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I was sitting with Davie in his office the day he got the call from Dave Thomas, one of Abbott’s friends and soon-to-be manager who’d been trying to get him into the show. Davie turned on the speakerphone so I could listen.

Thomas started talking about Abbott, a fighter out of Huntington Beach, California, who benched 600 pounds. “He just beat up four Samoan guys. He’ll crush everybody you have.”

Four UFCs in, we thought we’d already heard it all, so Davie and I were trying to hold back our snickers. Davie pointed to the phone and mouthed, “Can you believe this guy?” But playing along, Davie asked Thomas, “Where does he fight?”

“Well, he fights on the streets,” Thomas stammered. “We’ll go to a construction site and set up fights for him.”

“Construction sites?” Davie asked. “You mean down where the bulldozers have been? In a pit down there? So he’s a pit fighter.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I told Davie, “Sounds kind of like the character in Every Which Way But Loose.”

Davie agreed. “So this guy is like Tank Murdock?”

“Who’s Tank Murdock?”

“From the Clint Eastwood movie, that pit fighter Clint challenges.” Davie drilled it home. “Tank Abbott, the pit fighter.”

And that’s just what the UFC called him.

In person, Abbott certainly had the bravado down. I’d met him at the after party for UFC 5 and realized the barstool story probably wasn’t far off. Abbott was a drunken mess.

“These guys can’t fight.” He slurred the words. “Wait until they bring in a real fighter like me. I’ll destroy these guys. If someone puts me in guard, I’ll slam his head until his brains fall out. Only pussies fight like that. You don’t fight like that in a bar where someone will stomp your head in.”

Abbott reminded me of all of the guys I met who were full of themselves and talked a much better game than they played. I would soon get to see if Abbott was the real deal or just another fool I’d get the satisfaction of watching as someone made him look silly.

I didn’t get that satisfaction, at least not in Abbott’s first fight. He faced John Matua, who, with ten bare-knuckle victories, had been listed in the program as a first-level Kuialua, which was an ancient Hawaiian art of bone breaking. Nothing was broken here, however, other than Matua’s spirit.

The 280-pound Tank steamrolled Matua with hell-bent punches and sent all 400 pounds of his opponent into the canvas in about twenty seconds after catching him with a legal headbutt. Matua was never able to recover and was put to sleep with a huge right hand. His body went rigid and his legs began to twitch, not an uncommon reaction when somebody gets his lights turned off.

Abbott mocked Matua’s trembling with his own gyration, then nonchalantly walked to his corner and gave his guy a high five as if he’d just landed a three-pointer. The fans ate it up.

Abbott continued his spree by tapping out Paul Varelans in the semifinals with strikes, but he was tamed by a returning Oleg Taktarov with a rear-naked choke in a final match that went nearly eighteen minutes.

It didn’t matter that Abbott had lost, though. The fans were captivated by him. The UFC had found its next star to hang its future on, but something about the sixth event concerned me.

During the semifinal match between Oleg Taktarov and Anthony Macias, I believe I saw my first fixed fight in the UFC. Both fighters had the same manager, Buddy Albin, so I think it was decided backstage that Macias would throw the match so Oleg could advance to the finals and face Tank as fresh as possible. The fight went a little too smoothly for my tastes when Macias shot in and nearly fell into the guillotine choke, which he tapped out to in twelve seconds.

The night’s superfight, a rematch between Ken Shamrock and Dan Severn, was memorable to me, not because Shamrock wore purple Speedos, which he’d shown me during the backstage equipment checks. I’d thought, You’re shitting me. No, this fight was unforgettable for its finish. After a minute and a half of clinching, Shamrock caught Severn in a guillotine