“I was always honest with Chase and I told him before he went that I didn’t think he was ready,” Toole said. “Not because of skill level but there’s a lot of things that go into it maturity-wise and other. Chase was great but he was tagging Joe Silva on Twitter, ‘I’ll fight in two weeks. I want to fight the same card as my buddy.’ All the time. I think he took five or six of his fights on ten days or less notice in his last UFC stint.”
The lone fight that came with a training camp was his UFC 211 bout with Rashad Coulter. On a card that saw Joanna Jedrzejczyk, Eddie Alvarez, Stipe Miocic and many more, it was Sherman vs Coulter that took home Fight of the Night honors.
When Sherman failed to match the flash of his UFC 211 performance or the devastation of his 9-1 run before making it to The Show, the UFC and Sherman parted ways. One of the first people to get a phone call was Dean Toole of Island Fights.
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“I told him, ‘Just get back on a card. We can’t pay you what the UFC can but we can get you active and give you the right people to fight,’” Toole recalls.
Less than three months later Sherman was in the Island Fights ring.
Out to prove he was the fighter he had always been, Sherman notched three straight first round stoppages in six months, including a monstrous leg kick TKO at Island Fights 56. The three-fight stint, a BKFC heavyweight title and a pandemic was all it would take before the UFC called “The Vanilla Gorilla” once more.
