(And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why history must be re-written.) By Matt Saccaro Tournaments seem like a great way to determine the best competitor from a group of athletes. You have 8 (or 16 or 32 or whatever the number) fighters, put them in a bracket, and then let them fight it out. The last dude standing clearly must be the best because he survived the tournament, right? At first, that logic seems OK. But upon closer scrutiny, it starts to sound like something Master Shake would try to argue. Tournaments ”” like the ones the UFC used to run ”” are heavily dependent on how the bracket is organized. Some fighters get an easy run, others get a gauntlet. This got us at Cage Potato thinking: What if some of the early UFC tournament brackets were re-organized or even shuffled just a little bit? Who would end up becoming the “Ultimate Fighters” of the 1990s? Let‘s find out! UFC 2 UFC 2 was the first and only 16-man tournament run by the UFC. The first round of the tournament ”” save for Royce Gracie‘s fight (of course)””didn‘t air on the PPV and aren‘t on the DVD either.  These “lost fights” from UFC 2 have quite a few interesting characters such as the enigmatic Pencak Silat master Alberto Cerro Leon and the chubby, sweatpants-clad Robert Lucarelli. Look at the complete bracket and see how many names you recognize. Most of these guys from the UFC 2 dark matches had no chance in the tournament, save for a man named Freek (or Frank) Hamaker.  We‘re going to stick with Freek because it rhymes with Reek. A fighter like Hamaker was a rarity in the early days. He wasn‘t a hapless striker fated to be embarrassed.  He was a sambo practitioner who trained under legendary European grappler Chris Dolman. Hamaker‘s first (and only) fight was at UFC 2 against the mysterious San Soo Kung Fu man Thaddeus Luster. The fight went like the typical early UFC fight. The guy with grappling immediately took down the guy without grappling and won shortly afterwards. Hamaker withdrew from the tournament after defeating Luster and disappeared to the pornography theater from whence he came.