Flashback to UFC 17: Enter the “Iceman”
Published by Jim Genia on April 27th, 2009 in History

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Few paid attention to the tall, quiet kickboxer from California in the days leading up to the show. Sure, with a Mohawk and kanji tattooed to the sides of his side, he looked every bit the role of “crazy fighter”. But in Mobile, Alabama in May of 1998, folks who’d gathered for UFC 17: “Redemption” gravitated to the new sport’s more notable stars – which back then included the likes of former champ Mark Coleman, drunken brawler David “Tank” Abbott, and the legendary Ken Shamrock. Plus there was a four-man middleweight tournament (a new weight class that ranged from 170 to 200 pounds at the time) to salivate over, and middleweight champ Frank Shamrock was defending his belt against some lanky grappler named Jeremy Horn, so it was understandable that the “Iceman” was lost in the shuffle. But he was there, making his presence known in the cage long before he would be known to the world at large as one of the faces of modern mixed martial arts.

The UFC was owned by Semaphore Entertainment Group and Bob Meyrowitz before the age of Zuffa, Inc. and Dana White, and the product from that era was more raw and less regulated than what fans know of today. The rules meeting the day prior to the event saw “Big” John McCarthy addressing the fighters and their camps in a hotel banquet hall filled with rows of chairs, and between wiseass comments and faux-questions from Maurice Smith, competitors one by one stepped on a scale to mark their official weights. Abbott joked quietly from his seat in the back, Allan Goes sat focused and intense beside Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu patriarch Carlson Gracie, and Ken Shamrock – wearing a cast on his leg mandated by some storyline his World Wrestling Federation employers had crafted – waited patiently for ward Pete Williams to weigh in before dragging his clan to a nearby weight room. There was absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, a modus operandi that extended even to the hours before show time, when the fighters walked casually with their entourages from the hotel to the Mobile Civic Center a short distance away. Things picked up dramatically when the scant few thousand blood-hungry spectators filled into the arena.

Before the satellite TV pay-per-view broadcast, a Native American behemoth named Andre Roberts entered the Octagon to knock the towering Harry Moskowitz out with an elbow in a little over three minutes. In a dark bout taped for a later broadcast, champ Frank Shamrock found himself dominated on the ground by Horn for the entire 12-minute round and into overtime, where he rolled into a kneebar for the win via tap out. Liddell, vying to be the alternate for the middleweight tournament, slugged it out with Midwest boxer Noe Hernandez, going the distance and earning the decision but appearing more of a resilient punching bag than the KO-artist he’d later become. Would the battered kickboxer physically be able to step in to the tournament later that night if needed? Thankfully, with a dogged ground-and-pound win over Goes and a quick triangle choke submission over Maurice Smith-protégé Bob Gilstrap, Dan Henderson and Carlos Newtown would ensure that that question would never need answering. The middleweight tournament ended with wrestler Henderson squeaking by Canadian submission specialist Newton with a questionable decision after 15 minutes of up and down battle.

Wrestler Mike Van Arsdale had little trouble handling Royce Gracie-trained Joe Pardo, tapping him out with a bent-armlock late in the match, and the redneck crowd went bonkers over their hero Tank Abbott’s 44-second destruction of highly-touted Brazilian Hugo Duarte. The crescendo of chaos and bloodlust reached a fever pitch when Lion’s Den fighter Williams survived Coleman’s early intensity to feed the gassed ex-champ a shin to the chops and a first-class ticket into dreamland. (Coleman’s wife came screaming and crying from backstage at the sight of that; she was quickly ushered back by a production assistant.) The entire venue roared their approval, and with UFC 17 one for the history books, everyone eventually filtered out.

Few took notice of the Iceman leading up to the event, but at the breakfast buffet in the hotel the next day the future face of modern MMA stuck out. His head and cheeks purple with bruises and red with abrasions, and swollen as if he’d dove face-first off the roof, Liddell looked like hell. But when congratulated on his win, he smiled. And he smiled proudly, at that.