5 of the worst title challengers in UFC history

#4 Gan McGee

Tim Sylvia easily dealt with challenger Gan McGee in the 'Battle of the Giants' in 2003

It’s a pretty established fact that the UFC’s Heavyweight division, prior to somewhere around 2007-2008, was a bit of a wasteland when compared to the rest of the promotion. That’s nothing against Frank Mir, Tim Sylvia and Andrei Arlovski, who were all great fighters in their own right, but realistically, the majority of the world’s best Heavyweights prior to that time were plying their trade in PRIDE.

That meant that we saw some odd challengers for the title in the UFC’s biggest division, and perhaps the most notable of those was Gan ‘The Giant’ McGee. A training partner of the legendary Chuck Liddell, McGee debuted in the UFC in 2000 in what stands as the UFC’s only Super-Heavyweight fight. He lost to Josh Barnett in that outing and didn’t return until 2002, when he was matched with Pedro Rizzo.

McGee won that fight by breaking Rizzo’s nose, and while it was a big win in terms of name value, in all honesty, Rizzo was on a real slide at the time. That win was followed up with a sloppy TKO of the massively inexperienced, 0-1 Alexandre Dantas, and suddenly, McGee was granted a title shot against newly crowned champion Tim Sylvia.

In all honesty, it felt like the UFC had matched McGee with Sylvia simply because of his large size – he stood at 6’10”, and with Sylvia at 6’8”, the promotion billed the fight as ‘The Battle of the Giants’. In the end it wasn’t much of a battle as Sylvia knocked McGee out in the first round, and he never returned to the UFC after that – fighting just 4 more times in his career.