Issue 085

February 2012

We pay tribute to the recipient of 2011’s ‘Outstanding Contribution to MMA’ statue, the greatly missed Shawn Tompkins.

Shawn Tompkins was destined for a career in mixed martial arts before the sport even existed. The Canadian-born Tompkins, who started his journey with shotokan karate at six years old, always dreamed big, and at age 18, he opened his very first martial arts training facility – one year before the UFC introduced the world to the sport that would eventually become known as MMA. Over the course of the next 19 years, Tompkins would unsuccessfully try his hand as a competitor before discovering his true calling was to remain outside of the cage as a trainer to some of the sport’s top fighters. It was a wise decision, and Tompkins became so good at his craft he would eventually become simply known as ‘The Coach.’

Tompkins first made his mark on the US scene as an assistant coach for MMA legend Bas Rutten’s International Fight League franchise, the Los Angeles Anacondas. He eventually took over head-coaching duties, watching over notable figures such as Conor Heun, Jay Hieron, Chris Horodecki, Mike Pyle and Krzysztof Soszynski. The position led Tompkins to relocate to Las Vegas, at the legendary Xtreme Couture gym. He would eventually relocate to the nearby TapouT Training Center to branch out and build the longstanding Team Tompkins brand.

In April 2011, Tompkins nearly reached the pinnacle of MMA as a coach: guiding Mark Hominick to a gutsy decision loss to UFC featherweight champion José Aldo in front of 55,000 of the pair’s countrymen at UFC 129 in Toronto. While Tompkins’ pupil fell short of a world title, he exposed holes in the champ’s game, and both Hominick and The Coach were looking forward to a potential rematch in the near future.

Things were coming together for Tompkins and his team, and as one of the most widely recognized and respected coaches in the sport, the 37-year-old appeared primed for even bigger things. But, on August 14th, 2011, Tompkins tragically passed away in his sleep due to an unexpected heart attack.

“We talked all the time – just about life and all kinds of things,” Tompkins’ longtime pupil, John Gunderson, tells Fighters Only. “We would shoot texts back and forth to each other, day in and day out, just messing with each other because that’s the kind of relationship we had. When he died, it was shock, and then it was disbelief.”

Tompkins left behind a wife, Emilie Tompkins, the sister of UFC lightweight and longtime Tompkins protégé Sam Stout. With three months of grieving behind her, Emilie is now comfortable talking about the man she knew for 11 years. “When I met him, he still had a karate school, and he was doing kickboxing on the side,” Emilie says. “He had a couple of classes a week with kickboxing, and slowly that just kind of took over. The boys got into kickboxing and then ventured into MMA, and it went from there. He was just a friend of a friend, really, but a super-exciting guy, and he had all these big dreams. I was just blown away. It was love at first sight, for sure.”

Contrary to popular belief, it was not Stout who introduced Emilie to Tompkins but instead the exact opposite. “When I met Shawn, I was going to college, and he was pursuing this dream,” Emilie says. “I’d work at the front desk of the gym every once in a while and just try to be part of it. Then my little brother Sam, he started kickboxing with Shawn when I first met him. I always like to take credit for that because I introduced them, not the other way around.”

Tompkins and his chief pupils, Hominick, Stout and Chris Horodecki, quickly took to the rapidly growing sport of MMA. Emilie remembers a time when Tompkins dreamed of opportunities that would eventually become a reality. “When I first met him, when people said, ‘Oh, what does your boyfriend do?’ I would say, ‘Uh, he has a boxing gym,’ because nobody really understood what MMA was,” Emilie recalls. “But it was pretty cool. I remember when I first met him, we would watch Pride, and he would say, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to train one of those guys one day?’ As a matter of fact, he said that about Wanderlei Silva, and then four years ago, when we moved to Las Vegas, he had that opportunity. I’ve seen him really accomplish a ton of goals. It was an amazing thing to be a part of that.”

Tompkins’ rise to the top was not without much hard work and sacrifice. His relationship with Rutten, a man that remained a close friend until Tompkins’ untimely death, was a perfect example of how The Coach was the creator of his own destiny. “The year before I met Shawn, he spent almost a year in California, basically living on the mats at Bas’ gym,” Emilie says. “They met at a seminar in Canada, and Shawn was really eager, and he wanted to learn more from Bas. Then Bas invited him to California, and Shawn was there for months, just kind of being the grunt man. He would sleep on the mats and clean the gym just so he could be there. Shawn really learned everything from Bas, originally.”

But the key to Tompkins’ success lied well beyond any type of particular coaching skillsets. Talk to anyone who worked closely with Tompkins, and they’ll unquestionably use one particular word to describe the relationship: family. “I met him at the first IFL event in Las Vegas,” Gunderson recalls. “I’d met him at a few IFL shows, but I actually hung out with him for the first time at that event in Las Vegas. I fought, and we just chatted a little bit. After my fight, he came in the back and said, ‘I’d like it if you moved out here. I think I could make you a better fighter.’ You feel like you’re always learning with him, and you feel better. He made you feel like you were on top of your game, like no one could beat you. All the confidence he put into you, as a fighter, you need that. You need somebody to push you.”

Gunderson believes Tompkins was a throwback of sorts – a man who was driven by a pure belief in the art of MMA, rather than simple sporting entertainment. “Nowadays, you’ve got so many fighters at the top who bring in certain coaches, but the fighter runs practice,” Gunderson says. “They say how hard it’s going to go or, ‘I don’t feel like this today.’ Since I’ve known Shawn, I think I’ve had 10-to-12 fights, maybe more, and I had my ups and downs. He was there with me in my ups, and he was there with me in my downs. When I was down and out, he would call me up and say, ‘Get your ass down here. We’re all together.’ He was that kind of guy. He brought a family to the team. Shawn was big into that team atmosphere, and that’s what I liked.”

Tompkins’ passing was first reported in the moments leading up to the main card of one of this year’s most memorable UFC fight cards, UFC Live 5, headlined by Dan Hardy and Chris Lytle. Despite the crowd-pleasing action unfolding in the cage, Tompkins’ impact was evident on the press row, as journalists from numerous outlets scrambled to both verify and make sense of the sad news. Backstage, UFC officials were scrambling, as well, trying to find out if by some cruel luck the reports were untrue.

It was but a small preview of what was to come. Tompkins’ August funeral in his native Canada and subsequent October memorial service in Las Vegas drew hundreds and hundreds of mourning figures hoping to share their memories of The Coach. “When I went to Canada for the funeral, we weren’t sure how many people to expect,” Emilie says. “At the visitation, they usually have a couple of hours in the afternoon and a couple of hours at night. We actually continued the visitation from 1pm to 11 o’clock, and we had thousands of people come out. The funeral itself, we had almost 800 people. It was so nice to hear all those people tell me how Shawn had touched their lives in small ways or big ways. The memorial was the same thing. We originally wanted to do that just for the people who couldn’t make it to Canada for the funeral. But it turned into a really great celebration of his life. A couple months had passed by then, and all the people that really cared about him came out and showed their support, and I was overwhelmed – but not surprised. He was such a great person. Not everybody had the opportunity to know him personally, but the people that did really, really truly cared about him, and I think that shows how much he cared about them.”

Talk to the people closest to Tompkins, and they won’t bother to tell you of his technical abilities as a coach, despite how much he accomplished in his craft. Instead, they’ll tell you of who he was as a person, which mattered greatly to his fighters. “Shawn was that type of person if you met him, you had a story to tell about him,” Sam Stout says. “He touched a lot of people’s lives in a lot of really deep ways. He had a lot of influence on a lot of different people.”

“Everyone he met he had a certain bond with that person and a certain relationship,” Mark Hominick adds. “It was nice to hear a lot of the stories at his memorial. There are so many people that met him, and they each had a special bond with him, a special relationship, and that was his gift, really.”

In trying to make sense of Tompkins’ death, or at least accept it and move on, it is perhaps Tompkins’ widow who offers the most insight. “Unfortunately, we lost Shawn much too early. But for such a short life, he accomplished so much. I’m going to use that as an inspiration, so I hope fans and friends do the same.”