McCarthy dabbled in enough disciplines to know what he thought UFC 1 would prove: That an elite jiu-jitsu practitioner could weather kicks and punches and drag fights to the ground, then end them there. McCarthy asked Jimmerson about his comfort in clenches, and Jimmerson indicated he didn't think it would ever get there.
"Try to hit me with a jab and I'll try to get ahold of you," McCarthy said.
Jimmerson gave him a curious look -- he didn't want to hurt the poor guy. "It's OK," McCarthy said. "If you hit me, you hit me. That's on me."
So Jimmerson locked in and started to throw a jab. McCarthy surged forward and into his body. He didn't drill him hard, but he knocked Jimmerson down without much effort and got on top of him for a second before letting up.
Jimmerson vaguely remembers the exchange with McCarthy. But McCarthy says he'll never forget what Jimmerson said to him as he helped the fighter up: "Oh my god, he's going to break my arms and legs, isn't he?"
MARCUS KOWAL HAS A QUAKE TAKE about the impact of UFC 1. The former Strikeforce fighter and longtime MMA trainer believes that we've learned more about fighting in the past 30 years than we have in all of human history combined. This means the MMA fighters you watch on TV every weekend aren't just the best in the world. They are the best that the world has ever produced.
"I say this with a tremendous amount of respect for traditional martial arts because we are where we are because of traditional martial arts," says Kowal, who has cornered Frank Trigg and worked with Urijah Faber, among many others, at his MMA training center in Los Angeles. "But it's like comparing a T-ford with a Tesla -- MMA fighters today are lights years ahead of any point in history."
McCarthy, for one, thinks Kowal is "absolutely right." As he explains: "Until UFC 1, there was no mixed martial arts. Every martial art was segregated and only fought within itself. We had no idea what was going to happen out there."
So in retrospect, UFC 1 was less a night of fights and more a set of experiments. This sounds odd to say out loud now, three decades into the UFC, but the world had almost no clue what the best way was for humans to prevail in hand-to-hand combat.
There were karate tournaments, wrestling dual meets, submission grappling leagues and so on within every discipline. But we had never seen a jiu-jitsu black belt fight against a boxer, or a Muay Thai fighter go against an American folkstyle college wrestler. Throw in the barrage of mostly comical martial arts movies of the 1980s -- think Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and The Karate Kid trilogy -- and what worked and what didn't in real life was an open question. That made the UFC an unprecedented adventure that led to unprecedented discoveries.
McCarthy thought with nearly 100 percent certainty that Gracie would win UFC 1. McCarthy grew up wrestling and boxing and got into martial arts in the early 1990s. Almost immediately after running into the Gracie family brand of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, he was blown away at the way they could dictate how fights unfolded. The first time he ever rolled with a Gracie, it was Royce. McCarthy used the power of his then-310-pound body to double-leg Gracie to his back. He squished down onto Gracie and heard him breathing near his ear. It was strained, but calm. This was where McCarthy usually overwhelmed people.
Not Gracie. As McCarthy tried to leverage his massive size advantage to get a tap, he heard Gracie whisper into his ear, "You've seen Rocky, right? Nobody thought he could win, either." Within 30 seconds, Gracie had McCarthy submitted from an arm bar. So McCarthy thought Gracie would do the same thing to everybody at UFC 1. "If you go back to UFC 1, nobody truly knew what they were getting into other than Royce," McCarthy says. "He had been doing it his whole life."
But even he couldn't say for sure. UFC 1 was a bizarre spectacle, centered around fighting styles more than fighters -- techniques rather than people. The card was a one-night tournament featuring eight fighters and seven fights. Those seven fights lasted a total of 12 minutes and 33 seconds. By comparison, a recent UFC event in September, Adesanya vs. Strickland, lasted twice as long as the entire UFC 1 card. It was fast, brutal and scary.
Gracie's uncle, Rorion, was a key figure in helping then-UFC owner Art Davie set up the inaugural event. He had one ask: That his nephew gets to fight Jimmerson in the first round. He believed that Royce was going to shock the world and romp through the bracket, and he wanted him to start with the presumed favorite right out of the gate.
The night began with sumo wrestler Teila Tuli fighting France's Gerard Gordeau, who practiced a brand of kickboxing known as Savate. Tuli weighed about 450 pounds, twice the size of Gordeau, and looked like an obvious winner because of his sheer size. At the bell, Tuli rushed the French fighter. Gordeau eluded him, stepped back and unleashed a head kick that sprayed out three of Tuli's teeth. Two got stuck in Gordeau's foot, and one soared through the air. It was 26 seconds of sheer violence, and the upheaval to everything we thought we knew about fighting had begun.
The crowd was stunned. Even the fighters were shaken. McCarthy remembers the run-up that night backstage being loud and boisterous. There were fists and feet hitting pads, and trainers hyping up their guys with barking and grunting. Then Tuli's tooth went flying through the air, clearly visible on camera, and McCarthy says an eerie hush went over the fighters warming up.
"It was like a ghost town," McCarthy says. "Dead silent. It was all of those guys saying, 'Holy s--, this is real.'" As Jimmerson warmed up, his manager rushed back from watching the first fight and was sobbing. "Art, walk away," he said. "Just go. Get out of the arena."
Jimmerson was feeling some pangs of regret, but he also felt like he made a commitment. He played hardball with UFC management at the last minute when he realized how much legitimacy he was bringing as a well-known top-10 boxer. He couldn't just sneak out a side door.
As the fight card rolled on, Jimmerson watched the brawls in front of him and kept telling himself that he was a real fighter. Someone who'd punched and been punched in front of crowds many, many times. As vicious as the fights were, he talked himself back into believing that his striking skills could allow him to outclass his opponents. One glove, two gloves, no gloves, whatever. Jimmerson received $20,000 to show up, and he figured he'd win the $50,000 grand prize by keeping his three opponents at arm's length before knocking them out.
A few minutes later, Jimmerson made the walk to the cage. He paced in his corner, one glove on, as Gracie emerged from the back in a conga line of other Gracies in white gis, jogging into the cage to fight.
Jimmerson still thought he was going to win. But McCarthy's warning was ping-ponging inside his brain. He thought the worst-case scenario was that Gracie got him on the mat and he tapped out.
No one knew it at the time, but he'd just been locked into the cage with MMA's first superstar, and was facing a decade of infamy.
Conor McGregor at a Target in Los Angeles and has a 15-second video of McGregor hyping up the legend of Art "One Glove" Jimmerson. In anticipation of the 30th anniversary, the UFC brought in Jimmerson and the five other UFC 1 fighters for a roundtable video shoot in January. "I feel more love from the MMA community than boxing sometimes," he says, "and I'm OK with that."
When he talks to people, someone always asks, What did you do with the glove? He smiles and explains the journey he has been on with the literal representation of something that dogged him for two decades. He considers it a treasured item at this point, which is why he always declines offers to buy it. With the 30th anniversary of UFC 1 approaching, those offers have picked up frequency, culminating in one person offering him $60,000 for what is considered perhaps the most famous piece of equipment in UFC history.
At breakfast in LA recently, Jimmerson says he usually tells people he could never give up something so important to him, an artifact that he couldn't part with because it symbolizes what is one of the most difficult things he has overcome in his life -- turning a humiliating moment into a mound of humility. He could never sell that.
As he eats pancakes, though, Jimmerson pauses between bites. He has something he wants to say. He gives a quick glance around to make sure nobody is nearby, and then he puts his hand up beside his mouth to shield the world from knowing.
"Everybody asks about the glove," he says, before lowering his voice to a whisper. "Shhh. I have no idea where it is."
Jimmerson pauses at the last classroom and waits a beat before getting resigned to striking out. Hey, UFC 1 happened two years before DVDs were invented, and none of these kids knows what a DVD is. It's an understandable strikeout.
But then a funny thing happens.
"Mr. Jimmerson?" yells a guy about 10 yards away, coming out of a kickboxing class. "Is that you?"
Jimmerson swings around.
The guy is about 25. He has MMA gloves on and shin pads from what was a very sweaty sparring session. He rushes over to Jimmerson and gives him one of those two-on-one handshakes the pope gets.
His name is Josh Moreno, and he recently had his first pro MMA fight. He'd seen Jimmerson at a UFC a few years earlier and approached him. Moreno is the perfect person -- an MMA superfan who grew up with the UFC and now does it himself -- to cherish a guy like Jimmerson. In that demo, Jimmerson and the men of UFC 1 are legends, not so much for how good they were but for how gutsy they were to go first. They exchanged contact info at that UFC and connected afterward for some striking training. For Moreno, there was something invaluable about meeting a guy who tried and failed. It made him want to try, too. "Oh my god, he's a wonderful man," Moreno says. "He made me believe in myself so much. It clicked right away."
Moreno's MMA coach walks past, and the young fighter frantically waves him down. "This is Art Jimmerson," Moreno says. "He's the one-gloved boxer."
The second guy, Octavio Robledo, not only does the double-squeeze handshake, but he drops down to one knee and bows his head. "Such an honor," Robledo says. "Such an honor. To have been in there, period, is incredible. You guys are a part of what we all have joined."
Jimmerson gives them each one more hug, and then he walks about 20 feet into the center of the gym, where a giant Octagon resides. The fuss around him causes a few people to lower their protein potions and drift over toward Jimmerson as he climbs into the cage. He asks someone to take a picture of him standing in there, and as she takes it, a man whispers into her ear, "I think he fought at UFC 1."
She holds up a smartphone as more people gather outside to meet Jimmerson. He poses for photos and gives out an aw-shucks look to everyone like he's a little embarrassed.
But he loves every second of it. It took him 30 years to get comfortable in moments like these, accepting the infamy of his 138 seconds as a UFC fighter, because he knows that he was one of the eight men willing to try. He has a smirk on his face like he knew this would happen all along. Like a man with faith -- an audacious faith.
https://www.espn.com/mma/ufc/story/_/id/38827608/art-jimmerson-one-glove-ufc-1
BACKSTAGE AT UFC 1, Art Jimmerson was sure he was going to win the whole thing. Like, very sure. The boxer outweighed his first opponent by a good 20 pounds, and he laughed out loud when he saw that the guy -- a young jiu-jitsu black belt named Royce Gracie -- was going to be wearing what looked like a bathrobe into the cage.
"Easy money," he thought.
So easy, in fact, that he decided to wear only one boxing glove into the cage the night of Nov. 12, 1993. He had both gloves with him. But he figured he was so much more skilled than the other guys who showed up at UFC 1 that he would KO his way through the tournament bracket by peppering each of his opponents with his jab, then fire his ungloved right hand and put their lights out with one punch. He couldn't wait to make a quick $70,000.
Jimmerson had won 15 straight boxing matches, with a possible fight against Thomas Hearns in the near future. That made him a huge get for the inaugural Ultimate Fighting Championship as his sport's representative.
The UFC began with a very direct question as its organizing principle: Which combat discipline is the best? So the fighters weren't just competing for themselves; they were elected as torchbearers for their entire sport. Jimmerson was boxing's senator at the first-ever bare-knuckle congress.
But as he warmed up, Jimmerson had a haunting exchange with an LAPD officer he ran into backstage. At the time, a few years before he became MMA's most famous ref, Officer John McCarthy was a friend and sparring partner of Gracie, and Jimmerson approached McCarthy when he saw him.
"You're with my opponent, right?" Jimmerson asked.
McCarthy nodded, and Jimmerson stepped back and squared him up.
"What's he going to do with this?" Jimmerson asked. Then he threw out his jab -- bam-bam-bam -- a few times in rapid succession. "How's he going to get past that?"
McCarthy smiled. At the time, boxing was king of combat. If you could have bet money on which skill set was the best for hand-to-hand fighting, boxing would have been about -1,000, and boxers would have all bet their houses on their craft as the best.
But McCarthy dabbled in enough disciplines to know what he thought UFC 1 would prove: That an elite jiu-jitsu practitioner could weather kicks and punches and drag fights to the ground, then end them there. McCarthy asked Jimmerson about his comfort in clenches, and Jimmerson indicated he didn't think it would ever get there.
"Try to hit me with a jab and I'll try to get ahold of you," McCarthy said.
Jimmerson gave him a curious look -- he didn't want to hurt the poor guy. "It's OK," McCarthy said. "If you hit me, you hit me. That's on me."
So Jimmerson locked in and started to throw a jab. McCarthy surged forward and into his body. He didn't drill him hard, but he knocked Jimmerson down without much effort and got on top of him for a second before letting up.
Jimmerson vaguely remembers the exchange with McCarthy. But McCarthy says he'll never forget what Jimmerson said to him as he helped the fighter up: "Oh my god, he's going to break my arms and legs, isn't he?"
MARCUS KOWAL HAS A QUAKE TAKE about the impact of UFC 1. The former Strikeforce fighter and longtime MMA trainer believes that we've learned more about fighting in the past 30 years than we have in all of human history combined. This means the MMA fighters you watch on TV every weekend aren't just the best in the world. They are the best that the world has ever produced.
"I say this with a tremendous amount of respect for traditional martial arts because we are where we are because of traditional martial arts," says Kowal, who has cornered Frank Trigg and worked with Urijah Faber, among many others, at his MMA training center in Los Angeles. "But it's like comparing a T-ford with a Tesla -- MMA fighters today are lights years ahead of any point in history."
McCarthy, for one, thinks Kowal is "absolutely right." As he explains: "Until UFC 1, there was no mixed martial arts. Every martial art was segregated and only fought within itself. We had no idea what was going to happen out there."
So in retrospect, UFC 1 was less a night of fights and more a set of experiments. This sounds odd to say out loud now, three decades into the UFC, but the world had almost no clue what the best way was for humans to prevail in hand-to-hand combat.
There were karate tournaments, wrestling dual meets, submission grappling leagues and so on within every discipline. But we had never seen a jiu-jitsu black belt fight against a boxer, or a Muay Thai fighter go against an American folkstyle college wrestler. Throw in the barrage of mostly comical martial arts movies of the 1980s -- think Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and The Karate Kid trilogy -- and what worked and what didn't in real life was an open question. That made the UFC an unprecedented adventure that led to unprecedented discoveries.
McCarthy thought with nearly 100 percent certainty that Gracie would win UFC 1. McCarthy grew up wrestling and boxing and got into martial arts in the early 1990s. Almost immediately after running into the Gracie family brand of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, he was blown away at the way they could dictate how fights unfolded. The first time he ever rolled with a Gracie, it was Royce. McCarthy used the power of his then-310-pound body to double-leg Gracie to his back. He squished down onto Gracie and heard him breathing near his ear. It was strained, but calm. This was where McCarthy usually overwhelmed people.
Not Gracie. As McCarthy tried to leverage his massive size advantage to get a tap, he heard Gracie whisper into his ear, "You've seen Rocky, right? Nobody thought he could win, either." Within 30 seconds, Gracie had McCarthy submitted from an arm bar. So McCarthy thought Gracie would do the same thing to everybody at UFC 1. "If you go back to UFC 1, nobody truly knew what they were getting into other than Royce," McCarthy says. "He had been doing it his whole life."
But even he couldn't say for sure. UFC 1 was a bizarre spectacle, centered around fighting styles more than fighters -- techniques rather than people. The card was a one-night tournament featuring eight fighters and seven fights. Those seven fights lasted a total of 12 minutes and 33 seconds. By comparison, a recent UFC event in September, Adesanya vs. Strickland, lasted twice as long as the entire UFC 1 card. It was fast, brutal and scary.
Gracie's uncle, Rorion, was a key figure in helping then-UFC owner Art Davie set up the inaugural event. He had one ask: That his nephew gets to fight Jimmerson in the first round. He believed that Royce was going to shock the world and romp through the bracket, and he wanted him to start with the presumed favorite right out of the gate.
The night began with sumo wrestler Teila Tuli fighting France's Gerard Gordeau, who practiced a brand of kickboxing known as Savate. Tuli weighed about 450 pounds, twice the size of Gordeau, and looked like an obvious winner because of his sheer size. At the bell, Tuli rushed the French fighter. Gordeau eluded him, stepped back and unleashed a head kick that sprayed out three of Tuli's teeth. Two got stuck in Gordeau's foot, and one soared through the air. It was 26 seconds of sheer violence, and the upheaval to everything we thought we knew about fighting had begun.
The crowd was stunned. Even the fighters were shaken. McCarthy remembers the run-up that night backstage being loud and boisterous. There were fists and feet hitting pads, and trainers hyping up their guys with barking and grunting. Then Tuli's tooth went flying through the air, clearly visible on camera, and McCarthy says an eerie hush went over the fighters warming up.
"It was like a ghost town," McCarthy says. "Dead silent. It was all of those guys saying, 'Holy s--, this is real.'" As Jimmerson warmed up, his manager rushed back from watching the first fight and was sobbing. "Art, walk away," he said. "Just go. Get out of the arena."
Jimmerson was feeling some pangs of regret, but he also felt like he made a commitment. He played hardball with UFC management at the last minute when he realized how much legitimacy he was bringing as a well-known top-10 boxer. He couldn't just sneak out a side door.
As the fight card rolled on, Jimmerson watched the brawls in front of him and kept telling himself that he was a real fighter. Someone who'd punched and been punched in front of crowds many, many times. As vicious as the fights were, he talked himself back into believing that his striking skills could allow him to outclass his opponents. One glove, two gloves, no gloves, whatever. Jimmerson received $20,000 to show up, and he figured he'd win the $50,000 grand prize by keeping his three opponents at arm's length before knocking them out.
A few minutes later, Jimmerson made the walk to the cage. He paced in his corner, one glove on, as Gracie emerged from the back in a conga line of other Gracies in white gis, jogging into the cage to fight.
Jimmerson still thought he was going to win. But McCarthy's warning was ping-ponging inside his brain. He thought the worst-case scenario was that Gracie got him on the mat and he tapped out.
No one knew it at the time, but he'd just been locked into the cage with MMA's first superstar, and was facing a decade of infamy.
Conor McGregor at a Target in Los Angeles and has a 15-second video of McGregor hyping up the legend of Art "One Glove" Jimmerson. In anticipation of the 30th anniversary, the UFC brought in Jimmerson and the five other UFC 1 fighters for a roundtable video shoot in January. "I feel more love from the MMA community than boxing sometimes," he says, "and I'm OK with that."
When he talks to people, someone always asks, What did you do with the glove? He smiles and explains the journey he has been on with the literal representation of something that dogged him for two decades. He considers it a treasured item at this point, which is why he always declines offers to buy it. With the 30th anniversary of UFC 1 approaching, those offers have picked up frequency, culminating in one person offering him $60,000 for what is considered perhaps the most famous piece of equipment in UFC history.
At breakfast in LA recently, Jimmerson says he usually tells people he could never give up something so important to him, an artifact that he couldn't part with because it symbolizes what is one of the most difficult things he has overcome in his life -- turning a humiliating moment into a mound of humility. He could never sell that.
As he eats pancakes, though, Jimmerson pauses between bites. He has something he wants to say. He gives a quick glance around to make sure nobody is nearby, and then he puts his hand up beside his mouth to shield the world from knowing.
"Everybody asks about the glove," he says, before lowering his voice to a whisper. "Shhh. I have no idea where it is."
Jimmerson pauses at the last classroom and waits a beat before getting resigned to striking out. Hey, UFC 1 happened two years before DVDs were invented, and none of these kids knows what a DVD is. It's an understandable strikeout.
But then a funny thing happens.
"Mr. Jimmerson?" yells a guy about 10 yards away, coming out of a kickboxing class. "Is that you?"
Jimmerson swings around.
The guy is about 25. He has MMA gloves on and shin pads from what was a very sweaty sparring session. He rushes over to Jimmerson and gives him one of those two-on-one handshakes the pope gets.
His name is Josh Moreno, and he recently had his first pro MMA fight. He'd seen Jimmerson at a UFC a few years earlier and approached him. Moreno is the perfect person -- an MMA superfan who grew up with the UFC and now does it himself -- to cherish a guy like Jimmerson. In that demo, Jimmerson and the men of UFC 1 are legends, not so much for how good they were but for how gutsy they were to go first. They exchanged contact info at that UFC and connected afterward for some striking training. For Moreno, there was something invaluable about meeting a guy who tried and failed. It made him want to try, too. "Oh my god, he's a wonderful man," Moreno says. "He made me believe in myself so much. It clicked right away."
Moreno's MMA coach walks past, and the young fighter frantically waves him down. "This is Art Jimmerson," Moreno says. "He's the one-gloved boxer."
The second guy, Octavio Robledo, not only does the double-squeeze handshake, but he drops down to one knee and bows his head. "Such an honor," Robledo says. "Such an honor. To have been in there, period, is incredible. You guys are a part of what we all have joined."
Jimmerson gives them each one more hug, and then he walks about 20 feet into the center of the gym, where a giant Octagon resides. The fuss around him causes a few people to lower their protein potions and drift over toward Jimmerson as he climbs into the cage. He asks someone to take a picture of him standing in there, and as she takes it, a man whispers into her ear, "I think he fought at UFC 1."
She holds up a smartphone as more people gather outside to meet Jimmerson. He poses for photos and gives out an aw-shucks look to everyone like he's a little embarrassed.
But he loves every second of it. It took him 30 years to get comfortable in moments like these, accepting the infamy of his 138 seconds as a UFC fighter, because he knows that he was one of the eight men willing to try. He has a smirk on his face like he knew this would happen all along. Like a man with faith -- an audacious faith.
https://www.espn.com/mma/ufc/story/_/id/38827608/art-jimmerson-one-glove-ufc-1
