A written apology, an accidental historian, and tough questions for relics of MMA's past

‘Big’ John McCarthy

The letter is as good a place to start as any. The letter is a story in itself.

Dated March 22, 1996, addressed to the offices of the Semaphore Entertainment Group on 57th Street in New York City, and signed by David L. “Tank” Abbott, it’s a piece of MMA history that’s just weird enough to be worth preserving, even if questions of where and how it should be preserved are not so easily answered in this sport.

The letter is an apology. That much is clear right off the bat, as Abbott declares that “a sufficient amount of time has passed” since UFC 8 for him to look back on his actions that evening and feel “appalled and ashamed” of his own behavior. He admits that he acted like “a total simpleton” at the event. He offers his “heartfelt apology,” though it’s not clear exactly what he’s apologizing for.

“I can tell you what he was apologizing for,” John McCarthy, the veteran referee who worked that night’s “UFC Superfight Championship” bout between Ken Shamrock and Kimo Leopoldo in Puerto Rico, told MMAjunkie. “But he’s not the one who wrote the letter.”

But, wait, before we get into the story of the letter itself, we should pause to consider where it is now. It’s a bizarre little relic of MMA’s early days, from a time when the sport as we know it was still in its infancy, its odds of survival changing with each passing month.

If this were Major League Baseball instead of the UFC, this letter might be in a display case in Cooperstown right now. Instead it’s the personal property of a man named Brett Kawzynski, who, in his passion for collecting MMA memorabilia, has become something of an accidental historian for the sport, amassing as a hobby a pile of documents, gear, event canvasses, and strange knickknacks of all sorts that form a fossil record of MMA’s past.

For Kawzynski, the stuff he’s acquired falls primarily into two different categories. There’s the stuff he’s willing to sell, usually through his website, MMACollector.com, and then there’s the stuff he wouldn’t consider parting with for any price.

“Tank” Abbott’s apology letter belongs in the second category, seeing as how it’s a part of MMA history, the kind of thing that Kawzyski would like to see in a museum some day.

“That’s always been my goal, to start an MMA museum,” Kawzynski said. “But life gets complicated, and I’m not independently wealthy. There’s what you want to do and what you’ve got to do.”

* * * *

Kawzynski isn’t alone. According to UFC co-creator Art Davie, there are a few hundred “serious collectors” of MMA memorabilia worldwide, three or four of whom have accrued private collections that essentially constitute independent museums stocked with combat sports artifacts that might otherwise have been lost forever. Some of them were lost, in fact, before anyone could collect them.

The canvas from UFC 1, for instance?

“That’s gone,” Kawzynski said. “They threw it in a dumpster” after the event.

The original material used to build the first octagon and the fence surrounding it?

“Somebody took it and used it to pen their horses or cows or some sh-t,” Kawzynski said. “It’s crazy.”

With no official, independent hall of fame for the sport, and no physical location to house all these bits of MMA history, many of those items that survive remain scattered among hardcore collectors. They sit in storage units or basement boxes. Some have found their way into makeshift shrines in somebody’s spare bedroom. Some remain with the fighters or executives who own them, at least until they decide to sell them to a collector like Kawzynski.

He’s paid thousands of dollars a pop for items like the autographed shorts that Cain Velasquez wore the night he took the UFC heavyweight title from Brock Lesnar at UFC 121 – a piece of MMA history that Kawzynski said he pursued for six months before he finally acquired them. He’s also had fighters simply give him things that they want to see preserved, some of which Kawzynski said he declined on the grounds that it was “too much responsibility.”

He’s got Davie’s original notebooks from the planning phase of the first UFC. He’s got more event canvasses that he can keep track of, everything from the first mat that Lesnar fought on in his UFC debut to the WEC canvas where Urijah Faber and Jens Pulver first squared off.

He’s got photos that early UFC fighters sent in to SEG as part of their applications for their no-holds-barred event, everything from UFC 1 semi-finalist Kevin Rosier posing shirtless with his black belt, mid-kata, to Mark Coleman glowering at the camera with the American flag draped over his shoulder.

He can tell which UFC event program was printed in different colors after the printer ran out of paper and what became of the IFL’s office supplies once it abruptly ceased operations in 2008.

Kawzynski is proud of his collection, too. The more private the item, the more it feels vaguely like something he shouldn’t even have, the happier he is to have it.

“All the original sketches of the octagon?” Kawzynski said. “Rorion Gracie has a copy in his Gracie Museum. I have the originals.”

For many of these scraps of MMA history, he also has the stories to go with them. Which brings us back to “Tank” Abbott’s apology letter following UFC 8.

* * * *

The funny thing is, Abbott didn’t even fight at UFC 8, which might have been part of the problem. He was there mostly as a personality, according to McCarthy, “since he was kind of their star at the time.”

This was before the Zuffa era, before Dana White and the Fertitta brothers, back when SEG ran the show and Art Davie was the UFC “commissioner.” This was a time in MMA history when the promoters had to go to court just to fight for their right to put on an event, even if cable operators were busy dropping the UFC from their pay-per-view offerings under political pressure from on high.

The last thing the UFC needed, in other words, was Abbott getting drunk at cageside and trying to start a brawl with someone else’s cornerman. Though that’s exactly what happened, according to McCarthy.

“It was after the first time we had been in federal court after they were trying to shut us down,” McCarthy said. “We’d spent two days in federal court and had won, but all we’d won was the ability to keep going.”

According to Davie, this was when Abbott chose to “create a situation” during the event. According to McCarthy, that situation started with some alcoholic spirits and a simmering feud between Abbott and Brazilian fighter Allan Goes.

‘Tank’ was there with his girlfriend, doing his normal thing with vodka, and his girlfriend was egging him on. So ‘Tank’ takes his teeth out, hands them to his girlfriend, then goes off to confront Allan. … It was just not a great time for that.”

Cooler heads prevailed at cageside. UFC officials kept the conflict from escalating, and McCarthy’s wife gave Abbott’s girlfriend a stern talking to. Abbott didn’t appreciate that, according to McCarthy, and he quickly turned his ire on her.

“He scared my wife a little bit,” McCarthy said. “I didn’t find out about it until later, because I was in the cage reffing the (Shamrock-Leopoldo) fight, but, you know, apparently he was telling her, ‘I’ll f-cking kill you,’ and stuff like that.”

By the time McCarthy found out, Abbott was gone. There were “a lot of people looking for him at that time,” as McCarthy remembers it, and Abbott decided he’d rather not be found.

McCarthy expressed his displeasure to UFC owner Bob Meyrowitz and said he’d rather quit than continue working for a company that wanted people like Abbott representing it. Meyrowitz responded by suspending Abbott from the UFC. The apology letter was his way back in.

One went to the SEG offices, addressed to Meyrowitz, Davie, SEG COO David Isaacs, and UFC co-creator Campbell McLaren. Another went to McCarthy’s wife, Elaine. Exactly who wrote those letters, that depends on who you ask.

“My wife showed me the letter and basically said, ‘Hey I got a letter from ‘Tank,’” McCarthy said, “I took one look at it and told her, ‘That ain’t Tank.’”

He suspected that Isaacs had written the letter for him and then let Abbott sign his name at the bottom. Davie, who wound up writing the UFC’s response to Abbott, remembers it differently.

“I think I drafted the letter for him, to be honest with you,” Davie said. “Not that he couldn’t have done it himself. He’s a college-educated guy, a history major, and the son of a b-tch can write. He’s a very bright son of a b-tch, by the way. I always liked him. I helped him draft the letter because as I recall he wasn’t too thrilled about having to write it. But ‘Tank’ did legitimately bow his head and admit he was wrong.”

* * * *

Kawzynski came to own the letter the same way he came to own many odds and ends and historical documents – he bought them.

In fact, he bought so many old documents that when Davie was writing his own memoir about the creation and early days of the UFC, it was Kawzynski who he called in order to learn what he’d written in his own notes.

To Davie, all this, from those early plans to Abbott’s mea culpa, should be in a museum somewhere. The same way Cooperstown has displays of old baseball gloves that, by today’s standards, look more like something you’d wear to pull weeds than catch a fast-moving ball, these old bits of MMA history should be kept safe and open to the public. There’s a market for that, Davie said. It just needs a home.

“It’s like baseball fans who are interested in what it was like when Babe Ruth played,” Davie said. “Well, ‘Tank’ Abbott, Keith Hackney, my God, what was that like? How did this all begin? If you’re a baseball fan, Babe Ruth, Gil Hodges, Bill Dickey, you want to know about this stuff. So it’s inevitable that some MMA fans will wonder, ‘Hey, Oleg Taktarov, how did he come to the party?’”

The problem is, at the moment the closest thing MMA has to a recognizable hall of fame is the one the UFC operates. Even that isn’t so much a museum or physical location that fans can visit as an honorary distinction, and who gets in or stays out is subject to the whims of the UFC brass.

That’s a shame, said McCarthy, and it’s the private collectors who seem the most well-equipped to do something about it, given their vast troves of hidden MMA treasures.

“The sport is more than the UFC,” McCarthy said. “Not that the UFC isn’t the biggest dog out there – they are. And they have their own hall of fame and that’s fine. But there are too many guys who never fought in the UFC who are important to the sport. What they did and what they accomplished, it’s important. There needs to be something else, a museum or a hall of fame, that picks up all of MMA.”

Kawzynski doesn’t disagree. With various fighters and gym owners he’s discussed the possibility of creating such a museum before, and even gone so far as to purchase useful domain names for potential use later on, but for one reason or another those plans never panned out.

It’s one thing to create a home for this stuff on the internet. It’s another thing entirely to find a physical place for it in the world, one that fans could visit.

“I mean, where would you even put it?” Kawzynski said.

Davie has also considered that question, he said. Then again, if football fans will go to Canton and baseball fans will travel to Cooperstown, where wouldn’t MMA fans go on a pilgrimage into the sport’s relatively recent and at times troubled past?

“It could be Joplin, Missouri, for all anyone knows,” Davie said. “Could be in the Dakotas, the Pacific Northwest, could be in Denver. Who knows?”

While there remains no clear answer, Davie isn’t concerned that these MMA relics will be lost. Not as long as there collectors like Kawzynski around. Not as long as there are still people who care to see stuff like the apology letter that “Tank” Abbott wrote, or at least signed.

“It’ll all be under glass somewhere, eventually,” Davie said. “I hope I live long enough to see it.”