Jim Carpenter was a veteran of 62 professional MMA fights, starting his career in the infancy of the sport and taking on the best the sport had to offer. Hailing from Wigan, England, Carpenter was the scourge of the British Isles and eventually winning every conceivable title in the Lightweight and Welterweight divisions before taking his talents to Alpha-1 and eventually Gamma.
Though he never won any titles with the bigger organizations, he was a stiff test and fared well against the best in the world, finishing his career with a record of 49-11-2. A quiet, unassuming gent, Carpenter was respected by all in the business and gaining even more popularity in America than he had in his native England. It was for this reason that he decided to settle in Arizona upon his retirement in 1999 after being stopped by Bobby Brubaker at Gamma 31.
After being out of the spotlight for nearly 2 years, an unlikely meeting with Dean Guest led to a pooling of ideas and resources and in January of 2001, with $500,000 in their coffers, owner Guest and CEO Carpenter announced the opening of the Arizona based MMA organization, Elite Cage Warfare, or ECW. Initially starting with just three divisions (Heavyweight, Light Heavyweight and Middleweight) the two began their journey to put ECW on the MMA map.