At 39 years old, Robbie Lawler is a former UFC world champion who will undoubtedly find himself in the UFC Hall of Fame one day.
He’s also a guy who has looked for a fight his entire life. It’s why on Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Lawler will compete for the 45th time professionally in a rematch with Nick Diaz at UFC 266.
His journey is chock-full of fights regarded as some of the best ever. There’s the bloodbath rematch with Rory MacDonald, the sheer brutality displayed in the Carlos Condit fight and the knockout of Melvin Manhoef in StrikeForce that left Manhoef’s eyes rolling into the back of his head.
Those fights were all available on mainstream broadcasts, but a couple that didn’t make the list? They took place down on Ward Avenue at a time Hawaii was a hotbed for live MMA shows.
TJay Thompson has promoted fights in Hawaii since the 1990s, but the peak of his time as a promoter came in the mid-2000s.
Egan Inoue was the headline attraction for many years as the SuperBrawl champion until he was knocked out in 27 seconds by Japanese fighter Masanori Suda in 2003.
That left Thompson without a local champion for two years, until Niko Vitale’s superman punch knockout of Suda made the rounds on all the local news broadcasts the next night.
Thompson had his local attraction to fill the Blaisdell but needed the right opponent to really have his promotion take off.
Around the same time, Lawler was regarded as one of the UFC’s biggest up-and-coming stars until he was derailed by a knockout loss to Diaz.
After suffering another defeat, Lawler found himself out of the UFC at the end of 2004. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
“(Robbie) was managed by Monte Cox, who ended up being my best man at my wedding,” Thompson said. “There was an actual plan put in place, a five-fight deal, and the goal was to have him be rich and famous at the end of it.”
Over the next three years, Lawler fought four times in Hawaii. He knocked out Vitale less than four minutes into a title fight in 2006, only to lose the belt by third-round submission to Jason “Mayhem” Miller seven months later.
He came back the following year for back-to-back fights. He scored a fourth-round knockout of Frank Trigg in a back-and-forth affair that had the arena standing and yelling for a full 20 minutes at one of the most vicious and brutal fights the promotion had ever put on. Then Lawler came back and won the EliteXC middleweight title with a knockout of Murilo “Ninja” Rua.
The win over Rua made Lawler a champion in a company that was in its first year with a Showtime deal and then ultimately was bought out by StrikeForce, which secured a groundbreaking network TV deal with CBS.
Lawler was on his way toward the stardom he enjoys today, but it began with that series of fights in Hawaii.
“They always appreciated how I came to fight,” Lawler said Wednesday. “They’re definitely amazing fight fans because they appreciated what you were doing.”
Lawler has main-evented seven UFC cards and fought all across the country, but still remembers the roars of the crowd he would hear in the 8,000-seat Blaisdell Arena.
“It was a nice, decent-sized place where there wasn’t a bad seat in the house,” Lawler said. “It definitely catapulted me in my career. I was fighting, working on my skills, getting better and everything, and it was the right place for me at the time.”
Lawler admitted he hasn’t been back to Hawaii since the Rua fight, but joked he has a bunch of credit card points that maybe he should use to go back to where he managed to get his career back on track.
“I loved the laid-back atmosphere, I loved the food, it was a good time,” Lawler said. “Those crowds were elite. It was a really good gift at the time to fight there. It was an awesome experience.”
Thompson had a front-row seat for the entire thing.
“I’m perhaps most proud of the work we did with Robbie on how his career resurged,” Thompson said. “We couldn’t claim any other (weight) class as world class, but the 185-pound division we had was special.”
