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Don Frye

As a training partner of multiple-time UFC champion Dan Severn, Don Frye started his career in the deep end: He made his debut at the one-night UFC 8 tournament and steamrolled the field, including the also-debuting Gary Goodridge, winning three matches in a total of just over three minutes. He'd return months later at UFC 9, TKOing Brazilian legend Amaury Bitetti, and came back for the UFC 10 tournament, where Mark Coleman defeated him in the finals. It would be his only loss in the first half of his career: He came back and won the Ultimate Ultimate 96 tournament--winning one fight that referee Big John McCarthy swears to this day was fixed but making up for it by fearlessly going toe-to-toe with Tank Abbott in its finals--won a fight in the Texas-based USWF, and at 11-1, as one of the top-ranked heavyweights in the sport...retired. With the UFC struggling and MMA's future uncertain, the 32 year-old Frye left for New Japan Pro Wrestling. To the surprise of many, he quickly became one of their top heels: A tough, charismatic gaijin grappler who won two tournaments, challenged for the IWGP championship and retired Antonio Inoki. His NJPW stint made him a celebrity. With the rise of Pride his return to MMA was inevitable, and after four years he started his comeback at Pride 16 against Gilbert Yvel, reinvented as a pro-America patriot in the wake of the 9/11 attacks just two weeks earlier.

His patriotic return ended in a DQ when Yvel repeatedly gouged his eyes, grabbed the ropes and kicked him in the groin. It might have been a sign.

Frye was still a tough, talented fighter, but he was no longer young. Now in his mid-thirties, he was well out of contention in the top ranks and found success only against fellow old-school veterans and pro-wrestlers like Ken Shamrock, Yoshihiro Takayama and Akebono. When placed against more vital fighters--Hidehiko Yoshida, Mark Coleman, Gary Goodridge, Yoshihiro Nakao--he was stomped. He left in 2003 to fight for K-1's MMA division, but as one of their favorite sons he came back for Pride 34, their farewell show--where he was brutally, violently beaten by the 6'5", 280-pound James Thompson, eating dozens and dozens of unanswered punches and knees in front of an inexplicably apathetic referee.

That was the downfall of Don Frye: He was such an impossibly tough bastard that nothing could make him stop. He didn't stop when Ken Shamrock tore his ACL apart in 2002, he didn't stop when he was knocked out by Gary Goodridge in 2003, he didn't stop when James Thompson beat him half to death in 2007. It wasn't until 2011, when a 46 year-old Frye was knocked out by lifelong journeyman Ruben "Warpath" Villareal in front of a tiny crowd at a regional Gladiator Challenge show that, at the demand of his family, Frye called it a career.

Don Frye is surprisingly difficult to summarize. He made himself into such a memorable character that it's hard to separate the man from the gimmick. He was a fighter and boxer who quit to be an EMT and a firefighter; a top-ranked mixed martial artist who left the sport to become a professional wrestler; a technically skilled wrestler and judoka who made wild brawling the centerpiece of his style; a world champion who engaged in fixed fights; an actor who started in Godzilla and ended in Aronofsky; a complex personality who caricaturized himself behind a mustache and a man's-man parody. He's as memorable for the strange spectrum of his person as his insane toughness as a fighter, and there might not be a single person in the sport who more truly lived their gimmick.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (Pride 16 vs Yvel / Ultimate Ultimate 96 vs Tank Abbott / KOTC: Predator vs Warpath / NJPW 1999 attire).