Dan Cramer, who graduated in December as an economics major, is just one of 32 fighters competing for a six-figure UFC contract tonight on the premiere of SpikeTV's "The Ultimate Fighter."
The show airs at 10 p.m. and Cramer will be at Thirsty Dog Pub & Grille to watch with friends, explain the show to patrons and either celebrate his success or mourn his failure - he isn't allowed to say whether he makes it past the first round of the show or not. Cramer has donated a lot of the free merchandise he received for being on the show and will raffle it off to patrons.
Each of the first two episodes featurs eight fights. Cramer's first fight will air April 9.
The show "The Ultimate Fighter" is in its seventh season. Over the course of the 12-episode season, "UFC light heavyweight champion Quinton "Rampage" Jackson and top light heavyweight contender and Season 1 champion Forrest Griffin will train and coach fighters in the middleweight division," according to SpikeTV. "'The Ultimate Fighter: Team Rampage vs Team Forrest' is hosted by Dana White, UFC President."
And this season is different from others in that there are more contestants.
In the past six seasons, 16 contestants have lived in a house together and set up tournament-style fights in order to win a UFC contract, Cramer said, but this season the number of contestants was doubled.
With only 16 spots in the house and a need to eliminate half the competitors, the contestants fought each other.
"We did 16 fights in the first two days to figure out who would end up in the house - winners stayed in the house, losers had to leave," Cramer said. Cramer's contract with the show prohibits him from saying whether or not he made it into the house.
"The Ultimate Fighter" house cuts off their fighters from contact with the outside world while they endure a grueling regimen of jiujitsu, judo, muay thai, boxing and wrestling with each other.
Even after participants are eliminated in the tournament-style fights, they continue living in the house until the end of the season, when a new "Ultimate Fighter" emerges. Contestants trained morning, noon and night, Cramer said.
The intense training schedule was not exactly new for Cramer, who started out with jiujitsu and competed as a teen before finding that he really liked the intensity of fighting and the UFC.
"I was a huge fan of the sport - I watched all the fights," he said.
As the sport got more popular, he said he started integrating boxing, martial arts and wrestling into his training and developed an interest in fighting competitively as he began doing better and better.
Flash forward a few years and see Dan Cramer, training for a tryout while in his final semester of college and nursing a hand injury.
"They announced a tryout for my weight class in New Jersey," he said, "and I thought it would really help me with my career."
Three hundred others thought so too and showed up at the tryout with him. Through a day's worth of competing and cuts, the field was narrowed to 30 hopefuls who were eligible to compete on the show in Las Vegas. Cramer got the call that he was being flown out to Nevada for a second elimination round of more intense tryouts including more cuts, drills, fights and drug tests just a week later.
Cramer left Connecticut Jan. 25 and was in Nevada for six weeks.
He's not allowed to say how far he got in the competition, but it's far enough that he feels confident in his ability to move into professional fighting.
The sport is a lucrative one, he said, and it will become moreso as it becomes more popular and more mainstream.
"The show gave me the opportunity to make connections so now I can train full time and pursue a career in mixed martial arts and use my degree to market myself as a pro athlete," he said.
And he's glad to be able to focus on a career in professional fighting rather than juggling training and school.
"The hardest part of training was balancing being a full-time student in Storrs and training in Danbury on top of that," he said. "It's a crazy uphill battle."
Cramer commuted from Danbury, an hour and a half away, each day for classes and trained at night during his last semester of college.
Now that he's back from taping the show, he's really focusing on his training, and preparing for more fights in the future, but is taking some time to enjoy life.
"I get to listen to music again, talk to my friends, see my family," he said, "But now it's back to training and preparing for fights. You gotta be ready for the next level."
Contact Aly Shea at
Alison.Shea@UConn.edu.
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