Ultimate MMA Night: Watch Damian Anderson Shatter Stereotypes in His Stellar UFC Debut!

Damien Anderson always wanted to a be a fighter, but he wanted to do so in the safest way possible. So rather than strap on the gloves on Day 1, he decided to take a more calculated path toward MMA, even if it meant waiting years to throw a punch in competition. After he met Garry Tonon at a college jiu-jitsu club when studying at Rutgers University, Anderson began training under John Danaher.

"I've always been interested in fighting, and I didn't really know what route or what was the safest route to fight because I didn't understand fighting as like — to some people it just looks like guys are stepping in the ring and just kind of throwing punches," Anderson recently told MMA Junkie. "So, I didn't want to do that. If I wanted to fight, I wanted to make sure that I did it intelligently.

"I thought that the guys that fought the best in my opinion were the guys that had a massive grappling advantage or could at least use the threat of grappling to then allow them to start striking. So I didn't really know what to do, but I was like, 'Alright, first step is I have to try to get world-class grappling. ' Then once I kind of secured that, I could start looking into my striking.

So the whole plan was really just to try to get my grappling as good as possible as quickly as possible. " Not only did Anderson make his grappling good – he made it great. He competed for WNO, Polaris, and Fight2Win.