Taylor Wily entered the McNichols Sports Arena on 12 November 1993 under the ring name Teila Tuli. He was a 25-year-old sumo wrestler and he left the building as a footnote: the first fighter ever knocked out in the UFC.

Gerard Gordeau, a Dutch savate stylist, caught him with a kick to the jaw as he scrambled near the fence. The bout was over in 26 seconds. A tooth ended up in the crowd.

“There was a different feeling when you walked through that octagon,” Wily later told Unilad.

His professional MMA career ended that night. The record would stay 0-1.

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A sumo champion before the octagon

Wily had arrived in Denver already a successful athlete. According to SportBible, he had competed in professional sumo in Japan under the ring name Takamishu and become the first foreign-born wrestler to win a championship in sumo’s makushita division, the sport’s third tier.

The UFC experiment pulled fighters from different disciplines into the same cage with almost no rules. Sumo met savate. Savate won in under half a minute.

From UFC footnote to shrimp truck

Wily’s breakthrough on screen came in 2008, in a small role as Kemo in the comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Two years later he joined the cast of CBS’s Hawaii Five-0 reboot as Kamekona Tupuola, a shrimp-truck owner and reluctant police informant. He stayed for 171 episodes across a decade and reprised the role on the Magnum P.I. revival that followed.

Peter Lenkov, who executive-produced both shows, told Unilad in the hours after Wily’s death that he was “devastated” and “heartbroken.”

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A longer Instagram tribute followed. In the post reported by NME, Lenkov recalled the first audition.

“T, as I told you many times, I fell in love with you at the first audition. You came in with a towel on your head mopping up sweat, and I was smitten.”

The wrongful-death suit filed in Las Vegas

Wily died on 20 June 2024, in Hurricane, Utah. He was 56. His manager, Michael J. Henderson, told reporters the cause was natural, and his obituary noted his health had declined over the final six years of his life.

That has not stayed the complete picture. In October 2025, local outlets reported that Wily’s family had filed a wrongful-death complaint in Las Vegas against GMTCare, a medical transport company. The suit alleges a wheelchair lift malfunctioned on one of the company’s vans in 2023, causing Wily to fall and strike his head on the pavement, and links those injuries to his death. GMTCare has not publicly commented, and the case remains unresolved.

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Wily is survived by his wife Halona and their two children.

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