Last man standing: Cub Swanson's UFC 327 swan song officially closes the book on the WEC
In 2001, beloved MMA promotion WEC debuted with a small show in California. Twenty five years later, the last man standing from the blue cage — Cub Swanson — makes his final walk this weekend at UFC 327. In more ways than one, it's the end of an era.
The whole thing started on a westbound interstate, in a brown four-door Cadillac sedan. Leonard Garcia and his three of his friends loaded in for a 1,200-mile road trip from Plainview, Texas to Lemoore, California. The car, a mid-1980s model, was the only one in good enough condition to make the journey.
Garcia, along with fellow fighters Gabriel Garcia and Isaias Martinez, were heading out to compete at the original WEC event at Tachi Palace. It had been dubbed, somewhat gallantly, WEC 1: Princes of Pain . Nobody knew anything about it, other the fact that real fighters — meaning those who actually trained, rather than those who jumped in the cage on a lark — were competing.
They also knew that Dan Severn, a veteran of UFC 4, was headlining the event against Travis Fulton. Such a main event spoke to the new promotion’s legitimacy. “Travis had a billion fights,” Garcia says.
“Even then he had like 180 or something like that. ” The cage was outdoors, and the canvas was bright blue. The crowd that assembled at the Tachi Palace was largely made up of bikers, day-drinkers and gamblers who’d come to see some bloodshed.
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