Sherdog’s 2011 Comeback Fighter of the Year: Ian McCall

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Comebacks in sports are typically predicated on one or two scenarios. The first, and most basic, is that an athlete of a particular caliber slips up and falls off their game before returning to form. Second, and often related to the first, is a situation in which an athlete battles personal demons before returning to the level of success he’d achieved prior, or perhaps even beyond.

MMA, like other sports, is littered with tales of car accidents, messy divorces and substance abuse that have besieged its athletes. Some recover, some never do.

Top-ranked flyweight Ian McCall’s 2011 comeback involved a little of Column A and a little of Column B. More specifically, a pretty bit of Column A and an awful lot of Column B.

Prior to 2011, the 27-year-old McCall was known almost entirely, if at all, for his three WEC appearances at 135 pounds. Few saw his entertaining win over Coty Wheeler, and those aware he lost to Dominick Cruz knew mostly from looking at Cruz’s record once he took over the division. No, the specific appearance in the little blue cage that most remember McCall for was his resounding loss to veteran Charlie Valencia in December 2007.

Valencia unleashed a hellacious, overhead-release, belly-to-back suplex on McCall that sent him flying across the cage in gruesome and comedic fashion. When McCall recovered, he was thrown in a vicious guillotine that forced him to haplessly tap out. This animated GIF fodder was the one moment synonymous with McCall’s name.

When the Valencia fight is now broached, McCall has a wry smile and rolls his eyes. It’s easy to be dismissive of such a slip-up when you’ve come so far since.

“I’d like to get back the last five years of my life. If I was training consistently the whole time, I would be a black belt in jiu-jitsu and smoking everyone,” McCall told me in August.

“If I had an extra 10,000 hours invested, it’d be great, but I’m on borrowed time. I’ve got to make this all right, and the best way for me to do that is to just keep fighting and to raise my family.”

Those five years that McCall talks about, formative

ones for a young prizefighter, were squandered. McCall’s life was like a documentary-style glimpse about the shiftless, destructive, privileged youth of Orange County. He rolled with gangs of kids in luxury sedans, looking to fight anyone, even bystanders on the street. McCall refers to himself as a “whore” when recalling his promiscuous partying. His reliance on drugs such as Oxycontin, Xanax and GHB had DEA agents show up to his house, and even led to overdoses that put him in intensive care.

McCall once told me that approximately 30 people he would have considered friends, people he would have said hello to on the street, are now dead. One of his first MMA and jiu-jitsu coaches, Jeremy Williams, kicked him out of Apex Jiu-Jitsu because of his drug use. Williams took his own life in May 2007 with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Nineteen months later, McCall was the first non-police officer on the scene when his friend and UFC veteran Justin Levens and his wife Sarah McLean-Levens were found in their Laguna Niguel condo, in an apparent murder-suicide.

A prolonged and painful divorce was the catalyst for much of McCall’s hard living. However, when he overdosed on another pharmaceutical cocktail again in November 2010, it was his family that put him on the inside track to success.

“It was all a train wreck -- everything, the family, my life. It was honestly terrible, dude. Then one day, I just matured and said, ‘This is f----- up. I can’t keep going like this. I love these people,’” McCall said, recalling his family at his bedside and the realization that he needed to get his affairs in order.

From the intensive care unit, McCall unfathomably accepted a February bout with top-ranked flyweight Jussier da Silva for Tachi Palace Fights 8 in Lemoore, Calif. It would be just his second fight in two years.

After spending a round with then-undefeated da Silva on his back, McCall cruised through the final 10 minutes of the bout to win in an emotional upset with major ramifications in the 125-pound division. Three months later, he schooled another unbeaten, Dustin Ortiz, in a thrilling 15-minute exhibition of well-rounded MMA skill.

Prior to the Ortiz win, McCall flirted with the idea of making a run on “The Ultimate Fighter” Season 14, at bantamweight. When I asked McCall that night in Lemoore, Calif., after the Ortiz win if he would go the “TUF” route, he showed off the kind of newly improved decision making that guided his recent success.

“I feel like this is my niche. I can be the best here. Plus, those dudes were huuuuge,” he laughed.

In August, he put together a mature, consummate dismantling of Tachi Palace champ Darrell Montague to take the promotion’s 125-pound crown. Montague, like McCall’s other two 2011 victims, will probably be joining “Uncle Creepy” in the Octagon in the very near future.

Prior to 2011, Ian McCall was a footnote, a WEC undercarder who once went out in hilarious fashion and teetered on the brink of being another upper middle class family trauma victim. Yet, in a matter of months, under the tutelage of Colin Oyama and Giva Santana transformed into the top-ranked 125-pounder in the world. Further, in the development of his Uncle Creepy character, complete with faux-pompadour and Dali mustache, McCall has fashioned himself into a true MMA cult favorite. He’s now a husband, and a father to a young daughter.

McCall’s life and career turnaround is an easy victor for “Comeback Fighter of the Year.” Not only are his accomplishments in the cage considerable, but he bolstered the legitimacy of the whole flyweight division, helping the drumbeat for MMA’s flyweights to enter the Octagon grow louder. As reward for those accomplishments, he’ll be one of four men who bring the 125-pound division to the UFC when he takes on Demetrious Johnson in Sydney, Australia, with a shot at the UFC flyweight title on the line.

It is only appropriate.