"Once I Was a Champion" - Evan Tanner Documentary

[CrimsonGhost56]

http://onceiwasachampion.com/home.aspx

Evan Tanner: adventure seeker, fighter, philosopher, writer and alcoholic died on September 8th, 2008 in the desert region north of Brawley, California. He was on a quest to find buried treasure. "Treasure" does not necessarily refer to something material.

There was a huge hole in the MMA community the day that former UFC Champion, Evan Tanner was pronounced dead, a hole that needs to be filled. More so than his actions in the ring, his antics out where followed by many. The man lived several lives within his thirty-seven years.

He poured his heart out in his blogs and remained honest through the harsh times, as well as the good. When he made mistakes, it wasn’t just him that learned from them, but a community of over thirty thousand. He walked his own path, but became a leader. When Evan made it public that he was an alcoholic and that he wanted to change himself, the amount of people he inspired was tremendous.

The more you get to know Evan Tanner, the more you want to know. The details of his adventures are always interesting, and never predictable. The purpose of this documentary is to learn more about him, his stories and his philosophy on being a better person.

Evan’s blogs inspired a lot of people, but in particular they inspired this film's course. We want to go to the places he went, meet the people he talked about - the people who were important to him, and learn more about his message.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yszYYry8bNw[/ame]

apparently its coming out in a few weeks. looks pretty interesting, ill be checking it out for sure. ill bump the thread when more info comes out.

[CrimsonGhost56]

well my guess that it was coming out in a few weeks was a little off but nonetheless the official trailer was released today.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufCwtz-vjIg[/ame]

[EmpireWF]

The people behind it are submitting it to festivals so it'll probably be released later this year (hopefully).


Here's an old SI piece on Tanner

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/the_bonus/01/13/tanner/index.html

The Colorado Desert is seven million acres of scorched earth in the southeast corner of California, along the borders of Mexico and Arizona. Evan Tanner arrived there around noon on Sept. 3 after riding his motorcycle 200 miles east from his home in Oceanside. Ducking under the gnarled branches of ironwood trees, he turned off the road and into the mountains, up one of the many washes carved by flash floods. He found the spot he'd pinpointed days earlier using Google Earth and parked his bike on a starkly beautiful plateau above the wash. He set up a cot and folding canvas chair facing a sea of pebbly mounds dotted with creosote bushes, and then he put up his shelter, a beige nylon tarp held up by metal poles -- critical protection from the sun on a day the temperature reached 117°.

This expedition into the desert had been well publicized. Tanner, a popular mixed martial artist in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), had been chronicling his preparations on a UFC-related blog on the Spike television network's Web site. His description of the trip and its dangers had drawn attention and criticism on other MMA sites, prompting Tanner to post, "This isn't a version of Into the Wild. I'm not going out into the desert with a pair of shorts and a bowie knife to try to live off the land."

On Sept. 4, his second day alone in the desert, Tanner set out on foot for Clapp Spring, a small oasis roughly five miles away, to replenish his water supply. But the terrain was harsh, with weathered basalt outcroppings and steep gravelly hills that absorbed and amplified the heat like a Dutch oven. Tanner had no map -- only a GPS -- so he climbed the mountains in his path instead of going around them. By a local miner's estimate, the temperature approached 130° in the sun, so hot that Tanner's sweat likely evaporated as it left his pores.

Tanner reached Clapp Spring, where bighorn sheep and wild burros once went to drink in the shade of California fan palms, but he found it empty. The main pool had dried up to the size of a napkin, two inches deep and filled with slime.

On his iPhone, he called and texted a friend and said that he'd wait until nightfall to return to his shelter. If no one heard from him the next morning, the friend should alert the authorities.

That night, out of water on the hike back from Clapp Spring, Tanner squatted to rest in a ravine barely wide enough for his 6-foot frame. In heat that still exceeded 90°, he collapsed on his side beneath the waxing harvest moon. He was in peak physical condition, 200 pounds of well-defined muscle, only months removed from his last UFC bout. But in fight terms, Tanner versus the Colorado Desert was a brutal mismatch. By the early morning of Sept. 5, a little more than a mile from his campsite, he was dead from heat exposure. He was 37 years old.

Even in a sport that sneers at convention, Tanner was a singular figure, known as much for his fierce individuality as for his fighting prowess. Before his trip, the MMA Internet subculture had crackled with speculation about why he was headed to the desert. Some cynics, noting Tanner's faltering UFC comeback after two years away from the sport, his ominous blog posts about the excursion and his longtime struggles with alcoholism, concluded that he was on a suicide mission. Others believed he was venturing into the desert for spiritual reasons. Some of his friends simply assumed that it was just another one of his whimsical walkabouts.

They all were wrong.

It was the spring of 1997 when Evan Tanner caught wind of the announcement: A fight promoter was staging a tournament in Tanner's hometown of Amarillo, Texas. The eight-man competition would be held in an old B-52 bomber hangar that had been turned into a rodeo arena. The fighting style was early mixed martial arts -- essentially No Holds Barred -- and the *winner-take-all prize was $500. As friends goaded him to enter, Tanner, then 26, shrugged. Why the hell not?

After all, Tanner accumulated new experiences the way other people collected stamps or coins. He was also a natural athlete: After taking up wrestling as a sophomore at Caprock High, he had won the Texas state championship his junior and senior seasons. Smart and strikingly handsome, he could have been the classic popular jock, but Caprock classmates recall him as a proud loner, a quiet kid with few friends and a tendency to get lost in his head. His parents were divorced, and he was close to neither. His mother and stepfather, pious Jehovah's Witnesses, had once moved Tanner and his three siblings to a ranch in Arkansas to wait out the End of Days. Tanner's father lived outside of Texas, and during high school Tanner stayed with his older brother, Jeff. After graduating in 1989 he enrolled at a small college in Iowa on a wrestling scholarship and made the dean's list, but school bored him and he abruptly dropped out in his freshman year.

He spent the first half of his 20s drinking a lake's worth of beer and going on spontaneous trips -- camping or snowboarding, often by himself -- subsidized by a variety of jobs. By turns he worked in a slaughterhouse, laid cable, washed dishes, poured concrete, installed drywall, taught skiing and prepped salads. Before the Amarillo fights Tanner bought a few books and videos on Brazilian jujitsu and taught himself chokes and *submissions -- the underpinnings, so to speak, of MMA. On the night of the fights, as a few friends and his girlfriend, Danita Drown, the daughter of the local Harley-Davidson dealer, looked on, Tanner used his innate athleticism and a series of slick moves to punish three opponents, the last of whom, Paul Buentello, was a friend and high school classmate. For Tanner the night turned out to be more than a little adventure. It was a new line of work.

The emerging sport of MMA gave former karate kids and college wrestlers a new outlet for their skills. Tanner was the accidental fighter, almost embarrassed by his success and the violence it entailed. He combined his wrestling prowess with uncommon toughness and a knack for exploiting his opponent's tactical errors. After the Amarillo bouts he continued fighting and winning, and he traveled as far as Japan to traffic in mayhem. In 1999, after his record reached 17-1, he joined the UFC, the premier MMA organization.

Tanner enjoyed the strategic battles with his opponents, but he derived little enjoyment from putting them "to sleep" with chokeholds or pulping their faces with kicks and punches. Fighting, he once wrote on a blog, "is not who I am, it's not how I define myself. It's just something I do. There are many other ... paths I could be walking, but fighting is what the fates put before me. There is an ultimate purpose to it."

Specifically, he believed that fighting afforded him a platform to spread his message, which he called Belief in the Power of One. Shortly before his death, Tanner explained it this way: "It's not a self-glorifying thing, it's not, 'Hey look at me, believe in me.' It's a belief that one person can change the world. ... Your words and actions resonate eternally." Basically it meant helping other people -- in Tanner's case, mentoring younger fighters, counseling both friends and strangers in crisis, and at one point attempting to start a foundation for underprivileged MMA prospects.

Even as he rose in his new sport, Tanner continued to drink heavily. He did nothing to hide his alcoholism; at one training site he covered a wall of his residence with beer cans he'd drained. And he continued to take off on spontaneous, sometimes ill-advised adventures, leaving town with only vague indications of his destination. He once ignored weather advisories and rode his Harley-Davidson out of a training site in Oregon in a snowstorm, bound for Amarillo. It reminded friends of the time he had hiked the Grand Canyon rim-to-river and back in the same day simply because a sign warned against it; he made it but nearly died of dehydration.

In 2001 Tanner drove a truck from Amarillo back to Oregon after his license had been revoked for driving under the influence. Riding through Idaho, he witnessed a fatal highway crash and performed CPR on the doomed victim until the police arrived. According to Danita, when a cop asked to see Tanner's license, the fighter explained his regrettable situation; the officer decided to look the other way as Tanner drove off.

Tanner was one of the few MMA fighters who didn't give himself a nickname, but his friends called him Evan Jack Sparrow, a nod to the buccaneer played by Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. "Evan was always pushing life," says Buentello, who would also become a prominent MMA fighter. "Just a modern-day hippie who lived on his own terms." Tanner was the rare cage fighter who listed Pride and Prejudice and The Brothers Karamazov alongside The Art of War among his favorite books. For one fight he would braid his hair; for the next, he'd grow a beard that would shame Grizzly Adams; for a third he'd wear his hair in cornrows or a samurai-style topknot. Every look, he explained, represented a new direction in his life.

These sensibilities made him a wildly popular fighter with the UFC's growing fan base of young men. Though Tanner was a self-described "minimalist" who sometimes felt he'd been born in the wrong century -- his only possession beyond the bare necessities was a collection of antique dictionaries -- he mastered social networking in the Internet age. Distant and awkward as he could be in person, he blazed to life when he corresponded with fans on his MySpace page. He was also a serial blogger. As he once put it on his site evantanner.net, "Sometimes when I write, it's like I'm reaching out to an old friend without a name or a face."


In 2002 Tanner moved to Gresham, Ore., to train with Team Quest, a fighter camp then co-managed by Randy Couture, the longtime UFC heavyweight champ, and Matt Lindland, an '00 Olympic wrestling medalist and subsequent UFC star. At first Tanner moved in with Couture. "The first thing Evan did was join a book club," recalls Couture. "I was happy to have him [at my home], but it was clear he was uncomfortable depending on someone else." Within weeks Tanner had moved into an eight-foot trailer behind the gym. Then he bought a small home in Troutdale, Ore.

Mostly by dint of his physical fitness and mental strength, the accidental fighter kept winning. By 2005 Tanner was the UFC's middleweight champion. That summer he signed to defend his belt in Atlantic City against Rich Franklin, a Jim Carrey look-alike who'd been a math teacher in Ohio before discovering MMA. An added bonus: The winner of the fight would earn a starring role on The Ultimate Fighter, a reality show on the Spike network. Franklin kneed and elbowed Tanner until his face looked as though it had gone through a meat grinder, and the fight was called in the fourth round. Devastated by the loss, Tanner returned to Oregon and resumed drinking, which he had stopped during training.

According to Lindland, the other Team Quest fighters staged several interventions, to no avail. Shortly thereafter Tanner left Team Quest.

He fought a few months later in Las Vegas and lost again. He returned home late in 2005 to find that, exasperated with his egotistic and self-destructive ways, Danita had taken most of the furniture and moved out. They would never speak again.

Tanner told friends that he sat on the floor in the empty house and drank for a week, drank past hunger, drank until the lights outside blurred and flashed before his eyes like Fourth of July sparklers.

*****

In March 2006, in what would be his last fight for two years, Tanner won a first-round submission victory over Justin Levens (who, ironically, would die along with his girlfriend in November '08 in what is being investigated as a murder-suicide). In his time away from the sport, Tanner roamed the country, passing through Death Valley, Yosemite, Atlantic City, Hawaii and places in between, still drinking heavily. Out of work and out of money, he moved from place to place and woman to woman. "There were so many problems in my personal life -- women, drinking, finances, ways of thinking, all which kept me a fraction of my true self," he wrote in a blog post about that lost time. "I had to burn some things out of my system, I had to catch my breath."

Finally, with the mental toughness that had made him a great fighter, Tanner set a date to quit drinking: Oct. 10, 2007. According to friends at the time, he stuck to it. No AA, no higher power -- just a date. To hear Tanner tell it, his drinking problem had been intentional, part of a quest he began in his early 20s to learn compassion by accepting a great weakness in himself.

"I decided to become an alcoholic," he wrote in '05. "I had to force myself to drink. It took years of this for my body to finally gain the addiction, the craving ... I would lose the respect of many ... but I was willing to face all of that for the sake of what I had to gain, these things that would make me a better man in the future."

This, of course, sounds delusional. "I thought it was the biggest cop-out," says Tanner's half-sister, Paige Craig. "It was the most lame justification for wallowing in something that's unhealthy." But even in quitting, Tanner stuck to his story. He claimed he had accomplished what he had wanted to with his drinking, and he stopped cold. And for the 11 months that followed, Tanner was the man he had always hoped to be.

In November 2007 he signed a new four-fight deal with the UFC. He moved to Las Vegas to train. Uncomfortable seeking commercial sponsorships, as most UFC fighters do, he asked his army of web-based fans to contribute a few bucks and join Team Tanner. Meanwhile, he convinced an old fighter friend from Amarillo, Brent Medley, to give up his car sales job, come train with him and make his own MMA comeback. Medley came expecting to learn MMA from Tanner but wound up also listening to his eclectic philosophies. "It was like living with the Dalai Lama for nine months," says Medley.

Tanner reconnected with other friends like Johnny Hannay, an old high school classmate who was in the throes of a divorce, calling Hannay daily to make sure he was O.K. Tanner flew to Ottawa to work the corner of Ian Dawe, a young fighter he had befriended in 2003 through MySpace. As he had done sporadically over the years, Tanner showed up when friends needed him most, set them in the right direction and disappeared again, like a red-bearded Mary Poppins.

Tanner also started to devote more attention to his intellectual pursuits. After a brutal loss to Yushin Okami in March 2008, Tanner seemed unperturbed. Outside the dressing room he told a reporter that he was O.K. with losing because now he'd have more time to devote to his poetry, fiction and blogging.

A month later Tanner was trolling MySpace for travel blogs when he stumbled across the musings of Sara Tuominen, an Arabic linguist from Washington State who works for the U.S. government as a translator Iraq and Afghanistan, among other countries, and blogged about her experiences in Saudi Arabia. From late June until Tanner's desert trip, their MySpace message correspondence ran longer than some novellas. "Are you aware it's now 6:30 a.m., the sun has risen and we've stayed up all night?" Sara wrote after the first of many long exchanges. He wrote back, "I feel so wild and free."

As part of his growing interest in Sara, Tanner became engrossed in one of her hobbies: treasure hunting. He started researching the desert east of his new home outside San Diego and discovered the 19th-century legend of Peg Leg Smith's lost gold, nuggets strewn atop a desert butte. Tanner decided to make a series of trips into the desert -- the first alone, the next with Sara. Through a combination of Internet research and perusal of satellite maps, he settled on a campsite near Clapp Spring, whose water he planned to use over several days in the wilderness.

On his Spike blog, Tanner mentioned his planning for the adventure but claimed that his goals were not material. "I'll have to portray our adventure as spiritual in nature, to avoid being institutionalized," he told Sara. On Aug. 20, two weeks before he left for the desert, Tanner wrote to her, "I can't help but wonder if symbolic treasure has already been found. If this shared adventure is a conscious manifestation of my own discovery of another brightly burning star, of a familiar soul. Underneath the desert sky, beneath a million shimmering stars I expect I'll find my answer."

It was too strong a belief in his Power of One that led to Tanner's death. A simple phone call or a visit to the nearby town of Palo Verde, and he would have learned that Clapp Spring was dried up. The authorities, alerted by one of Evan's neighbors, discovered his body on Monday, Sept. 8. As the news spread through the MMA community, it was met with sadness but not always surprise. "It was tragic but at the same time ... " says Couture, his voice trailing off. "Evan dying alone in the desert? That was fitting in a way."

Still, Tanner's death triggered an outpouring of grief surprising for a onetime champion years removed from his glory days. He inspired dozens of blog posts and YouTube videos that got an aggregate of around 300,000 views. His memorial site at evantanner.net displays nearly 2,000 comments and anecdotes.

One came from Dawe, the young fighter Tanner had met via MySpace and had mentored in the last years of his life. Soon after Tanner moved to Vegas in 2007, they decided to take a day off from training and climb the calcified Red Rocks sand dunes. On the ride over, Dawe admitted to Tanner that he was scared of heights. Climbing off the established trails, Dawe was barely able to keep pace with Tanner. When they reached the top, Tanner looked at him and announced that Dawe would be descending alone.

A few minutes of careful stepping brought Dawe to the edge of a precipice. The next ledge was 10 feet down, across a three-foot gap with a deep ravine below. Dawe searched but saw no other route, no other soul around. Then, out of nowhere, he heard a voice, "Just flow, Ian."

There he was, Evan Tanner, in a black hooded sweatshirt, standing on the ledge below, which a moment before had been vacant. Dawe jumped, landed safely and looked for his friend. But like a mirage in the desert, he was gone.