‘Our encyclopedia’: How the death of Thomas Gerbasi leaves a void the UFC may never fill

Somewhere around 2009, there was an argument brewing at UFC headquarters. The team in the main Las Vegas office was working up a profile on this new Dutch kid the promotion had just signed when someone spotted his listed height and thought, surely, there must be some mistake. There was simply no way this dude named Stefan Struve was actually 7 feet tall … was there?

Leonie Mowat was responsible for everything that went up on the UFC website at the time. That meant she was usually the first one to feel the blowback when there was any discrepancy about the information on UFC.com. Fortunately, she knew just how to settle this disagreement.

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“I was like, ‘Let’s call Tom,’” Mowat told Uncrowned this week. “So I had to get on the phone and be like, ‘Look, no one believes me about this guy’s height. Can you please confirm it for us?’ And he did. I knew that, once everyone heard it from him, they’d believe it. He was just that guy for us, like our encyclopedia that we could go to on the fly whenever we needed, and he’d have the answers.”

For two decades, Thomas Gerbasi was the UFC’s mostly unseen yet utterly indispensable man. To the extent that fans knew his name, it was as the guy who wrote stories about the fighters for the UFC website.

But to those who worked with him, he was much more. A mentor. A resource. A steady hand on the helm through every storm. When he died of a heart attack this week at the age of 56, the UFC lost a source of institutional knowledge that may prove impossible to replace.

To understand just how vital Gerbasi was to UFC operations, you only needed to know his zip code. A lifelong New Yorker, Gerbasi adamantly refused to relocate to Las Vegas and work out of the main UFC office with everyone else. This was uncommon, to say the least, since UFC CEO Dana White has never been a man who believed in remote work. According to other UFC employees, there were only two people who were so essential White would let them work from home indefinitely: Gerbasi and former UFC matchmaker Joe Silva.

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“I would talk to him about that all the time,” said Spencer Kyte, a longtime writer for UFC.com and other publications. “I’d say, ‘I need to get a Gerbasi deal where I don’t have to move to Vegas, but I still have a job.’ He’d tell me, ‘Now that Joe Silva is gone, that’s a one-person deal and no one else gets it.’ But that was absolutely part of it. He didn’t want to leave where he grew up and have to move his family or be away from his daughter and now his granddaughter. And he was so good at what he did that they let him do it the way he wanted to do it.”

Gerbasi’s love of combat sports began with boxing. In 1997, he even competed in the Golden Gloves tournament, losing his one and only bout via knockout and then writing hilariously about it later for outlets such as MaxBoxing and the New York Daily News. Prior to that, Gerbasi wrote, his experience was limited to a couple of unsuccessful attempts at street fights as a kid, plus a match at a “White Collar Boxing” night at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn.

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“It was the longest two minutes of my life,” he later wrote of that first round in Gleason’s. “I waddled back to the corner. [Owner of Wall Street Boxing] Tony [Canarozzi] saw fit to not let me sit down and to give me a thimble’s worth of water. He then proceeded to make me look at the white Larry Holmes [in the opposite corner] and told me, ‘Look at him, he’s more tired than you are.’ I didn’t have the air to respond, but if I did, I would have said, ‘If he was more tired than me, he would be dead.’”

When it came time for him to finally fight in the Golden Gloves, Gerbasi faced an opponent named Disel “Truck” Means. He’d later write that he didn’t remember anything after the opening glove touch.

“The Daily news wrote that I was out for ‘a good 30 to 40 seconds,’” Gerbasi recounted years later. “‘My buddy Martin Snow, who once owned the record for fastest KO win in the [New York Golden Gloves], asked, ‘What’s a bad 30 to 40 seconds?’”

Gerbasi wrote about boxing for multiple outlets before developing an interest in the nascent sport of MMA and then finally landing a job with the UFC. At first, his job was mostly focused on churning out content for the website. But as noted by Ant Evans, a former coworker at the UFC who’s now a contributor here at Uncrowned, it didn’t take long for Gerbasi’s depth of knowledge about the entire sport and its history to prove vital to so many different aspects of the UFC’s operations.

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“He didn’t just run UFC.com,” Evans said. “He also had a massive hand in doing the metadata for every video — and initially there were well over 80,000 on UFC Fight Pass. He also wrote every Topps card. He wrote every bio. He worked on every UFC video game from the last 20 years. He had complete input on the ratings on them.

“That happened because once something weird happened, like Dan Hardy had a higher strength rating than [UFC Hall of Famer Georges St-Pierre], they said, ‘Well, OK, we’ll just get someone from the UFC to do it.’ That someone was always Tom. That was always what that meant, which is why anything from the UFC that had any written word to it had Tom’s fingerprints all over it. He was not precious about very many things, but he was very proud of being the editorial director of the UFC — not the editor of UFC.com. He was the editorial director of the UFC.”

According to Evans, Gerbasi was one of many people whose job was potentially on the chopping block after the UFC was sold in 2016. Executives from what was then WME combed through the UFC payroll and budget in search of any “efficiencies” that could be created by cutting staff or other expenses.

“They cut back on everything,” Evans said. “The Christmas party that year was like finger food and plastic f****** seats. It was grotesque.”

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But when the new owners began to question whether Gerbasi was worth the money, Evans said, that’s when the heads of several other departments finally spoke up.

“So many people at the UFC were like, ‘We can’t possibly lose Tom. He does this, this, this and this. If you get rid of him, I’ll have to hire a full-time guy to replace him.’ Then somebody else would say, ‘I will also have to hire a full-time guy to replace what Tom does for my department.’ Then a third person stepped up.”

Pretty soon, the new owners came to realize what longtime UFC employees already knew: Gerbasi’s value to the company was beyond question.

But now that he’s gone, what Gerbasi’s friends and colleagues remember about him most is not his incredible work output. (Though that is still one thing they marvel over. As Evans said of Gerbasi’s daily word count as a writer, “I couldn’t hit that if I just sat down and started writing words out of the dictionary.”) Instead, it’s his warmth and openness they recall best. How, instead of guarding his own spot in an industry with few available jobs, he was always eager to help others find a place in it.

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Longtime boxing writer Lance Pugmire remembered sitting next to Gerbasi while covering his first UFC event in 2006. The Los Angeles Times had sent him to UFC 65 in Sacramento, California, but Pugmire wasn’t sure what to make of MMA at the time.

“I mean, literally when they first asked me to cover the UFC, I was like, ‘Is this real?’ I thought it was an extension of pro wrestling. I didn’t pay any attention to it at all,” Pugmire said. “And the next thing I know, I’m sitting by the Octagon next to Tom, and I really leaned heavily on him for everything that was happening in there. And he was so patient and kind in talking me through it, even though he was on deadline just like I was. That was one of the first times I had ever met him, and the fact that he would do that for me, it just taught me right away what type of individual he was and just how patient and caring he was.”

There are many writers in this sport who have stories like this, including Uncrowned’s own Chuck Mindenhall, who recalled how Gerbasi helped bring him into the fold of MMA media and made him feel welcome there.

Instead of hoarding his contacts or his information, Gerbasi was always eager to share and to help. That, said Kyte, was what made him so much more than just an editor or a boss to the writers he worked with.

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“I learned really quickly just how universally respected he was,” Kyte said. “I didn’t realize the reach he had, because that wasn’t something he’d ever brag about. But I’d talk to people like [former UFC PR director] Dave Sholler, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, Tom helped me get my start.’ Then I talked to Chuck [Mindenhall] and so many others and it was the same story again and again. Everybody has the same recollection of Tom. He was always the person you could go to who would always help you out.”

That, in and of itself, is rare enough in the world of sports media. But what’s even rarer is just how beloved he was by his peers, who all learned to see through the gruff New York exterior to the teddy bear underneath.

“It’s cliche to say that nobody had a bad word to say about him, but with him it’s actually true,” said Mowat. “I remember saying to someone years ago, ‘If someone has a problem with Gerbasi, you know that’s a them problem. That’s not a Gerbasi problem.’ He was someone who loved the sport so much that he was always willing to engage and help you understand where he was coming from.”

For those close to him, the timing of Gerbasi’s death seemed especially cruel. He’d received the Nat Fleischer Award for excellence in boxing journalism just this past year. His newest book — “Boxing: The 100 Greatest Fighters” — was released by Insight Editions earlier this month. He was training for yet another marathon in between matches with his rec league soccer team. So much was going right for him. He was not a person anyone expected to lose just yet.

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For the UFC, replacing a person with Gerbasi’s wealth of knowledge — he literally wrote the “UFC Encyclopedia,” two different editions — won’t be easy. Perhaps it won’t even be possible with just one person. It wasn’t just his depth of knowledge of the sport, as Evans pointed out, but also all the little things.

“He once told me, when we were in Cologne, Germany, for a UFC event, ‘Follow the cutmen at dinnertime. They always know the best places to eat,’” Evans said. “If you needed some fighter’s number, even if he hadn’t fought in the UFC for years, Tom would have it. He was our ChatGPT — for everything.

“When he wrote the ‘UFC Encyclopedia,’ they wanted him to sit there and sign it at one of the UFC Expos. He hated it. He hated attention. But he wasn’t sitting there five minutes when Frankie Edgar came over and was like, ‘I’ll sit here and sign with you.’ Then another fighter. Then another. All without ever being asked. They just wanted to support him, because they all loved him.”

It’s also Gerbasi’s wry sense of humor that his friends remember now. How he could say all he needed to say with one cocked eyebrow, or how he could be so charmingly self-deprecating even while maintaining a work output that put his peers to shame. Somehow he still found time to write music reviews for outlets like The Village Voice, or whip up articles on the Gotham Roller Derby league, just for fun.

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“Whenever he sent me something he’d written that he was excited for me to read, it was never MMA stuff,” said Kyte. “It was always roller derby or music or something from one of the boxing sites. I think that’s where he got to be just Tom, rather than the UFC.com guy. Stuff he was doing just for free on Medium. He lived this and absolutely loved sitting down at the keyboard to write.”

Anyone who needs any proof of that need only revisit his own accounts of that sole boxing match, the one where he liked to joke that he only remembered two hits: The punch hitting him and the ambulance hitting 80 on the way to the hospital.

“Over two decades later, I still look at the tape of the fight,” Gerbasi wrote. “No, you can’t see it. And each time I watch it, I do a little better. I think that the next time I watch it, I’m gonna win.”