One of the longest-running MMA promotions is almost finished, but will its history die with it?

If you weren’t paying attention you might have missed it, and if you were paying attention but didn’t know any better you might have actually believed it.

“A lot of people forget, when it comes to women’s MMA (Bellator President) Scott Coker was the first one. He was the pioneer. He’s the one that started it.”

That was Bellator commentator Jimmy Smith during Saturday night’s Bellator 172 broadcast on Spike TV, reshaping history to meet his employer’s needs. The truth is that Coker’s Strikeforce brand didn’t hold its first real MMA event until 2006, and there were no women to be found on that first card. It wasn’t until December of that year that Strikeforce featured its first women’s bout, pitting Gina Carano against Elaina Maxwell at the old HP Pavilion in San Jose, Calif.

Of course by then, a little fight promotion by the name of HOOKnSHOOT (a blend of pro wrestling terms meant to convey the authenticity of the action) had been doing women’s fights for years. It had done multiple all-women fight cards and single-night women’s tournaments. It had put women in main events. It had cultivated the talent that would form the foundation of the entire women’s MMA scene in North America, and it had done it all quietly from its home in the southwest corner of Indiana, where people knew that you could expect good fights and a good time when you showed up to the weird little Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Evansville.

HOOKnSHOOT started out in a gym in 1995, just a couple years after the birth of the UFC. You might say Jeff Osborne, the promotion’s founder, was an early adopter in that sense. Now, more than 20 years later, he’s getting ready to turn out the lights on one of the oldest MMA promotions in the world, with his final show scheduled for March 4.

It’s a bittersweet goodbye. On one hand, Osborne won’t miss the stress and constant aggravation of putting on live fights. On the other, he can already see history being yanked out from under him and rewritten before his eyes. It stings to see how easily people can forget, even after all these years.

* * * *

Aaron Riley: The way I first heard about it was, there was a kid in my high school who had gone to one of the first HOOKnSHOOT events. He was really into pro wrestling, but he knew I was into martial arts stuff and so he told me about going to this fight and showed me the program from it, saying, ‘You gotta see this.’ Through some kickboxing competitions, I began to hear a little more about Jeff and the gym he trained at. People would say, ‘They’re shootfighters!’ It was like, well, that sounds fun.

Yves Edwards

Yves Edwards: I heard about it on the Internet, and I mean dial-up internet. And for MMA people at that time, the internet was (The Underground forums on MMA.tv). That was pretty much it. It was the UG, which was mostly an East Coast thing, and then Sherdog on the West Coast. I was in Texas so I read them both. I heard about Aaron Riley and the name he was making for himself. I thought, I want to fight that guy.

Tara Larosa

Tara Larosa: I was on the UG and I was getting into fighting, but I’d only had like one amateur fight at the time. There was this girl who hated me, couldn’t stand me, and I really couldn’t stand her either, so we had this big rivalry. Jeff Osborne was throwing this all-women’s show, and he asked if we wanted to fight each other on the show. I was like, hell yeah. Everyone knew HOOKnSHOOT back then. And Jeff was smart. He jumped all over that fight because of the heat it had generated on The Underground.

Julie Kedzie

Julie Kedzie: I had a friend who was good friends with Jeff Osborne, and that’s how I saw the DVD of the first all-women’s show they did, “Revolution.” I saw that and thought, yes, that’s what I want to do.

Kaitlin Young

Kaitlin Young: I had heard about this women’s tournament on, like, Thanksgiving weekend. I had just had my first pro fighter in October, so I was really green, but I kind of thought, why not? At that time a lot of the organizations would make women fight three-minute rounds. That’s how it was in EliteXC and a lot of the few other places that did women’s fights. But Jeff and HOOKnSHOOT were allowing women to fight five-minute rounds, which was awesome. They were also one of the only ones paying women well.

* * * *

Like a lot of people, Osborne saw his first UFC on VHS tape. He didn’t think it could possibly be real. A no-holds-barred fighting event inside a fenced cage on live TV? Not likely. Maybe it would be a pro wrestling-style deal, he thought, with the participants working especially stiff, but surely these guys weren’t really going to try and kick each others’ teeth out.

Also like a lot of people, Osborne came away from the viewing experience with an entirely different perspective. After all, one fighter literally got his teeth kicked out.

“I fell in love with it,” Osborne told MMAjunkie. “I remember seeing it and turning to my friend and saying, ‘Not only am I going to run a show of my own, I’m going to fight on it.'”

So that’s what he did. It’s what he tried to do, anyway. Osborne’s opponent didn’t show for that first event, which ended up being a good thing. He had no idea how stressful it would be to promote an MMA event, especially in a small town where, for all Osborne knew, people might freak out the moment they saw bare-knuckled men punching each other in the face.

“That first show was so weird and scary,” Osborne said. “I was terrified I didn’t have the proper insurance. I was worried how people would react to it. My opponent not showing up for that was probably the greatest thing to happen to me.”

Osborne would end up fighting – and losing – on a subsequent show he promoted. The experience was enough to convince him that it was a very bad idea, trying to compete on the same event that he ran. There was enough to worry about just making sure that the seats were filled, that the fighters were where they were supposed to be, and that the place didn’t catch fire.

He couldn’t have known then that this would be something he’d do for the next two decades. He definitely couldn’t have known the role he’d play in shaping the sport that would eventually crawl out of this primordial ooze.

* * * *

Osborne: I think my favorite is a fight Aaron Riley had against a guy named Shane Garrett. We had to do it as a pancrase fight because Aaron was still in high school, he was a teenager, but it was this incredible fight. They went 20 minutes and Aaron won the decision and by the end nobody was still sitting down. It might have been the first standing ovation in MMA history, even if there were only about 400 people there. But I bet none of those people will ever forget that fight. It was such an emotional experience to watch.

Riley: I definitely remember that match, me and Shane Garrett. He had a lot of MMA experience and he was challenging me for my title at HOOKnSHOOT. I was a senior in high school at the time. It was early on in my career, and early on in MMA in general, now that I think about it. It was funny. The day before the fight Jeff told me, ‘Man, I saw this guy working on leg locks and he’s more technical than Frank Shamrock.’ I was like, great, thanks for making me feel better about the match.

* * * *

The people who know, they mostly remember HOOKnSHOOT for two things: 1) Its early embrace of women’s MMA, and 2) How many future stars passed through its ring on their way to bigger stages.

UFC middleweight champion Dave Menne got his start in HOOKnSHOOT’s lightweight tournament. (His first month of pro competition, in April 1997, Menne would fight six times, with four of those coming in HOOKnSHOOT.) Frank Mir made his pro debut at a HOOKnSHOOT show in 2001, and very nearly got himself beat up before coming back to win. Antonio Rogerio Nogueira had his first fight in North America at HOOKnSHOOT “Overdrive” in 2002.

Then there was Ian Freeman, Ivan Salaverry, Hermes Franca, Chris Lytle, Travis Lutter, “JZ” Cavalcante, Jeremy Horn – names that feel like they were lifted out of an MMA time capsule.

HOOKnSHOOT was particularly good about showcasing groups underserved by the two emerging giants of MMA, PRIDE and the UFC. One of those groups was female fighters, who first appeared on a HOOKnSHOOT card in 1999 and had a show all to themselves as early as 2002, with a seven-fight, all-women event called “Revolution.”

Osborne had been a fan of the women’s fights from ReMix in Japan, and thought there had to be a market for it in the U.S. Because his was one of the few promotions to show a real interest in regularly promoting women’s bouts, he ended up cultivating much of the early women’s MMA scene right there in the Memorial Coliseum in Evansville.

“It was one of the first organizations to take women seriously and not just use them as a sideshow,” said Kaitlin Young, who won HOOKnSHOOT’s 2007 Women’s Grand Prix by winning three fights in one night. “Some of the other shows, it’d be like, ‘Oh, and here’s something weird, a women’s bout!’ At HOOKnSHOOT it was perfectly acceptable for women to be the main event and the main attraction. It was ahead of its time, compared to many other shows.”

For Tara LaRosa, who had her first fight in what she recalls as “this weird abandoned train station,” it was a revelation to be treated like a real professional in Osborne’s show, but also to feel truly appreciated.

“HOOKnSHOOT became like my family,” LaRosa said. “Other places you’d fight, it felt more like a transaction, this cold, clinical thing. But if you fought for HOOKnSHOOT, you knew all the people, everyone behind the scenes. You’d go fight and go for drinks after and it felt like you were a part of it. To them, you were a person. You had a name. Now, on most shows, you just feel disposable.”

Growing up a few hours away from Osborne’s home base in Evansville, Julie Kedzie came to know of HOOKnSHOOT as a place where a local fighter like herself could forge a real name for herself. She began fighting there in 2004, then won a one-night HOOKnSHOOT tournament in 2005, clocking more than a half-hour of total fight time in one evening.

“It was heaven for me, honestly,” Kedzie said. “It seemed like every time the women fought, people there paid attention. Sometimes it was to tell them that they wanted to (expletive) them in the mouth, which is what sometimes happened to me, or they were just really into the fights. But it seemed like you didn’t notice the same prejudice toward women fighters there, just because Jeff had made it his thing to have lots of women fight.”

But Osborne was also an early believer in the lighter weight fighters. Back when the UFC couldn’t decide if it even wanted to feature a lightweight title, and while PRIDE was busy shuffling its smaller fighters into the “Bushido” series of events, HOOKnSHOOT was featuring guys like Aaron Riley and Yves Edwards in main events.

Edwards got involved after Osborne came down to his home state of Texas and watched him fight at a small show there. It just so happened that former UFC light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz was the referee for that event. He was considerate enough that, after Edwards knocked his opponent’s teeth out, Ortiz was the one who collected them and put them in a Budweiser cup for safekeeping.

“That was nice of him,” said Osborne.

He made plans for a Texas event of his own, one that would pit Riley, HOOKnSHOOT’s lightweight of great local renown, against Edwards, who was quickly gaining a similar reputation in the Texas MMA scene. Edwards didn’t think twice about accepting the bout.

“The thing about HOOKnSHOOT was that it was a small show, but you knew the MMA world was watching,” Edwards said. “You knew that if you were fighting there, people would see it. A win there would mean something. The bigger shows that were looking for good fighters, they were looking at HOOKnSHOOT.”

Edwards and Riley would fight twice under the HOOKnSHOOT banner – once in Texas, once in Indiana – with Edwards winning both bouts by decision. The second fight remains one of his favorite memories from a long and well-traveled career, in part because of where he got to do it.

* * * *

Edwards: I remember really wanting to finish Aaron (Riley) when we fought in Evansville, and I didn’t, but I still got to beat him up and it felt like beating him up in his home, in front of all these people who loved him. It was great.

Young: The (Memorial) Coliseum, I don’t know what it was about that place. It was a place where they did a lot of pro wrestling, so it kind of had that feel. I think there was also an old man living in there. Like, if you went through the wrong curtain, there’d be an old guy sitting in a recliner smoking cigarettes. It was bizarre and surreal, but I’ll never forget it.

Kedzie: It was such a weird venue. The seating and the way people stand to watch the fights, it feels so intimate and so close. You can hear the voices and you can interact. I could actually hear people cheering for me and calling instructions to me from the top row.

LaRosa: It’s like the dungeon down in the back. It’s a dank, dark, closed-off, no-air-flow dungeon down in the bowels of this building, underneath the stage. It’s just ominous. It was creepy and there was this bathroom down there that didn’t work, but kind of worked. There was a door that nobody could open and nobody knew what was behind it. It was crazy, but it was great because every time you came to Evansville, this was where you fought. When I went there, all I thought about were all the heroes of mine who had fought there.

* * * *

The strange thing now, with his final event approaching, is how absolutely certain Osborne is that he won’t miss it. He had some great times with HOOKnSHOOT, he said. It led to him doing commentary for the UFC for a time. And when he joined forces with Bodog back in what he considers the golden era of MMA, from about 2006 to 2009, those might have been the best years of his life.

“But it became a job for me probably six or seven years ago, and it’s never been the same,” Osborne said. “Don’t get me wrong – I’ll still train and watch fights and all that. But I won’t miss putting on the shows. It just feels like a crossroads in life, and it’s time to try a different route.”

About a year ago Osborne opened a new business venture, a retro arcade, complete with comic books and collector’s items from the ’80s and ’90s. It’s fun in a way MMA used to be, before it became a chore. Seeing what new treasures come through the door every day, it’s something different.

Plus, these days life is very different for a local MMA promoter. With a UFC event almost every weekend, the serious fighters are focused only on getting into the big time as quickly as possible. The others fight here or there, just to say they did it, but not enough to sustain a regional brand.

“I just feel a big oversaturation and downturn right now,” Osborne said. “But it has a lot to do with burnout, too. You do something for 20 years, I mean, 23 years I’ve been doing it. But it’s also that the industry is just not the same as when I fell in love with it.”

For his final show, Osborne has a little inside joke planned. As a guy who’s worked as a promoter, manager, journalist, commentator – even a commissioner – he used to enjoy telling people that he’s held every job in MMA but ring girl. So why not check off that box too, as long as it’s his last go-round?

“So that’s why I’m headed to the gym here in about 20 minutes, so I can be a ring girl with abs at 47 years old,” Osborne said. “After that, that’s the last straw. I really can’t conceive of doing another show. Just mentally, physically, emotionally, I can’t.”

But as one of the longest running MMA promotions prepares to roll up its tent for the last time, there’s a danger that the history will be forgotten. It’s happening already, Osborne said. The women who got their first real platform with HOOKnSHOOT are now mostly retired or else heading there soon. Many of the big names who started out in his show are now relics who newer fans may have never even heard of before.

To the fighters, the time they spent in HOOKnSHOOT was special. To everyone else, maybe it’s nothing more than one more clip on the UFC’s Fight Pass streaming service, where old HOOKnSHOOT fights now float in a sea of combat sports content.

But what are you going to do? That’s life – and business. Nothing lasts forever, and Osborne doesn’t want to try. Better to let it go than to see it limp along on life support, devoid of passion and spark.

Still, it would be nice if people remembered. Some do.

* * * *

Kedzie: One thing I’ll never forget is Aaron Riley – he was my favorite fighter, the one I modeled myself after. He was from Indiana and I just thought he was so great. For some reason I was at this show giving out autographed pictures of myself, which, even hearing that come out of my mouth right now makes me a little disgusted with myself, but he came up and he asked for one. I was like, are you (expletive) kidding me? You’re the first person I ever saw fight, the person who made me want to do this, and now you want my picture? It was a reminder of how small and friendly this sport can be, and how much we rely on each other.

Young: Jeff gave me a lot of really good advice when I first started. He was the one who, after I won that first tournament, told me, ‘Hey, don’t quit your job.’ He was good about being encouraging but also realistic. And it seemed like he really cared. Once I fought a few other places, I got to see that it wasn’t like that everywhere.

Edwards: I remember I fell asleep in my hotel 20 minutes before my fight once. I almost missed it. I was just tired. I guess I thought that someone would come get me when it was time, and I guess they thought that I would just show up when it was time. Finally someone did come get me and I had just enough time to get there, get my hands wrapped, and go do my thing. But it didn’t feel that strange. HOOKnSHOOT always had this kind of small-town vibe.

Riley: That fight against Shane Garrett, one thing is he was a Lion’s Den fighter from Mikey Burnett’s Lion’s Den in Oklahoma. That was right after Mikey had fought Pat Miletich in this big rivalry they had. Miletich and Jeremy Horn were teaching a seminar that same day and I asked them, ‘Hey, would you guys mind cornering me for this fight I have later?’ They were into it, because it was another opportunity for this proxy war between Miletich and Burnett. It also opened up some doors for me as far as training, getting to know those guys. I remember right after that was spring break. All my friends went to Florida; I went to Iowa. That kind of set me on a path, I guess.

LaRosa: I remember the second all-women’s show that I fought on made such a huge impression on me, and really changed my style and philosophy and outlook on the sport as a whole. That’s where I first met Roxanne Modafferi. We were sitting in a hotel room, a bunch of us watching tape on Roxanne’s opponent. I was sitting on the bed and she was sitting down on the floor and we were all just talking about stuff. I remember she looked up at me – and this was when she had those round Harry Potter glasses – and she goes, ‘I would really like to fight you some day.’ I just kind of looked at her. I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like a callout or a challenge, like ‘(expletive) you, I can take you.’ It was just this enthusiastic, ‘dude, it would be so much fun to fight you!’ All of a sudden, a light bulb went off for me. Because I used to wear all black and walk around like Billy Badass, like I was hard or something. But after that it was like, yeah, why wouldn’t I want to be friends with people I fight? Why would I want to hate them? These are the people I have the most in common with. They go through the same (expletive) that I do.