The MMA Hall of F@#$%&G Awesome: Matt Brown

Headquartered in scenic Woodloch, Texas, the Mixed Martial Arts Hall of F@#$%&g Awesome (HOFA for short) commemorates the achievements of those fighters who, while they might not be first-ballot selections for a traditional hall of fame, nonetheless did remarkable things in the cage or ring, and deserve to be remembered. The HOFA enshrines pioneers, one-trick ponies and charming oddballs, and celebrates them in all their imperfect glory. While the HOFA selection committee’s criteria are mysterious and ever-evolving, the final test is whether the members can say, unanimously and with enthusiasm, “____________ was f@#$%&g awesome!”

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“My mouth was bleeding a lot and in the newspaper article it talked about, ‘This guy named Matt Brown is spitting blood into a cup as he’s doing the interview with me.’ It made for a pretty good article.”

That quote, which saw Brown reflecting on his mixed martial arts debut nearly two decades after the fact (h/t MMA Fighting), is solid confirmation of his old-school credentials. What set “The Immortal” apart from most of the countless other fighters of the 90s and early 00s who came up fighting in dog kennels, on unpadded wooden floors or in cutoff jeans, is that even after reaching the pinnacle of the modern sport, headlining arenas for the world’s top promotion, the backroom brawler was never far from the surface.

The human-interest side of Brown’s story should be well known to anyone who saw even one of his bouts in the Octagon, and once again it is familiar fare: After running with a bad crowd as a young man, getting into street violence and hard drugs, he once overdosed to the point of needing to be resuscitated, which formed the basis for his professional nickname. He turned his life around, channeled his energy and talents into sanctioned violence and eventually made his way to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, where he achieved some big things across a 30-fight run with the promotion, then finally retired as a well-respected figure in the sport.

Coming into the seventh season of “TUF” in 2008, his first exposure to MMA fans at large, there was nothing to recommend Brown as a standout from that cast, let alone the one who would go on to achieve the most after the show. The 27-year-old was barely above .500 and while his regional tape showed solid muay thai striking and violent tendencies, his defensive grappling deficiencies were such that he featured in quite a few other fighters’ highlight reels as well.

On the show, he stood out as Season 7’s version of a time-honored “TUF” archetype: the cast member who, thanks to being a little older and more experienced in life, is not amused by the constant frat house hijinks. This was illustrated nicely by his reaction to castmate Jeremy May putting lime juice in Brown’s chewing tobacco. (Whether that crossed some kind of line is up for debate, but nearly two decades later, it remains a head-scratchingly weird prank.) Brown was not pleased, but got some very TUF-style payback when they met in the bracket; future welterweight Brown avenged his Copenhagen’s honor by crushing May—who would go on to spend most of the rest of his career at heavyweight—with the best knockout of the season.

Once in the UFC, Brown initially presented as a knockout artist was destined to hit a ceiling somewhere outside the Top 10 due to the apparent liability of his submission defense. That impression seemed to be confirmed in 2010-2011, when he lost four out of five bouts via tapout, including a second loss to a fellow HOFA inductee in Chris Lytle that served as one of the best highlights of Lytle’s career.

However, an unexpected thing happened to “The Immortal” on the way to the bin of just-another-guy welterweight action fighters: Brown started winning a lot of fights in a row, violently. He strung together seven straight victories, six of them by knockout, earning him a title eliminator against Robbie Lawler in the main event of UFC on Fox 12 on July 26, 2014. While Brown came up short that night, he would remain a factor in the division for nearly another decade, serving up his patented brand of technical brutality until May of 2023, when he retired after—of course—a knockout win over fellow grizzled veteran Court McGee.

SIGNATURE MOMENTS: From a competitive standpoint, the Lawler fight represents Brown’s high-water mark, as Lawler would go on from there to win the belt in his next fight, the crowning achievement of his own legendary career. While Brown missed weight for that crucial bout and lost a competitive but clear decision to the “Ruthless” future champ, he also showed that the long win streak that had brought him to that point involved no smoke or mirrors: Brown was a real, live welterweight contender, and would remain so for several years to come.

Picking a single highlight is a trickier matter, as one might expect of a fighter who only heard the final horn twice in 17 UFC wins. Unlike many fighters who come up looking like killers against overmatched opposition, then become conservative at the top level, Brown continued to live and die by the sword until the very end, using his historically underrated footwork and distance management to run opponent after opponent into his fists, feet, elbows and knees.



Beyond the raw knockdown and knockout numbers, Brown’s finishes were subjectively some of the nastiest in the sport, and none was nastier than the surprise he delivered to Diego Sanchez at UFC Fight Night 120 on Veterans’ Day in 2017. Late in the first round, an awkward series of collisions and slips led to Brown catching a kick from Sanchez with his right hand. Brown then walked his man to the fence, braced his left hand against Sanchez’s forehead, then wiped him out with a right elbow to the head. It looked, sounded, and had roughly the same effect as if Brown had hit him with an ax handle. Sanchez went down in a heap, his head clanking off his own knee on its way to the floor, as Brown stomped off to celebrate another savage knockout.

THE HOFA COMMITTEE SAYS: Of the fighters who have retired since the HOFA opened its doors in 2018, perhaps none was as obvious a shoo-in candidate as “The Immortal.” His blend of an ultraviolent highlight reel, underrated technical skill, no-bullshit persona and well-documented enthusiasm for heavy metal make him the living embodiment of the Hall’s founding values.

It is with great pleasure that we say: Matthew Burton Brown, you are f@#$%&G awesome.