Ant Evans said he pitched his vision for an expanded UFC Hall of Fame to company brass for about five years before he got it right. Early on, it wasn’t an easy sell – a lesson he learned the first time he sat down to explain his ideas to then-UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta.

“I pitched it to Lorenzo,” Evans said. “I was talking about all these different wings (I wanted to do). I was pretty inarticulate and didn’t pitch it very well. I sucked. It was a bad pitch. He was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the stupidest idea I’ve heard all week.’”

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But Evans was undeterred. He kept working.

When the UFC Hall of Fame inducts its 2019 class at a gala event Friday in Las Vegas, it’ll be to a version of the hall that might not exist without Evans’ persistence and the hard work of a dedicated group of UFC staffers. Among this year’s inductees, Michael Bisping and Rashad Evans join the hall of fame’s modern-era wing, Rich Franklin goes into the pioneer wing, and the 2009 brawl between Diego Sanchez and Clay Guida is honored in the wing reserved for great fights.

The full scope of the UFC Hall of Fame, including individual wings to spotlight different aspects of MMA history, is the realization of the concept Evans and others argued for all those years. In addition to the modern wing, pioneer wing and great fights wing, there is also a wing to honor out-of-the-cage “contributors” such as former UFC matchmaker Joe Silva and Tapout clothing founder Charles “Mask” Lewis Jr., among others.

“I wanted to help tell these great stories,” Evans said. “I think just as a storyteller, people like Don Frye and people like Maurice Smith deserve to be remembered – and they weren’t.”

When Evans joined the UFC’s media relations team in 2006, the hall of fame was already three years old. A look at the list of early inductees, however, makes it appear the hall’s initial incarnation was a bit of an afterthought. It had launched to mark the UFC’s 10-year anniversary on Nov. 21, 2003, when Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock were inducted during a live ceremony at UFC 45. Yet by Evans’ arrival, the hall had added only two more UFC greats – Dan Severn and Randy Couture – to bring the grand total to four.

He thought the hall could do more to recognize the pillars of MMA’s past. In the hard-charging world of the UFC, however, the idea of spending much time looking back seemed counterintuitive to some. After all, the fight company isn’t selling tickets to events that happened last year or even last week. The focus is always on what comes next.

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“The great Don King told me this once when I was a boxing reporter,” Evans said. “(When I asked him), ‘What’s the biggest show you’ve ever worked on?’ he goes, ‘It’s always the next one.’ If you want to be a promoter, the biggest show is always the next one. … That’s a promotion’s job. Promotions are like great whites. There has to be forward motion, or they cease to exist.”

Even in a sport that has existed in America only for a bit more than 25 years, Evans and others believed it was important to build a monument to its history. In the wake of that early rebuke by Fertitta, he worked to refine his pitch for a bigger, better hall of fame.

He started doing research, contacting more established institutions in baseball, football, pro wrestling and even the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, to get some pointers. When he felt he was ready, he took his ideas back to Fertitta and UFC President Dana White. Each time they shot him down, Evans would go back and tinker some more. Eventually, he said he wore them down.

“Finally, I think I just annoyed Dana and Lorenzo,” Evans said. “They were like, ‘You’re not going to stop, are you?’ I was like, ‘No. Look, if it sucks, you get to say, ‘I told you so.’”

White and Fertitta agreed to let Evans and a group of other UFC employees begin to expand and reshape the hall of fame. Making it a reality was a team effort, Evans said, and he mentioned UFC producer Zach Candido and UFC Vice President of Global Brand and Creative Heidi Noland as instrumental in the hall of fame’s development.

After this weekend’s ceremony, the hall of fame will include 16 pioneers, six modern-era fighters, six contributors and five fights. It contains UFC stalwarts such as Matt Hughes and Forrest Griffin, and also fighters who did the bulk of their best work outside the octagon, including Kazushi Sakuraba and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira. In the absence of any high-profile independent hall of fame, it stands as the industry leader.

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Not everybody likes that, obviously. Evans has heard all the criticisms of the UFC Hall of Fame and dismisses many of them out of hand. He talks about the hall with the conviction of a person who spent hundreds of his own personal and professional hours to build it into what it is today.

“I think the result is a very, very credible hall of fame,” he said.

He scoffs at the notion that the UFC Hall of Fame is a glorified “employee of the month” award, noting several fighters who have historically clashed with the company – such as Frye and Tito Ortiz, for example – are in. He shrugs off the notion that it is made less legitimate because one man – White – has the final say on inductees. Who better and more knowledgeable than White to serve as gatekeeper, Evans said.

To the people who argue the UFC Hall of Fame is just a meaningless trifle, Evans points out several personal anecdotes from his time working there.

Frye’s induction, Evans said, was essential in healing a long, bitter feud between the fighter and White. Afterward, Frye even traveled to the UFC Performance Institute to get treatment following back surgery.

Evans said that Smith had long been estranged from his son and that the two saw each other for the first time in a long time when Smith’s son requested tickets to the 2017 hall of fame ceremony, because he wanted to see his dad go in.

He pointed to B.J. Penn crying backstage before his own induction. He remembered Mark Coleman tearing up on stage during his hall of fame speech, the former heavyweight champion saying he worried he’d been forgotten by the sport.

Evans forwarded along an email from UFC pioneer Paul “Polar Bear” Varelans, a non-hall of famer whom the company flew in to attend the induction ceremony a few years ago. Varelans had been going through a tough time in his personal life, Evans said, and after the weekend, the former fighter sent along his thanks in the form of one line – no capitalization, no punctuation:

“dear ant nice meeting you thank u for letting me be the polar bear again”

So, meaningless? Not so, Evans said.

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“That’s why I say fuck you to people who say it means nothing,” Evans said. “Well, it meant something to B.J. Penn. It meant something to Nogueira. It means something to Anderson Silva, who less than 10 hours after getting thumped by Daniel Cormier (at UFC 200), literally limped onto the stage so he could induct his friend Nogueira.”

During a decade-long career at the UFC, Evans worked his way up to senior director of editorial and content acquisition for UFC Fight Pass before departing the company earlier this year.

Most recently, he worked with Bisping to co-author the fighter’s autobiography, chronicling Bisping’s rise from misspent youth in Manchester, England, to eventually winning the UFC middleweight title and going down as one of the octagon’s best. The book, “Quitters Never Win,” will be published by a U.K. imprint of Penguin Random House later this year.

And in case you’re wondering, Evans will be there for this week’s UFC Hall of Fame ceremony. He bought a ticket and will attend for the first time as fan. He said he wasn’t going to miss the chance to see Bisping, who became his close friend while the two worked together in the UFC’s U.K. office, get inducted.

“Michael Bisping is one of my best friends,” Evans said. “I’m thrilled that he’s going in. It’s so richly deserved. For me, he is the ultimate fighter. He’s the epitome of what a fighter is.”

(Top photo: Chris Unger / Zuffa)