Looking back now, Jens Pulver can’t say exactly what he was expecting that day. A test, maybe. A way to find out something about himself that he’d only guessed at before.
The name of the event – The Bas Rutten Invitational 2 – sounded official enough. If the Dutch Pancrase fighter was affiliated with it, and if they’d already done it once without anything terrible happening, how bad could it be?
But since this is small-time MMA in 1999, we’re not talking about a fancy event at a civic center. We’re talking a couple hundred people packed into a Muay Thai gym in Littleton, Colorado, a town where just four days earlier two heavily armed teenagers had walked into Columbine High School and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives.