He thanked, family, friends, trainers, peers and the UFC, and then BJ Penn thanked his fans for making it all possible.
“If I forget anybody, you saw how many punches I took, you know why I forgot,” Penn said.
After an unforgettable career that began while training in local gyms, picked up when he became a jiujitsu world champion and reached a pinnacle when he became the second man to win UFC belts in two divisions, Hilo’s “Prodigy” now can call himself a UFC Hall of Famer. On Saturday in Las Vegas, Matt Hughes introduced Penn as “the greatest lightweight whoever lived.”
“Fans ask me all the time, ‘B.J., do you think you did enough with the time that you had?’” Penn said. “To them I answer, ‘No, I didn’t do enough. I did way too much, more than I ever wanted to do.”
Hughes hailed Penn as a fighter that spent exactly 5 hours, 18 minutes, 7 seconds in the octagon carving out a special legacy that opened the lower weight divisions to the mainstream.
Penn joked that his fighting career actually began when he was toddler. Among those he thanked was an uncle “who talked me into having my first fight at 3 years old against a kid who kept taking my toys.”
Among his proudest accomplishments: Penn not only beat down opponents to win UFC championships as a lightweight and welterweight – only Randy Couture can claim titles in two different divisions – but in doing so he stopped his critics in their tracks, making them “peanut butter and jealous.”
With his family beaming nearby, Penn was inducted into the Modern Era wing, for fighters who debuted after the unified rules were introduced in 2002. Bas Rutten entered into the Pioneer wing, Jeff Blatnick was enshrined posthumously into the Contributor wing and a 2005 tussle between Hughes and Frank Trigg was memorialized in the Fight wing.
One of Penn’s first milestone victories came in 2004 when he surprised many by defeating Hughes for the welterweight belt via rear-naked choke. Hughes would win a rematch two years later, but perhaps he did Penn a favor.
Penn dropped down to the lightweight division, spawning what Hughes called “a reign of terror” over the 155-pound class. Penn avenged an earlier loss to Jens Pulver, submitted Joe Stevenson for the title and defended his belt against Sean Sherk, Kenny Florian and Diego Sanchez.
“All I wanted to do was become the lightweight champion, beat Jens Pulver, and retire,” Penn said of his first fight against Pulver in 2002. “I always knew the UFC would get this big. But I’m a small-town guy, so I just wanted to become the champion, prove to myself that I could do it, go back to a normal life, and if anybody ever talked to me about the UFC, I could say, ‘Hey yeah, I know about that. I used to be the champ once. Here’s my belt.’ That was my whole dream.”
Penn knocked out Hughes in 21 seconds in the rubber match in 2010, but he would lose his last three fights.
Hughes said he tried to talk Penn out of a third fight with Frankie Edgar, who had beaten Penn via back-to-back unanimous decisions in 2010. Penn would go on to lose to Edgar in July 2014 by TKO, his final appearance in the octagon.
“He went out fighting the only way he could go out,” Hughes said. “Fighting the best opponent he could possibly find.
“He didn’t go out losing, he went out like BJ Penn.”
Who could forget?