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Kevin Randleman

One of the most-feared camps of early mixed martial arts was Team Hammer House. An Ohio-based collective of overly-muscular wrestlers, for a brief moment in time, they ran the MMA world--Mark Coleman as the UFC and Pride champion, Kevin Randleman picking up for him after he moved to Japan, Phil Baroni breaking people's faces, Wes Sims godzilla-stomping his way across the regional circuit. Hammer House was dominant. Hammer House was also not exactly real: In a world of high-tech Gracie Barra gyms and endless training gauntlets in padded rooms at Chute Boxe, Phil Baroni once described the Hammer House gym as a pair of heavy bags on Mark Coleman's porch in Columbus. And yet, somehow, it still produced champions.

This is a microcosm of the story of Kevin Randleman. In his first night in the sport he won the Universal Vale Tudo 4 tournament; in the second he nearly repeated the feat but was outlasted by Carlos Barreto, and within two years he was fighting for the UFC heavyweight title--which he lost an extremely controversial decision for in his first attempt, then took from Pete Williams in his second. He had four more fights with the UFC before joining his mentor in Pride.

Randleman's Pride run is a mixture of predictable failure and acts of legend. He lost more than he won--in all, his Pride record was 4-7--but en route he put in some incredible performances, most notably in 2004 when he nearly turned the entire MMA world upside down. When Randleman was announced for the 2004 Pride Heavyweight GP, he was seen as almost a joke entrant--he hadn't fought at heavyweight since the year 2000, and had just finished losing middleweight bouts to Rampage Jackson and Kazushi Sakuraba. When he was announced as facing the 9-1 phenomenon Cro Cop in the first round, fans hissed about Pride giving favorable matchups to their marketable stars. Randleman shocked the world, instead--knocking out the top heavyweight contender in less than two minutes with a perfect left hook. In the second round, Randleman was pitted against Pride champion Fedor Emelianenko--who'd submitted his coach Mark Coleman in the previous round--and came a hair's breadth away from doing it again, famously nearly decapitating Fedor with a german suplex before being submitted. In two fights, in less than four minutes of combat, Randleman nearly defeated the #3 and #1 heavyweights on the planet.

This, in short, is the real question of Kevin Randleman. He was one of the most powerful athletes in the sport's history, and it burst through in every fight he had--from his pre-match ritual of jumping nearly the entire vertical height of the cage, to the speed at which he uncorked his hooks and shot his takedowns, to the ease with which he threw bigger men through the air. Hammer House wasn't a real fighting academy--Randleman didn't even have a formal striking or grappling coach--and he still, briefly, was the #1 heavyweight on the planet. He was so tough and so gifted that he could still blow through almost anyone.

Unfortunately, when he entered his thirties and that athleticism began to fade, he hit a wall and never got back up. It's like night and day: Up until his 31st birthday he was 14-5, and by the time he retired nine years later he was 17-16. He had several problems with drug tests--if wrestling and ground and pound were the pillars of Hammer House, steroids were their filigree--and once had his license to fight temporarily suspended after submitting artificial urine to a test. Ultimately, and tragically, he died at a far too young 44, unexpectedly suffering a heart attack while in the hospital for pneumonia, leaving behind a wife and four children.

No one who knew Kevin Randleman had a bad word to say about him. He was a champion wrestler, a champion fighter and a champion as a human being, who once phoned a fan of his on twitter and talked him out of suicide. More than the what-ifs of his fighting career, I feel for the what-ifs of how many more years he should have had to raise his children. But life, like MMA, is not always fair.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (Pride 23 vs Yamamoto / UFC 20 vs Rutten / Strikeforce; Heavy Artiller vs Roger Gracie / UVF 8 vs Barreto).