Tyrone Mims had a lot going for him. Sherdog tells us that apart from his budding MMA career, he was a nascent reality star in an online reality show called Georgia Boys Grits-N-Glory. Sadly, both careers were cut tragically short on August 11, 2012, when the 30-year-old Mims became unresponsive after what MMA Junkie reports was his first amateur fight. The rest of the event was canceled and Mims was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead. 

The strange thing, however, is that no one seems to know just how he died. This wasn’t some backwoods tournament where ringside medical attention consists of the promoter’s dog licking fighters’ wounds. The event was arranged according to the regulations of the South Carolina Athletic Commission, which meant elaborate pre-match physicals and fight day examinations by ringside doctors. No one noticed anything wrong with Mims, and even a forensic autopsy couldn’t determine a cause of death. There were no concussions or other deadly injuries. An investigation failed to find any drugs, alcohol, or even underlying genetic causes to his demise. All the coroner could do was speculate that Mims might have had some unnoticeable heartbeat issues … but since that can’t be seen postmortem, all the officials could do was to file Mims’ death under “mystery.”   

As MMA Fighting tells us, Michael “Tree” Kirkham was a very peculiarly built fighter. The self-taught warrior’s 6’9,155-pound body meant that he had reach to spare, but as his last two fights tragically demonstrated, this alone wasn’t always enough to win. Kirkham’s father recalls watching Tree’s final amateur bout, where the opponent “beat the heck out of the back of Michael’s head to the point where it was beet red.” This was enough for the officials to place Kirkham on a 30-day “medical suspension.” Unfortunately, it appears that the fighter neglected to have a doctor look at his injuries, possibly because it was too expensive. 

On June 24, 2010, Kirkham’s ban ended. Two days later, he competed in his first professional match at the University of South Carolina Aiken Convocation Center. His opponent, Carlos Iraburo, made quick work of the poor Tree with a takedown and some headshots, and the referee stopped the match after just 40 seconds. Soon after that, Kirkham lost consciousness, and passed away two days later. Although his demise was unexpected and awful, not even his father blames Iraburo for the incident. Instead, it appears that Kirkham’s fatal brain hemorrhage occurred because of a badly understood phenomenon known as second-impact syndrome, where two hard blows to the head — even if you receive them weeks apart — can combine to completely “overwhelm” the body, resulting in massive swelling of the brain and a fifty-fifty chance of death.  

As MMA Fighting tells us, weight cutting — the practice of rapidly losing lots of pounds to make it to the weight class you’re fighting in — is dangerous. For Rondel Clark, an amateur fighter from Sutton, Massachussetts, it was lethally so. In August 2017, Clark fought his second MMA fight, losing via TKO but barely taking a hit. Three days later, the 26-year-old fighter was dead. 

At first, no one could figure out what had happened, since the only sign of physical discomfort Clark had displayed was exhaustion shortly before his defeat. However, it soon transpired that he had done a 15-20 pound weight cut without expert supervision, which had wreaked havoc on his body. In fact, starting from his kidneys, Clark’s entire system had shut down because he was so dried up. His official cause of death was a grisly-sounding condition called rhabdomyolysis, which means his muscle tissue basically started falling apart due to extreme dehydration combined with excessive physical strain.

Though Clark’s demise was a tragedy, it prompted his family to try and make something good out of it. They established the Rondel Clark Foundation, which “seeks to raise awareness and education about extreme weight cutting” by fighting the ingrained MMA culture that they say quietly encourages weight cutting tactics. 

The story of Douglas Dedge’s final fight in 1998 started like a martial arts movie. As Sherdog tells us, the Floridian learned about the World Super Challenge, an early MMA-style tournament put together by an Ukrainian jiu-jitsu club, and decided to test his mettle by joining the foreign “World Team” competitors who would face local fighters. Unfortunately, that’s where the movie plot ended and horrifying reality kicked in, because Dedge was no Jean-Claude Van Damme or Dolph Lundgren. Reportedly, he was a sub-par fighter who liked to play up his skills to promoters, and his one amateur fight at that point had ended in a strange loss that allegedly involved him trying to strangle his opponent with a headband or wristband. Even more alarmingly, he seemed to have some sort of medical condition that caused him to sometimes zone out or even temporarily lose his vision during training. 

So, when Dedge’s match in Ukraine started, the grim writing was already on the wall. Dedge was taken down and took multiple hits to the head, which witnesses say didn’t seem too hard but were enough to cause him to submit. Almost immediately after the match was over, he fell in the ring and was rushed to the hospital, where he ultimately died of “severe brain injuries”. Most people seem to put this down to a preexisting condition that he declined to report. 

It’s easy to imagine an MMA death as one of those scenes in martial arts movies where one fighter punches their opponent so hard, they die right there and then. That’s actually quite rare in real bouts, but it does happen: According to Sportbox (via Bleacher Report), Azerbaijani fighter Ramin Zeynalov suffered this exact fate in 2015 in a “national tournament.” 

Zeynalov’s road to demise was filled with pleas to abandon his quest of MMA success. The 27-year-old fighter had no need for money, and he had a loving family who tried to convince him not to fight just for the sake of fighting. Zeynalov chose to not listen, which proved to be a bad decision. During the fight, his opponent landed a hit to his head, knocking him unconscious and, according to Bloody Elbow, giving him a fatal brain hemorrhage. Doctors pronounced Zeynalov dead right there in the cage. His relatives chose not to blame Zeynalov’s opponent, noting that he had entered the ring voluntarily and didn’t prepared properly for a MMA fight, despite being an extremely successful martial artist in multiple styles.   

Sometimes, a death in the ring isn’t as simple as a direct cause and effect between an unfortunate fist and an unlucky face. As Seattle Times tells it, kickboxer Jameston Lee-Yaw’s amateur fight in April 2015 in his native Aberdeen, Washington ended in a disaster when he collapsed after the bout. According to Bloody Elbow, the fighter seemed visibly exhausted, which prompted the promoter to ask how he was feeling, but Lee-Yaw merely responded: “Yeah, I’m just tired man.” Initially unaware of any serious issues, the fighter’s teammates carried him to the dressing room, where it was soon discovered that Lee-Yaw’s state was a lot more than just post-match weariness, when he unexpectedly started having trouble breathing.

The fighter received medical help, was taken to Grays Harbor Community Hospital, and later transferred to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center where he was treated as a critical condition patient, but neither facility was able to save him. Two days after the fight, Lee-Yaw died of kidney failure. Precisely how his kidneys had taken damage was unclear — he had passed his pre-fight medical with no issue, and previous hospital visits had revealed zero kidney issues. While the 48-year-old Lee-Yaw wasn’t as young as he used to be, as far as anyone knew he had been fit as a fiddle … before he suddenly, fatally wasn’t. That’s how dangerous MMA can be.