Tamdan McCrory has the slow-striding limbs of a mantis, but the power of Thor—and that’s sort of the alarming impression he left with everybody when he met Pete Spratt in his UFC debut back in June of 2007. He was 20 years old at the time, a gangly 6-foot-4 welterweight with glasses and active hair—not exactly the thing of nightmares. Then he choked Spratt out in the second round with those long slithering arms, and geeks everywhere sent up a cheer for the man who calls himself . . . simply . . . “The Barn Cat.”
Why? Because there’s an animal that’s vicious. Just like him.
Over the next couple of years McCrory has gone a very respectable 3-2 in the UFC (12-2 overall). But a funny thing has happened to the “late-bloomer” since he TKO’d Ryan Madigan at UFC 96 just this past March. At 22 years old, McCrory is beginning to fill into his frame, meaning barn cats might just be added to the endangered species in the welterweight division.
“Yeah dude, I’ve grown,” he says. “The hardest part is going to be the weight cut. It’s not like I’m eating calories or anything, I’m just growing. I shot up in height real quick when I was young and my muscles kind of never caught up. That’s why I have such a huge frame. But I’m going to ride out the 170 thing as long as possible.”
Heading into his fight against Boston-native John Howard at UFC 101 in Philadelphia, McCrory says he is a “solid ten pounds of lean muscle mass bigger than I’ve ever been before.” He walks around these days at around 205 pounds, making him one of the bigger welterweights out there. In fact, when his strength and conditioning coach looks at him and gauges McCrory’s physical trajectory, he predicts that the upstate New Yorker will end up a light heavyweight before his fighting days near an end.
Fine by McCrory, who doesn’t mind an even distribution of his “skull breaking elbows.” To hear him tell it, he throws bigger lugs around at CNY MMA in Cortland all the time.
“I’m strong, I’m big, I can toss heavyweights around, it’s no problem, you know,” he says, pointing up his triple extension as an example. “I’ve gotten a lot stronger. I’ve gotten a lot more massive and this is the strongest I’ve ever felt as a fighter. I’m hitting harder than I’ve ever hit, I’m doing the best grappling that I’ve ever done.”
And right now he is “getting his diesel on” for the 5-foot-7 Howard, who is coming off an impressive split decision victory over Chris Wilson at UFC 94. McCrory will enjoy a nine-inch height advantage, which would lend theory that he would try and strafe “Doomsday” from a distance—but he knows the dynamo that steps in against him on August 8 will engage. Grit doesn’t succumb to limitations, and besides, height advantages can be deceiving, too.
“It goes both ways, you know,” he says. “I’m going to have the range and leverage in the clinch, and he’s going to be maybe a little more explosive. He’s a real gamer and well-rounded, so there’s nothing I’m going to be able to massively exploit. It’s one of those things where it could end up a chess match or one of us is going to get lucky. Either way, if you look at my past track record, either I’m finishing somebody or they’re finishing me.”
McCrory’s endured some ups and downs in his young UFC career so far. After beating Spratt, he has fallen to arm bar submissions to the crafty veteran Akihiro Gono and the grappling ace, Dustin Hazelett, who had to have seen McCrory’s long neck and limbs as a smorgasbord of Jiu-Jitsu appetizers.
But he beat the aforementioned Madigan and Spratt, sandwiching a unanimous decision win over Luke Cummo at UFC 87. It’s a pattern that has gone win-loss-win-loss-win after he began his mixed martial arts career a spotless 8-0. It goes without saying that this is where he’d like to derail that particular pattern.
“Man, you never expect to fall off your horse until somebody knocks you off,” he says. “But, my losses really don’t say anything bad about me. I’m 22 years old, and my losses were to a guy who fought for the first time when I was eight years old [Gono] and I lost to a blackbelt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Dustin Hazelett. Every fight you learn from.”
That’s because hindsight is always 20/20. The bespectacled McCrory’s literal eyesight is something like 20/40, meaning, once he takes off the glasses, the faces at ten feet are smudged out like the faces in the photos in the movie “The Ring.”
Not that he can’t see the guy standing right in front of him, though.
“My sight isn’t terrible,” he says. “I just have astigmatism, near-sightedness and astigmatism, so that if I’m driving down a road I can’t read road signs, basically. To the end of my fist I can see things, and then after that faces become blurry, like if I’m trying to look at my coach from across the corner I can’t see which one’s screaming at me. I can see to the end of my fist, though, and that’s what counts.”
At the end of McCrory’s fist is not a good place to be. The lank fighter who gets motivated by the dark metal stylings of Dethklok’s “Thunderhorse” and who loves to play video games with no human contact on Sundays, packs a disturbingly mean punch. If he lands one of those early against Howard, he might just ride his Thunderhorse right on out of the Wachovia Center and to the boardwalks of New Jersey.
“I’m going to Atlantic City after my fight,” he says. “Not even sticking around to watch it, I’m just going. I’m looking for a knockout though, I need to pay off my student loans, so I really need to get KO of the night.”
When it comes to paying off loans—McCrory graduated from State University of New York College in Cortland with a degree in Kinesiology—people will do just about anything.
McCrory needs only to open a hatch to his wilder side.
“I plan on freaking unleashing the barn cat, dude.”
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