I can remember first coming to understand just how cool Thomas Gerbasi was. It was about 17 years ago in Atlanta.
I was there for UFC 88, a card headlined by Chuck Liddell defending his light heavyweight title against Rashad Evans. I didn’t know many people in the combat media space at that time, except for TG — as he liked to sign off — who happened to be the editor of UFC.com.
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I only knew him because I’d written a feature on Dan Henderson after UFC 82 for the IE Weekly, an alternative newsweekly in the California’s Inland Empire, and it had caught his attention. Still no idea how he’d stumbled on it, as it was the first real piece I’d done related to MMA. He’d liked it enough to offer me a couple of side gigs at his website, profiling the likes of Brandon Vera and Chris Lytle.
But on that day in Atlanta, I was very much on the outside looking in at the world of MMA at that time.
“Meet in the lobby,” he told me. “We can walk over to the arena together.”
Next thing I knew I was walking alongside him, Kevin Iole, Neil Davidson, and Franklin McNeil — big players in the dedicated combat media — to the Philips Arena to witness Liddell’s downfall in real time.
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Tom, in his unmistakable New York accent, introduced me as an “excellent writer,” as if there was never any question of whether or not I belonged on the scene. He talked as if, naturally, I should be contributing to the great conversation on the fight game, the one they’d all long been a part of, which struck me as incredible.
Why the leap of faith? The elegant Davidson seemed to speak with his pinky off the cup handle, yet when TG spoke it was matter of fact.
Everyone loved him.
I can remember thinking, right after Tom introduced me to Joe Silva, the UFC’s matchmaker at the time: Wow, this guy is going out of his way to make me comfortable. It was like he took me under wing.
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And that feeling lasted for the next 17 years. TG was always there, like a kind of guardian of the word. To use the past tense in these sentences hurts. To make the great Tom Gerbasi a thing of the past, it doesn’t feel real.
He was, in many ways, the sturdiest presence in the tempestuous realm of combat sports — boxing and MMA. A million things happened around him. People came and went. Fighters came and went. Jobs came and went. Entire websites were erected and destroyed. Stars rose and fell. Controversies, scandals, sudden deaths of athletes.
Yet he remained right there. Same presence. Same enthusiasm. Same voice of reason. The steady voice in the gale.
In the middle of a major UFC event, he might lean over and say, “How is your son liking baseball?” He was, to put it another way, a restorer of faith.
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Gone at 56 years old. That’s hard to believe. He loved his family so deeply it hurts to see the finality of the date range, 1968-2025. But boy did he get the most out of that hyphen. He was a beautiful soul in this game, universally beloved. So many people over the years have talked about how Gerbasi championed them, or went the extra mile for them, or checked in on them when they needed it.
Personally, I’ll miss the side-eyed smile he liked to give. When he knew something you didn’t (which was often), or when he caught you speaking out of your ass, he’d shoot you this comical side-eye with a little smirk, as if to say, “you kidding me?” The little dimples on his cheeks were permanent. And when he spoke under his breath (which was also often), it was that of a no-nonsense Staten Island wiseman speaking.
“Sonnen early,” I remember him mumbling before UFC 117, “Silva late.” Four words was all he needed to prove himself a prophet.
In TG, there was a patient man rooted to the earth, paying little mind to the fight game’s greatest hysterias swirling all around him. Through all the pageantry of prizefighting he could be spotted, right there, typing at a pace all his own. I would joke that I’d written 1,500 words that morning, and he’d look at me with those side eyes.
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“Try 3,000,” he’d say.
And he wasn’t exaggerating. He wrote with the hand of a fiend. Profiles. Books. Literal encyclopedias. He wrote about roller derby. He wrote about bands he liked in the Village Voice. He wrote about seemingly anything that struck his fancy. And though he wrote about MMA more than anyone, his first love was boxing. He told a famous story about his one and only fight in the Golden Gloves, about the two hits he remembers — the one he took, and the ambulance hitting 80 to get him to the hospital.
When I moved to Connecticut and my daughter started kindergarten, I was sitting there with a lump in my throat when Tom called. He knew what I was going through. He wanted to know how I was holding up, and then he told me of sending his own daughter off to school for the first time. He was that guy in the world, always looking out.
When I was trying to find Jason Thacker from the first season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” he was constantly checking in to see if I had made any progress. He would go out of his way to provide contacts for people to check in with, connections of connections who might know something. And when the piece finally came out, he shot me a note: “You found him — nicely done, my friend.”
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That’s just how he was. When I saw him in March, sitting ringside at the Callum Walsh fight at the Madison Square Garden Theater, he showed me pictures of his granddaughter. We talked about the marathons he’d ran. He talked about playing soccer, joking that he was too old. When he saw Dana White and Hunter Campbell take their seats nearby, he said, “I guess I better say hello to the boss.” There was no big reverence because Gerbasi was the embodiment of the even keel.
Well, except when the wrestler Big E came over to say hello. On that front, he gushed a little. There was a little boy in there, too. You don’t smile through the fight game for three decades unless that boy is in there somewhere. I can remember asking him how he avoided getting burned out after all that time, and him saying, “I used to clean toilets, Mindenhall — I really don’t want to go back to cleaning toilets.”
I’m going to miss not having him out there. Knowing he’s out there. He was one of the good guys in the world. The last time I texted with him was a couple of weeks ago. He sent me a note about the book deal I signed for “The Fight Game,” just five days before his own book, “Boxing: The 100 Greatest Fighters,” was to come out.
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He wrote, “Hey, just saw the book announcement — love it. You’re gonna kill it, MMA Liebling!!!”
“Thanks, TG,” I wrote back. “See what you started all those years ago? You let me write one piece and now I’m stuck doing a book.”
“Hey, we’re all lucky to have you,” he shot back. “I can’t wait to see it.”
That was it. I regret not responding back, and I wish so badly I’d have told him what so many of us wanted to: “No, Tom, we are lucky to have you.”
Because we were.
