In Search of Strange Brew... - MMA Fighting
Ten years after the original Ultimate Fightertelevision show put the UFC on the map, one of its cast members fell off. So … whatever happened to Jason Thacker, the quirky Canadian that trained out of the old abandoned truck stop?
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I’ve long been fascinated with Jason Thacker. It’s very possible I’m the only one. Why? It’s sort of complicated. I suspect it stems from overthinking a word like "belonging." In the short history of the UFC, he was a person that ended up in the exact wrong place at the exact right time. Or maybe it was the right place at the wrong time. Whatever it was, man did he catch a lot of hell just for being there. And back then, being there meant something. Remember that?
The original Ultimate Fighter began airing in January 2005, and has long since been accepted as the jolt the UFC needed to break through. If Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin hadn’t had that rapturous, go-for-broke brawl on April 9 in the finale, there might not be a UFC today. That fight hit the broader living room like a magic potion. It was the culmination of something, but it doubled as a real-time epiphany — suddenly mixed martial arts was being translated for people who didn’t speak the language. All at once, it was as if light broke over the taboo.
People got it. Dana White later called it Zuffa’s "Trojan Horse."
And as an extension of that single fight, going backwards, the show itself has achieved a kind of cult status. During that nine-week stretch in 2004, a cast of 16 fighters gave the sport something it was in dire need of: Personality. It was those eight middleweights and eight light heavyweights, crammed into a Las Vegas mansion, with boom mics hovering overhead and small rooms set up as confessionals, that first humanized the spectacle. The barbarians, it turned out, were actual people. They had lives, families, neuroses, pet peeves, idiosyncrasies, dreams, easy to grasp sanity....
Ten years after the original Ultimate Fightertelevision show put the UFC on the map, one of its cast members fell off. So … whatever happened to Jason Thacker, the quirky Canadian that trained out of the old abandoned truck stop?
TWEET (458) SHARE (3321)PIN 118 COMMENTS
I’ve long been fascinated with Jason Thacker. It’s very possible I’m the only one. Why? It’s sort of complicated. I suspect it stems from overthinking a word like "belonging." In the short history of the UFC, he was a person that ended up in the exact wrong place at the exact right time. Or maybe it was the right place at the wrong time. Whatever it was, man did he catch a lot of hell just for being there. And back then, being there meant something. Remember that?
The original Ultimate Fighter began airing in January 2005, and has long since been accepted as the jolt the UFC needed to break through. If Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin hadn’t had that rapturous, go-for-broke brawl on April 9 in the finale, there might not be a UFC today. That fight hit the broader living room like a magic potion. It was the culmination of something, but it doubled as a real-time epiphany — suddenly mixed martial arts was being translated for people who didn’t speak the language. All at once, it was as if light broke over the taboo.
People got it. Dana White later called it Zuffa’s "Trojan Horse."
And as an extension of that single fight, going backwards, the show itself has achieved a kind of cult status. During that nine-week stretch in 2004, a cast of 16 fighters gave the sport something it was in dire need of: Personality. It was those eight middleweights and eight light heavyweights, crammed into a Las Vegas mansion, with boom mics hovering overhead and small rooms set up as confessionals, that first humanized the spectacle. The barbarians, it turned out, were actual people. They had lives, families, neuroses, pet peeves, idiosyncrasies, dreams, easy to grasp sanity....
