WEC Challenger Leonard Garcia Talks About His Wild West Texas Life

Dave Meltzer gets the skinny from featherweight WEC #1 contender Leonard Garcia on his arrest and exoneration in 2008. But he also got this little gem about the long strange road that led Garcia into MMA. As a child of the Texas Panhandle I can't tell you how familiar this story sounds:

Garcia’s involvement in MMA is a strange story. After high school in Plainview, Tex., he was planning on going to Texas Tech to play football as a walk-on. But after his high school graduation, he wound up at the Taco Cabana, and a guy walked by, put his hand in Garcia’s nachos and started eating them. He asked the guy to stop, so the guy did it again, and they got into a fight.

“I knocked him out, but then he asked me to come outside and do it again,” Garcia said. “I didn’t know he had a knife. He stabbed me eight times, and punctured one of my lungs. We ended up at the same hospital and I found out he had either PCP or LSD in his blood stream. I couldn’t recover in time to play ball.”

Instead, in 1998, he wound up at an early version of an MMA show in his hometown as a spectator. When there was an opening in the card, they asked if anyone in the crowd wanted to fight, and he ended up as a participant, and won his first fight. He then started training and fighting regularly.

Leonard Garcia has wilder stories than anyone this side of Lee Murray except unlike Lee, he's innocent!