The natural world is an almost perfectly closed loop, a finely tuned and living panoply of checks and balances. You’ve got predators eating herds of progressively smaller organisms, the herbivores eating the plants, the plants making oxygen and the scavengers cleaning it all up.
Everything plays a role. Nothing goes to waste. There are no great white sharks without benthic marine algae. No wings without the wind.
It is the same for mixed martial arts. Exactly the same.
In MMA, without the losers, there can be no winners. They nourish the lands with their very blood. In return, maybe they get a taste of the limelight. Or maybe, when a big fish starts to fade, a few lucky losers get the chance to take a big, wet bite out of him as he slowly drifts toward the bottom.
It’s beautiful, in its way. It’s the web of life. And I believe it illustrates that the true heroes aren’t the ones who have “the gold” or “the green” or are “good at fighting” or fit all nice and neat into another one of your prefabricated phony-baloney constructs.
No, the true heroes are the faceless men, who stride to the ring time and again to take their beating, so that others may soar higher. And in performing this terrible sacrificial dance, they unknowingly sustain something bigger than themselves.
It’s time for these warrior poet loser heroes to step out of the darkness and take their bow. These are the 25 biggest tomato cans in the history of the sport of mixed martial arts.
Don’t laugh.
These are the men who lose out loud, man. They don’t lose behind their desks like some desk jockey, bro. In some cases, it means getting knocked out. In others, it means tapping like you’re trying to bring back Morse code. Methodologies aside, these men have made careers out of losing fights.
A few ground rules.
First, true tomato candom is about sustained sucking. We’re not talking about guys who lost a few times and walked away. That sort of sanity has no place on this list. These also aren’t guys who suffered a string of losses during an otherwise decent career, or pro wrestling types who tried MMA once but left just as quickly after losing to some construction worker .
So with that, here they are, submitted for your consideration.
If for some reason anyone should take exception to any of this, please take solace in the knowledge that any one of these guys could almost certainly kick my butt.