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The WEC: Shattering The Stereotypes I Once Believed

In some ways, my experience with the WEC shares some similarities with my story about Elite XC and Women’s MMA. But there’s one big difference: for Women’s MMA, it’s not that I believed that women couldn’t fight. I just wasn’t that interested in seeing them fight.

Before the WEC, however, I actively believed that “little guys” couldn’t put on entertaining fights.

Let’s call that line of thinking what it is right now: completely stupid. I admit it: I was completely stupid to believe that.

But believe it I did, which is why I approached my first WEC show with a sense of boredom and superiority. I believed that once I watched a WEC event, I could finally get past the whole “don’t knock it ‘till you try it” argument that the pro-WEC fans always made when I described my lack of caring about the WEC in particular and the “little guys” in general.

So it should come as no surprise that my experience with the WEC was the most eye-opening experience in my entire time as an MMA fan.

I think the best way to describe how the WEC changed me as an MMA fan would be to give a list of milestones throughout my time as a WEC fan. So here goes.

By the end of my first WEC event, I realized how stupid I was to believe that “little guys” couldn’t put on exciting fights just because they were little.

By my third WEC event, I started marking down the dates for WEC events on my calendar.

By my fifth WEC event, I started to realize that the WEC might just be one of the best promotions I had ever watched.

By my seventh WEC event, I had pulled a complete 180 and was now joining the WEC super-fans in their quest to promote the WEC and lighter-weight fighters in general as loudly and as often as possible.

And when the curtain closed and I saw the final WEC event the WEC would ever run, I called it one of the greatest MMA events of all time.

My experience with the WEC was one of the few times I can ever remember being so very grateful for being proven so very wrong.

Next: Anderson Silva: Imitating The Famous Front Kick Anytime Anybody Talked About It