Thomas Gerbasi’s “UFC Encyclopedia” Book Review

With a history of 18 years, the Ultimate Fighting Championship has become the home of some of the top talent that the MMA world has to offer. Problems with the management in Zuffa aside, there is no denying how important the UFC has been in the growth of the sport in America and how they continue to spread it across the sea to other countries. With easily over 150 official events and fourteen seasons of their “Ultimate Fighter” reality shows, it is easy to forget parts of the past with the constant flow of new fighters and shows on a nearly weekly basis. Thanks to “The UFC Encyclopedia”, you can have a second chance to relive those memories.

Published by DK/ Brady Games, the cover of this book states that it is “the definitive guide to The Ultimate Fighting Championship”, but is it really? For a price tag of $50, it better be. This nerd went from cover to cover, scouring the pages to help you decide whether you should spend your hard-earned paychecks on this coffee-table book, or if you are better off saving that money for that dental surgery you have been putting off (oh, I know about that). Is this really the last book you will ever need to get on the UFC, and if it is, why should you own it? All of your questions about this encyclopedia will be answered by the end of this article! You can thank me later.

Hit the jump for the full review!

Clocking in at a hefty 400 pages, this hardcover coffee table book was written by Thomas Gerbasi, who is also the author of The “UFC Official Fan’s Guide: As Real As It Gets”, and writes all the info on the back of the Topps UFC trading cards, among other writing he does for the UFC as their editorial director. This full-color book is filled with the history of the UFC and tons of high-quality photos dating as far back as the very first UFC event in 1993.

The encyclopedia is broken up distinctly into two sections, an alphabetical profile of fighters, followed by breakdowns and stats from events. The book goes as current as UFC 130, which was main-evented by a showdown between Quinton Jackson and Matt Hamill. Between events, there are separate sections devoted to other important UFC tidbits, including a rundown of the octagon girls, a history of the UFC title belt’s appearance, announcers, and countdowns of the best knockouts, submissions and greatest fights. Did I agree with the choices on those “best of” lists? Not often, but frankly, it’s impossible to please everyone in that aspect. In this book, the qualification for best seems to be more about the historic significance of the outcome rather than the actual outcome looked at alone. For example, Frank Mir’s unique arm-lock submission on Pete Williams from UFC 36 is one of the slickest subs in the history of the company in my opinion, but it did not make the top 25 best submissions in this book. At the end of the day, that is more of a personal thing though so it’s easy to understand why my picks would not be the same as someone else’s, but it’s a great conversation starter!

Depending on the popularity of the fighter, sections on UFC combatants range from several pages, to just a few paragraphs. For example, Anderson Silva has four pages devoted to himself, but immediately following that entry, Wanderlei Silva gets one page. Across from that, six fighters including Elvis Sinosic, Kimbo Slice, and Wes Sims, share a page with all of their info squeezed in. When I say squeezed in, I mean it – Kimbo gets four sentences for his entry, Sinosic gets three sentences and Aaron Simpson (who is also on that page) gets a whopping two sentences to summate his time in the UFC. In spite of that, the sections on the more popular fighters are lengthy and include new interviews with the fighters to add deeper insight into their careers. If you were looking for info on every single fighter that appeared in the old UFC tournaments, you will not find EVERY fighter but you will get the more memorable ones, which is fine by me. I don’t need to know too much about Orlando Weit Mark Hall, or Joe Charles.

The sections on the UFC events, which includes “Ultimate Fight Night” and “UFC Live” events are comprehensive. For earlier events, Gerbasi awards “Unofficial” submission, knockout, and fight of the night honors to various fights in each events. Each entry includes a look at the fight poster, along with a selection of photos from the show. The results section is really the meat of the book, and my favorite part as well since I can relive the details of my favorite UFC shows or remind myself of some that I completely forgot about. Certain events get two pages, but the majority of them get one full page to cover results, photos and the story behind the scenes.

Additional appendixes included in this are a section devoted to each season of “The Ultimate Fighter” reality show ending at season 12, and “Leaderboards” which are stats from FightMetric.com about things like most strikes landed, most UFC wins, most career takedowns, and best significant strike accurary. “UFC Championship History” runs down all of the title holders in the company, as well as anecdotes about their reigns. It was in this section that I first noted the one bit of MMA history that the book chose to alter.

In the Bantamweight championship category, the book recognizes Dominick Cruz as the first champ, which is technically untrue. In reality, at UFC 30, Jens Pulver beat Caol Uno to become the first UFC Bantamweight champion, but his title was quickly changed back to being called the lightweight title by his next fight. However, there is UFC Championship belt in the old style that says “Bantamweight Champion”, so why change history?

You could also argue that Duane Ludwig holds the true record for fastest knockout in the UFC with four seconds, but this book would have you believe it was Todd Duffee’s KO over Tim Hague in seven seconds (in fact, the book completely ignores this KO record in fact in both Ludwig’s profile and the Ultimate Fight Night 3 entry). This is inherently the problem when you have a book of “facts” put out by a commercial business that can control the info they put out there. Luckily, those bits of misinformation are few, but it’s still disturbing to see them in there.

As all fans know, Zuffa bought Pride FC back in 2007, and soon after scooped up the WEC, along with other companies. This encyclopedia actually does devote two pages to each of those promotions, but since this is a UFC encyclopedia, they are only passing. Indeed, other companies like Elite XC, Affliction, and Strikeforce are mentioned in the book when necessary, but not much detail is devoted to them beyond just acknowledging their existence (with a company like the UFC, that’s actually a big deal that they are not ignoring the competition). I was hoping that even though this is the UFC Encyclopedia, that it would still at least list results of all the past Pride and WEC events, but no luck there. If you want that info, you’ll have to check out Jonathan Snowden’s “MMA Encyclopedia”.

UPDATE: I spoke with the author about two of those issues I had with the book, and he responded to both – “the bantamweight thing in the championship history section was an oversight, because as you’ll see, the mw / lhw and ww / lw name changes were there, and in the UFC 30 report, pulver’s win over UNO was correctly titled. Thanks for the catch – if we go to a second printing or an update, I’ll make sure that’s fixed. As for the Ludwig KO, until the commission changes its ruling, Duffee has the official record. Hopefully they do and bang gets it, not only because he deserves it, but because he’s one of the good guys in the game.” So there is hope for a second printing to correct those mistakes!

Overall, this is a great coffee table book full of vivid photos and plenty of information about anything you want to know about the UFC. Gerbasi left no stone unturned while writing this book and paints a great picture of the UFC and their legacy of fighters and events thus far. While there are some spots in it that were basically rewritten by the UFC, I can ignore it for the rest of the content and appearance of the book. In terms of a reference book, it does have plenty of details but it will not make a person an expert in UFC, and no matter how much the company tries to rewrite history, as long as their are people out there who are true “fight nerds”, we need not worry too much about the story of MMA being altered from the truth.

This book retails normally for $50, but you can grab The “UFC Encyclopedia” from Amazon.com for only $30. It makes a perfect gift for any fan of the UFC, whether they are new or hardcore, and even the more discerning MMA fans will enjoy this encyclopedia for its photos and records, although we get most of our MMA info elsewhere. I would have enjoyed the book more if it acknowledged the past in a more accurate way, but anytime a product has the name UFC on it, one should always expect a bit of a spin on the end-result.

Other Reviews: “Ultimate Matt Hughes” DVD Review, Review of Big John McCarthy’s autobiography, “Let’s Get It On!”, “UFC: Bad Blood – Liddell VS Ortiz” DVD Review and more in our product reviews section!