Last chance for Tanner, Grove?

Mixed martial arts pioneer Evan Tanner and former Ultimate Fighter winner Kendall Grove face off in the main event of the Ultimate Fighter finale card on Saturday night in Las Vegas.

Both have been told their UFC career is likely on the line.

Both fighters have essentially been told by UFC matchmaker Joe Silva that the loser is likely out of the UFC. It’s not a hard-and-fast edict, as if they have a great fight, the loser is likely to stay. And with injuries frequent and shows constantly being added to the schedule, both are still name fighters and could always get the call to come back.

Tanner, 37, has been a professional fighter for 11 years and is a former UFC middleweight champion. But it’s only been in the past year when he came to the decision that he really wanted to be a professional fighter.

“Fighting never was my dream,” said Tanner, a throwback to the early days of the sport when every organization had different rules and there wasn’t much money in the game. “I was never fully committed to the sport and I always had other things going on.”

After an 18-month hiatus from MMA largely spent drinking, drifting and not training, Tanner, 32-7, contacted UFC and asked to return. Then, after losing to Yushin Okami in his comeback fight on March 1 in Columbus, he’s faced with the uncertainty that he may have abused his body too much and waited too long to return.

Tanner’s career started in 1997 on a fluke. He was a two-time state high school wrestling champion in Texas who had Division I offers, but after leaving college after his freshman year, he didn’t do a thing athletically for seven years.

Some of his buddies from high school wrestling were competing in the U.S. Wrestling Federation, an Amarillo-based group doing a primitive version of MMA. Steve Nelson, a national sambo-style wrestling champion, opened up what was one of the first regional MMA organizations, long before MMA was even a term or before there were any standard rules.

Nelson marketed it locally as pro wrestling, a sport that in another generation was huge in Amarillo, except there was a twist. He used rules taken from pro wrestling including rope breaks on submissions and no closed fist punching, but in all but a few cases, the matches themselves were real. For a two-year period, it was all the rage locally.

Tanner was talked him into entering a tournament just as an experience.

He retained enough of his old skill from high school, and was a better athlete than anyone there. He walked through his early opponents, which included future MMA stars like Paul Buentello and Heath Herring, and aside from Nelson himself, become the group’s biggest star.

“I got talked into trying it by some friends, but it wasn’t my thing,” he said. “After the first time (where he won a four-man one-night tournament), I never figured on fighting again. Then they offered me a shot at the title. I thought it would make a good story to tell to my kids. If I won, I’d get a photo of me with a world title belt. Then I won the title. Then they kept asking me back to defend it.”

Aside from his wrestling, his other skills, like his submissions – he has 20 submission victories – and knees, were largely self-taught from studying videotapes. Tanner kept winning, and with a 9-1 record, with every win coming in the first round, he was considered one of the best prospects in the sport, and got booked into the Pancrase organization in Japan.

He would show up with a month or two of training and simply, through physical strength and athletic ability, kept winning against people who lived and breathed the sport 24/7. By the time he debuted in UFC in 1999, he had a 15-1 record and was one of MMA’s early masters of tying people up and throwing hard knees from a clinch.

At 190 pounds, Tanner was a small light heavyweight for most of his career, until the implementation of the middleweight (185 lbs.) division. Today, most people of his size at the top level cut to welterweight. Fighting to him was still more along the lines of something that came up a few times a year, he’d take the fight, make some money, and not give much thought to it until the next fight was looming.

But as a pioneer of the sport, Tanner resents the perception that UFC used to be nothing but unskilled street brawlers.

“UFC has always been tough,” he said. “I get tired of hearing how the sport has changed and when people act like it was nothing but street brawlers. There may have been a few, but there have always been great athletes in UFC.”

Tanner was 22-2 when he earned a shot at light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz shortly after the UFC was sold to the Fertitta brothers in 2001, but was slammed and knocked out in 32 seconds.

He moved to middleweight, where he was an early champion, beating David Terrell in 2005, before losing the title to Rich Franklin just as UFC hit cable television and the top fighters became celebrities.

But after a first-round submission win over Justin Levens at UFC 59 on April 15, 2006, he walked away from the sport.

His life consisted of drinking and wandering around the country and living in one place or another for a few weeks or months at a time, and then moving on. That’s with a heavy emphasis on drinking. And then he said he physically hit rock bottom.

“I did a lot of damage in my two years (actually closer 18 months) off,” he said. “Last October, I decided to completely focus on being a fighter.”

He moved to Las Vegas and quickly said he had abused himself to the point it took months to even begin to get back into shape. He said he was still feeling the effects when he faced Okami, one of the top middleweights in the UFC, three months ago, when he was knocked out in the second round by a knee. He said this will be his first fight where he’s both fully dedicated mentally and ready physically.

“My focus is on me, not my opponent,” he said. “My biggest challenge is with myself.”

He also said experience has taught him a valuable lesson, and that is to play to your strengths.

“One of the biggest mistakes I see is people trying to be what they’re not,” he said. “Stand-up is not my specialty. I know it well enough to protect myself. My game is the clinch and good wrestling, and to strike when I need to.”

Grove has to fight something more than Tanner. His toughest foe is the label that he doesn’t take a punch well. The 25-year old suffered two straight first-round knockouts, at the fists of Patrick Cote and Jorge Rivera.

If Grove goes out too easily, that counteracts the physical advantage the 25-year old Hawaii native has of being able to make 185 pounds at on a 6-fot-6 frame, giving him a tremendous reach edge on almost everyone in the division. And it’s something that no amount of fan popularity can overcome.

Grove has been one of the company’s more popular fighters since beating Ed Herman in a back-and-forth final match on season three of the Ultimate Fighter reality show two years ago. But with an 8-5 record, he’s also in the position of possibly becoming the first show winner to get cut.