Feb. 10, 2010 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:07:19
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| What are we waiting on? | ||
| We good? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Chatting about kombucha. | ||
| I just want to say before this podcast starts, you fucked up, Bellator! | ||
| You fucked up. | ||
| You fucked up. | ||
| I've been telling everybody that Jimmy Smith's the best out there forever, and you let him go. | ||
| That's a huge error on their part. | ||
| We can't talk about anything. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| It might be some future news. | ||
| We can't talk about that. | ||
| But the past is up for discussion. | ||
| The past is up for discussion. | ||
| The present's good. | ||
| I would be thrilled if somehow or another they were able to work it out where Jimmy Smith was at the UFC. We shall see. | ||
| That would be what I would like to see. | ||
| We shall see how that goes. | ||
| I would like to see that. | ||
| We will. | ||
| That's a big fuck up. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| It was, let me say, just a little background. | ||
| A lot of people have been asking me. | ||
| I haven't made any real public statements other than... | ||
| I'm not a Bellator hater, just want to say. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| Cross the board. | ||
| Never been a Bellator hater. | ||
| Respect. | ||
| I enjoy watching it. | ||
| I like the fighters. | ||
| And I've always told everybody that you were the best out there. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You did an amazing job. | ||
| I really appreciate that. | ||
| Number one, yeah, it's not a Bellator thing. | ||
| I mean, they were great to work with. | ||
| They were great about the whole breakup thing. | ||
| Say fucked up! | ||
| Just say it! | ||
| Someone say it! | ||
| Yeah, so what happened was I had a deal with an option year. | ||
| And 2018 was my option year. | ||
| And when I was in Verona, New York, doing the Verona show, my boss sat me down and he said, we're not going to renew 2018. We want a different deal. | ||
| And when they come to you and say, we want a different deal. | ||
| They want a downgrade. | ||
| It's never... | ||
| When your girlfriend comes to you and says, I want to talk, it's never... | ||
| I don't give enough blowjobs. | ||
| That's never... | ||
| They never say that. | ||
| I'm going to be a better girlfriend. | ||
| It's always bad. | ||
| It's always bad. | ||
| So, yeah, that was it. | ||
| When they were like, we want to change the deal around. | ||
| I was like, okay. | ||
| They did make an honest effort to keep me. | ||
| They really tried, but they just... | ||
| They didn't make an offer that was worth me coming back. | ||
| And that was pretty much a deal. | ||
| So it's kind of an amicable, comparatively amicable. | ||
| It's fascinating to me that in the world of mixed martial arts, professional mixed martial arts, there haven't been that many people that have done what you and I both do. | ||
| This is a small handful of people. | ||
| You know what the weird thing is about our job, really? | ||
| And I mean this from the bottom of my heart. | ||
| Everybody thinks they've got a guy. | ||
| It's one of those jobs that everybody thinks they can do. | ||
| They really go, we'll just throw a fight in and then he'll be able to do it. | ||
| I've seen I don't know how many that they want to do. | ||
| Even locker room interviews are going to get an ex-fighter to do that. | ||
| It's a job. | ||
| It's a skill. | ||
| It's one of those things where everybody thinks they can throw somebody in and do it. | ||
| I've seen I don't know how many try. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| You really have to work at it or have a knack for it. | ||
| It's not the kind of thing that You know, it's almost like coaching. | ||
| I mean, how many times have you heard, I've heard of great, great jujitsu guys, like, he's just not a great coach. | ||
| He's naturally really good. | ||
| He's not that good at teaching him because to him it just works. | ||
| And then you try and it doesn't work. | ||
| You know, it's one of those things where a great fighter isn't a great coach. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sometimes, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, a great fighter isn't necessarily a great broadcaster. | ||
| It just doesn't work that way. | ||
| Yeah, some guys are just naturally good at it, though. | ||
| Like, Cormier is naturally fun. | ||
| Like, when Rose Namajunas knocked out Ioana Jacek, he starts yelling, THUG ROSE! THUG ROSE! Like, that's just pure personality. | ||
| Like, you either have that in you, or you can't fake yelling out THUG ROSE after Rose Namajunas KOs her. | ||
| You can't fake enthusiasm. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's, I think... | ||
| Real enthusiasm is contagious, too. | ||
| If you really care about the sport, there are two things that... | ||
| Well, three things that we have to do. | ||
| Number one is to educate people. | ||
| It's weird because most Americans didn't grow up wrestling. | ||
| They didn't grow up doing Muay Thai. | ||
| They didn't grow up doing Jiu Jitsu. | ||
| So a lot of our sport is, at least partially, we're introducing them to it. | ||
| My mom doesn't know the difference between a knee bar and a leg lock. | ||
| She knows boxing. | ||
| She grew up watching boxing. | ||
| She has a background in that. | ||
| We have to explain a lot. | ||
| Number two is we've got to communicate enthusiasm. | ||
| We're happy to be here. | ||
| How great this thing is. | ||
| You should want to be here too. | ||
| That's number two. | ||
| Number three is the story. | ||
| Every fight has a story. | ||
| And even if we don't tell the story, we at least give them the option of the story. | ||
| Was Buster Douglas always a great fighter? | ||
| And we didn't know it. | ||
| Did he have one great night? | ||
| Was Mike Tyson unprepared that night? | ||
| Was Mike Tyson not as good as we thought he was? | ||
| We were literally just talking about that in the last podcast. | ||
| About how Buster Douglas' mom died. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Before the fight. | ||
| And he was just motivated like he'd never been motivated before. | ||
| Got himself in really good shape and had a mission. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Galvanized him like crazy. | ||
| The death of his mother. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's our job. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the play-by-play is more exciting. | ||
| To say, you know, what are we seeing here? | ||
| Are we seeing, wow, is Mike just having an off night? | ||
| Is Buster just having a great night? | ||
| Was Buster always great? | ||
| We didn't know it. | ||
| There are a million ways to see the story. | ||
| And mostly play-by-play does that. | ||
| But we do it every now and then about, hey, you know, this could be a new thing. | ||
| It could be an old thing. | ||
| It's our job to tell that story a little bit. | ||
| Well, especially when it comes to results that we think happen and why they happen in certain fights and corrections that were made, which is on the technical side of things, right? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| The technical side of things on the ground, too, which is huge. | ||
| And you're one of the – I mean, how many guys are doing it? | ||
| But you're a legit Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I think that's important. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think you have to understand transitions. | ||
| You've got to understand danger. | ||
| You've got to understand when someone's doing the right thing and then the percentages of them getting sub, drop substantially with each move. | ||
| You've got to be there. | ||
| So you're seeing every step of the way going, this guy's going to bail on us anytime now. | ||
| Here comes a scramble. | ||
| What would I do? | ||
| How do I anticipate this going down? | ||
| And being able to explain to people so they follow along. | ||
| And when you do it, and I follow along, it makes it more enjoyable to me. | ||
| I don't even know if we talked about this before, but I called Dana White about you how many years ago? | ||
| Four? | ||
| I tried to get Jimmy Smith hired by the UFC like four years ago. | ||
| I was like, dude, you want better people? | ||
| You want more people? | ||
| I go, hire that fucking guy. | ||
| I go, that guy, he knows what he's doing, man. | ||
| He knows what he's doing. | ||
| He's excited. | ||
| He loves the sport. | ||
| And I was telling him, you're a great guy. | ||
| And we talk. | ||
| He's genuine. | ||
| I go, he's a real fan. | ||
| And he's fucking really good at it, man. | ||
| Go get him. | ||
| Really love it. | ||
| I mean, I love the sport. | ||
| I love it 100%. | ||
| I know you do. | ||
| The timing didn't work out then, and then now I'm currently unemployed. | ||
| Well, you got to call some fucking badass fights though, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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I did. | |
| You know, Bellator's welterweight division in particular is goddamn stacked right now. | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| There are certain fighters, and I was thinking about it as I was watching the Cyborg fight last Saturday. | ||
| There are certain fighters you meet. | ||
| And it's stunning. | ||
| Certain athletes, when you meet LeBron James, you go, Jesus Christ. | ||
| I've seen him on TV, but when you see him in real life, you go, holy shit, that guy's big. | ||
| Cyborg's one of those. | ||
| Douglas Lima is one of those. | ||
| Have you ever met him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you meet that guy, you go, God, you make 170 pounds? | ||
| He is huge. | ||
| He is massive. | ||
| What do you think he walks around at? | ||
| 210. 210. He told me. | ||
| That's what he told you. | ||
| Jesus, that's 40 pounds. | ||
| When King Mo fought Rampage, King Mo was 218. He stepped on scale at 218. So the night of the fight, Douglas Lehman was there, and I walk up to him and I go, you've walked at 218. And he goes, yeah! | ||
| He's like, I want to eat too much. | ||
| I shouldn't, but I have. | ||
| He has walked around at what King Mo walked around at. | ||
| Because King Mo just stepped on scale. | ||
| It really doesn't cut to make 220. I mean, because the weight class was 220 when he fought Rampage. | ||
| He walks around King Mosas. | ||
| They are the same size. | ||
| That is so insane. | ||
| And he makes 170. He has the worst cut... | ||
| In terms of pounds I've ever seen, he deals with it well, but he has one of the biggest cuts I've ever seen. | ||
| He's really good with it. | ||
| Bellator wasn't under on any IV restrictions. | ||
| I think it's by state. | ||
| We weren't as a promotion under it, I don't think. | ||
| I think it's by state. | ||
| Because I think the hardcore testing got instituted by USADA when Nowitzki came along, and I think that's when they stopped IVs. | ||
| I think states still allow them. | ||
| Yeah, as far as I know, it's still state for us. | ||
| And so for people who don't know what we're talking about, what that means is, and this is up for debate, because Joe Silva claimed that there had been tests done, this is what he was telling me, and I believe him, that showed that the correct way of rehydrating orally actually led to better results over a 24-hour period. | ||
| I've heard that. | ||
| Yeah, that the IV thing was good for short-term recovery from severe dehydration, but to actually go from like a weight-cutting weight to go back. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I didn't read any of the studies, but I do know about the inherent dangers of severe weight cuts. | ||
| Kidney failure, you know, there's a couple people who died over the last year, a professional or amateur. | ||
| Wrestlers die every few years, a wrestler dies. | ||
| A young amateur Muay Thai fighter died, I think, in Australia. | ||
| Female, I think. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The issue that people have trouble understanding... | ||
| Well, first off, to the IV point, I've heard coaches say it's just for their head. | ||
| They feel better once they... | ||
| Like, they think they need the IV, and it's like a placebo. | ||
| I've had coaches tell me it's pretty much a placebo. | ||
| You can't do it that much more than... | ||
| Now, once again, I haven't read the studies, but I've had coaches tell me that. | ||
| That Mike Beider just needs it for his head. | ||
| It used to be like what we'd assume you had to have. | ||
| Like, if a guy's going to cut a lot of weight, he's going to have a guy ready with an IV. How many bags did you take? | ||
| That was the thing that everybody always brought up. | ||
| Immediately. | ||
| Yeah, how many bags? | ||
| Two things that people don't really know. | ||
| When people ask me, because I've been in this since about 2099 is when I first started. | ||
| 2099? | ||
| You're from the future. | ||
| I fucking knew it! | ||
| 2099? | ||
| 2099? | ||
| Dude, I knew it! | ||
| 2000 comma 99. Guys didn't cut like they do now. | ||
| And when you look at old UFCs and you look at the size of these guys... | ||
| Tito's one of the few guys who was right now a legit 205. Frank Shamrock is like my size? | ||
| Yeah, Frank Shamrock was very small for the... | ||
| Incredibly small. | ||
| When he fought, when Tito Ortiz and Frank Shamrock fought, it was one of the very first displays of defense and cardio and how critical it was in victory. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| He was lighter. | ||
| He was only like 190 when they fought. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| And he was able to push... | ||
| Fully clothed in 198. Was he? | ||
| Fully clothed, taking stuff out of his pockets. | ||
| Like a joke, like I'm fully clothed. | ||
| So guys cut more than they did in the early parts of the sport. | ||
| I mean, they just cut a lot more. | ||
| And when people ask me, well, what do you do about weight cutting? | ||
| How do we change it? | ||
| One of the things about fighting in general, and this goes too with other aspects of the sport, you're asking people who already take a huge risk, fighting is just a huge risk, period, to not take another huge risk. | ||
| Just the mentality of, if I have to do this to win, I'm going to do it. | ||
| You're saying, oh, they can't take that risk. | ||
| Well, you already have the personality of, I don't care what I have to do, I'm getting in that fight and I'm making it. | ||
| So it's... | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| What rule can you make? | ||
| It's hard to do. | ||
| You're talking about a group of people that are already used to taking a huge, dangerous physical risk to even get in there. | ||
| So adding on the weight cut, they're going to take that gamble every time. | ||
| No, I agree with you if they can. | ||
| 1FC, though, is instituting some interesting new rule changes. | ||
| And 1FC is doing hydration tests. | ||
| They do that in high schools now for wrestling. | ||
| They didn't do that before. | ||
| They should. | ||
| They should. | ||
| I'm trying to remember who told me that this weekend. | ||
| But they're essentially saying they're going to be able to ban weight cutting. | ||
| They're just going to be able to institute that no one's going to be able to cut weight. | ||
| If you pass the hydration test, you're not going to be able to cut weight. | ||
| So you have to pass this hydration test at every turn. | ||
| You can't just get on the scale and you weigh 170 pounds. | ||
| Oh, congratulations. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You weigh 170 pounds, but you're in danger. | ||
| Like, look at your body. | ||
| Look at your hydration levels. | ||
| But at what point are they testing? | ||
| Apparently they're doing it in three separate... | ||
| Because you don't want a card falling apart, of course. | ||
| They step up. | ||
| Not you. | ||
| Not you. | ||
| And then half the card falls apart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder what they did to... | ||
| So when would they? | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| Well, they'd have to do it early and blow all the weight classes up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were having this conversation. | ||
| You have to shift everybody one, at least. | ||
| Or if you don't even shift them one, you find out, like, what weight are you really? | ||
| You know, I mean, you could be like a Luke Rockhold dude who's a giant 185-er. | ||
| I mean, Luke easily looks like he could be a heavyweight when you're walking around him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Easy. | |
| He's like 220 or 230 or something like that, and then he gets to—I mean, maybe he's mad at me right now. | ||
| I don't really— Of lean muscle, bruh! | ||
| I might be exaggerating. | ||
| But at the very least, when he gets down to 185, he's probably coming from 200 plus pounds. | ||
| And a big, tall 205. But then there's other guys that just don't cut that much at all. | ||
| But what gets me is there's no hard and fast body type rule. | ||
| Like I said, Doug Sima is huge. | ||
| He makes it every time. | ||
| Do you ever talk to him about how he does it? | ||
| He's told me little things. | ||
| He used to not do it well, and he looked like death. | ||
| In the last few fights, he's looked much better. | ||
| He tended to bloom up to like 210, 215. And he's American top team, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not Coconut Creek, though. | ||
| Atlanta somewhere? | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Somewhere down south. | ||
| He might go there to Spar or something, but he's not at the main facility most of the time. | ||
| Are they all integrated, like Gracie Baja or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, that kind of thing. | ||
| They're the same team, so he goes around to get work. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| And then I have guys, you know, Fernando Gonzalez, never makes weight. | ||
| And he looks like he's got something to lose. | ||
| Like, he's not the most shredded, biggest 170, and he always has trouble with it. | ||
| So it's weird. | ||
| Certain guys, you're like, man, there's no way that guy can make it. | ||
| He always does. | ||
| And certain guys look like they should be able to make it pretty easily and just don't. | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| There's no easy rules, is what I'm saying. | ||
| Darion Caldwell's huge at 135. He's huge. | ||
| And he makes it. | ||
| He's a wrestler his whole life. | ||
| He makes it every time. | ||
| And he's a giant wrestler. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like how much of it is discipline? | ||
| How much of it is a really good game plan and a really good nutritionist? | ||
| Like Cyborg, or excuse me, Nurmagomedov made weight easily this time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, Cyborg obviously had a hard time trying to 140, but at 145 she's been successful, you know, cutting the weight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But for Nurmagomedov, he's had some real fucking problems making 55. This time, no problems. | ||
| Looked amazing. | ||
| Well, one of the things, you know, once again, going back to storytelling for us is when someone doesn't make it, they don't make weight. | ||
| Is it advantage the heavier guy or is it advantage the guy who, if you don't make weight, maybe something happened that last couple weeks of camp that maybe a little injury kept you from losing the weight or is it advantage the bigger guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it better to come in big? | ||
| Or did the guy make weight, was he a little more disciplined at the end? | ||
| And he has an advantage in the fight. | ||
| You don't know at the time. | ||
| Well, the problem with Nurmagomedov obviously was the last fight before this previous spectacular fight with Barboza. | ||
| He didn't make the weight because he had to go to the hospital. | ||
| So that's a different animal. | ||
| That's like, oh, you pushed it so far that they wanted to make sure you stayed alive. | ||
| So they had to bring you to a hospital. | ||
| So they obviously realized there's some changes that need to be made. | ||
| They made those changes. | ||
| And fucking hell on Friday, or on Saturday night rather. | ||
| Fucking hell. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| That was, it's really weird sometimes when you, in any sport, I don't care what it is, when you see somebody, you know, Jordan in his prime, you just can't cover the guy. | ||
| It's almost like he's the only one on the court. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was like he was the only one in the cage. | ||
| It was like everything was inevitable. | ||
| Everything was inevitable. | ||
| The takedown was inevitable. | ||
| The beatings were inevitable. | ||
| You know, even if you hit him, congratulations. | ||
| Now you're on your ass. | ||
| You're getting punched in the face over and over again. | ||
| You can't get up. | ||
| You're getting mauled. | ||
| Immediately. | ||
| And against an excellent fighter. | ||
| I forget, Barboza is amazing. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And he made him look like he's... | ||
| The look on his face when he got up. | ||
| When Barboza was like, hey... | ||
| You were better than me. | ||
| It was almost like a shrug. | ||
| I wasn't even mad. | ||
| It was just when you see somebody that much better, it's back to the drawing board. | ||
| Well, I was super impressed with Barboza being able to make it to the final bell. | ||
| I mean, that was amazing. | ||
| Just being able to do that, that shows you what a dominant performance it was by a guy like Khabib. | ||
| But you also realize... | ||
| What a world-class fighter Barboza is that he did. | ||
| Keeps throwing wheel kicks in the third round and he even landed one of them. | ||
| It just didn't have much on it anymore. | ||
| Didn't have the juice on it anymore. | ||
| But fuck, man. | ||
| He was still trying to win after a horrendous mauling for eight-plus minutes. | ||
| You know when I really look at fighters, when I really focus on them, especially the face, in between rounds, I look for that breaking moment of like, you know... | ||
| Vitor Belfort, Randy Couture, and he's sitting on the ground. | ||
| Just, like, didn't even sit on a stool. | ||
| Sat on the ground, like, beat. | ||
| And I'm like, this guy's beat. | ||
| It's when you look at them in between rounds, and you see that, like... | ||
| What am I doing in here? | ||
| That's when you know, you know, the men from the boys, mentally speaking. | ||
| And, you know, in Bellator, Patricio Pitbull, I remember when he fought Daniel Strauss, he was getting beat up for like four rounds, and every round he looked like Lemmy Adam. | ||
| And he won toward the end of the fourth round with a rear naked choke. | ||
| He just never quits, and I always look for that breaking moment, man. | ||
| That's what really separates the guys who are mentally 100% there on those who aren't. | ||
| I think Barboza got beaten, but I don't think he got broken. | ||
| No, I don't think so either. | ||
| If you think about the amount of time during that fight, he was actually getting his ass kicked. | ||
| When I said eight, I think I might have said rounds, I meant minutes. | ||
| I think there was like eight minutes of prolonged top time and beating in that fight. | ||
| Plus. | ||
| And then there's all the backward movement. | ||
| Trying to get away, throwing those inside leg kicks and doing everything he can, everything he can to create space. | ||
| But for eight fucking minutes, he never gave up. | ||
| Or whatever it was, 15 minutes, just getting the fuck beaten out of him. | ||
| He kept trying to win. | ||
| He wasn't capable of doing it, but he never broke. | ||
| Teddy Atlas said, fighters make an agreement. | ||
| I'll stop trying to win if you'll stop trying to hurt me. | ||
| Whoa, yeah. | ||
| And he never did that. | ||
| He never went, look, just go away. | ||
| Just like, leave me alone and I'll back up and you can beat me. | ||
| He never did that. | ||
| He kept throwing the whole time, which is incredible, but just no answer. | ||
| How many 10-8s were there on the scorecards? | ||
| Well, the thing is, one out of 10-8 every round. | ||
| It was the old scoring, too. | ||
| Nevada hasn't adopted the new rules. | ||
| So, for people who don't know, the new rules make it easier to make distinctions between a 10-9 round, 10-8 round, 10-7 round, which I agree. | ||
| They haven't adopted that. | ||
| No, Nevada has not. | ||
| That's an old-school 10-8. | ||
| It's an ass-whooping 10-8. | ||
| There were some ridiculous scorecards that seemed to indicate to some of us that even though the new rules are better and the states haven't adopted them, the judges have decided to adopt them in some sort of a weird, non-declared way. | ||
| Because it just definitely seemed there was a much larger disparity in the numbers and the scorecards. | ||
| But Nurmagomedov just mauled him. | ||
| I mean, mauled him in a way that you go, oh, God. | ||
| You're not even there. | ||
| He's just on such another level that the odds of you beating him drop so substantially after the first minute and a half. | ||
| You saw the look on Barbosa's face. | ||
| There's like two minutes plus into the first round, and he's trying to get up. | ||
| You see the look on his face. | ||
| He's like, fuck, how am I going to deal with this? | ||
| This is so next level. | ||
| What's really funny, it's almost to me like a throwback kind of fighter. | ||
| If you remember back in the day, guys that didn't have a real solid wrestling or jiu-jitsu background, when they felt that pressure, they kind of went, They didn't have any experience with it. | ||
| They were just like, holy crap, like a truck rolling over you. | ||
| You almost saw that look on his face. | ||
| Like, oh, like I've never felt anything like this in life. | ||
| And for someone training at Barboza's level, who you know he's training with high-level guys, he's training with all kinds of outstanding wrestlers and jiu-jitsu guys, to have that look like this is some crazy pressure, that's insane because no one has secret techniques anymore. | ||
| It's not divided skill-wise. | ||
| I mean, you have great guys in every camp. | ||
| And the fact that You see on someone's eye, and I say this to fighters, you don't want the first time you experience something to be in the cage. | ||
| You want to experience this in training, and then you can deal with it in the cage. | ||
| Barbosa had a look in his eye like, I have never felt anything like this in my life. | ||
| And that's incredible, considering modern techniques. | ||
| Well, it seems to me that everything right now is next level in comparison to a year and a half, two years ago. | ||
| Like, Dos Anjos beat Robbie Lawler recently in just a fucking tour de force performance. | ||
| Watched that fight, I was like, this is as good as Dos Anjos has ever looked, if not better. | ||
| Real sharp. | ||
| Fucking amazing at 170, but more importantly, the output, the amount of shots that he landed, the amount of shots that he fired, the endurance that he's showing, everybody is on this complete different performance level right now. | ||
| What I loved about that performance, One thing that generally doesn't change weight class as well when you move up is power. | ||
| Meaning, Robbie Law, if you remember, at 170, he was knocking everybody out. | ||
| At 185, he was like, so-so. | ||
| The shot that knocks somebody out at 70 when he was in Strikeforce at 185 isn't going to knock out Jacare. | ||
| It's not going to knock out Babalu. | ||
| It's not going to knock out these big 185ers. | ||
| So a lot of power punchers have trouble changing weight classes because the power shot just doesn't go with them. | ||
| Dos Anjos looked like he knew that. | ||
| And when I got to volume guys at 170, I'm not going to knock anybody out with one shot like I did at 55. I have to throw more at 70. I have to be more accurate at 70. I have to slice them up with elbows a little more. | ||
| So I like all the adjustments he made for the new weight class. | ||
| He didn't try to fight like he did at 55. He's like, I got to throw more against these guys. | ||
| I can't go one punch for one punch with Robbie Lawler. | ||
| He has a huge 170. So I like the way his style modified with the weight class change. | ||
|
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|
A lot of guys don't do that. | |
| I agree, and I also think the use of leg kicks is critical. | ||
| You've got to slow Robbie down. | ||
| Robbie's a big, heavy guy, and he immediately started chopping. | ||
| It is crazy to me, also, that that low calf kick is becoming such a giant factor in MMA. That kick is just dominant now. | ||
| Everybody's using it. | ||
| Remember what Melvin Manoff did to him? | ||
| After he knocked Manoff and couldn't walk. | ||
| He knocks him out and was limping over to his corner going, one more and I'm done. | ||
| That was one of the greatest comebacks from behind knockouts ever. | ||
| He's eating all those leg kicks and Melvin is just coming after him. | ||
| If you haven't seen that fight, folks, see it. | ||
| Because it's awesome. | ||
| Melvin is just owning that leg. | ||
| Got a little aggressive as Melvin Manoff does and got clipped, man. | ||
| Got clipped with the haymaker of all the haymakers. | ||
| Hail Mary, man. | ||
| And then one on the way down, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When he was out. | ||
| And then boom! | ||
| A Tiki Goshen shot, remember that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tiki's sitting there and lands with a shot, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, Robbie was a brutal, brutal knockout artist. | ||
| I always wanted to see a rematch between him and Nick Diaz. | ||
| I think everybody wants to see that. | ||
| That would be awesome. | ||
| How is it possible that that didn't take place? | ||
| There are certain matches that you wonder... | ||
| You know, the run Vanderlei was on, right? | ||
| Vanderlei V Tour 2 never happened. | ||
| I mean, there's certain ones you go, man, I can't believe that fight never happened again. | ||
| That's certainly one of them. | ||
| Still could. | ||
| Still could, hypothetically. | ||
| I mean, it would still sell like crazy. | ||
| I mean, I wonder if Nick Diaz, if he wanted to come back, would only want to come back for a title fight. | ||
| I wonder if he's like that kind of money fight guy where he's like, yeah, obviously he's got some money and obviously he's not beating down anybody's door to fight. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's not, you know, he's doing whatever the fuck he wants to do, but if you could get him back for a big money fight, I wonder if it would only be like a title fight. | ||
| That's increasing what's happening these days. | ||
| I mean, guys are like, ah, I'm not getting paid. | ||
| Like GSP. Yeah, he came back for a huge money fight and that's it, you know? | ||
| It's funny, Dana White said something crazy like, yeah, he's just going to pack up his money and head back to Canada. | ||
| Got a big check. | ||
| Three suitcases to hold all of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Big money fight stuff. | ||
| Won the title and then retired. | ||
| I mean, look, as far as legacy, if he wanted to end it right there, that's a pretty nice cherry. | ||
| Yeah, that's a nice one. | ||
| That's a pretty nice cherry. | ||
| With a finish? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's pretty awesome. | ||
| Come back up. | ||
| Choke the champ to sleep and say, nah, I'm good. | ||
| Now, do you think he comes back for any other fighter? | ||
| Michael Bisping was the perfect guy for him to come back and fight. | ||
| The perfect guy for him to come back. | ||
| He comes back for Conor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the fight. | ||
| But I don't think they want to do that. | ||
| I don't think stylistically it's... | ||
| I mean, it could certainly happen, it would certainly sell, but we know how GSP fights. | ||
| A, he's a giant compared to Conor. | ||
| He has a wrestling-heavy style. | ||
| I don't think it's a great... | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| It would be hard for Conor to look good in that fight, is the way I say it. | ||
| It would be hard for Conor to look good unless he caught him coming in, which no one's been able to really do against GSP. They would have to do some sort of a catch weight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because their body composition would just be so much different. | ||
| Wouldn't work. | ||
| If they really did 170. And, you know, that was an issue that he had with Nate. | ||
| But Nate is a legit 155-er. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He kept saying, oh, you've got to have some fucking attributes. | ||
| Nate is a big, long guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he does get heavy in between. | ||
| But the reality is, he fought successfully, made weight 155 on numerous occasions easily. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, fought in the Ultimate Fighter at 155. That's his weight. | ||
| And that was another one of those, when he came up from 45 to 55, I think he was still in that one-shot mode. | ||
| And if you watch that fight again, Conor hits him and goes, shit. | ||
| He's still here, because I'm at 55, and not only does Diaz have a great chin, he's a big 55-er, he's well hydrated, and especially when they fought, the first time it was at 170, he's hydrated. | ||
| He hasn't cut at all, he can take a shot. | ||
| And that one-shot ability he had at 45, oh shit, it's not here anymore. | ||
| I think he was a little bit more prepared. | ||
| Nate fought at least twice at 70 in the UFC before Cod. | ||
| He fought Rory. | ||
| Rory and who else? | ||
| Who was the other guy? | ||
| Who else he fought at 70? | ||
| He fought again at 70. I forget who he fought. | ||
| Right now we're being tweeted at. | ||
| Someone's tweeting at us. | ||
| So who are you fucking losers? | ||
| I should have your job. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| I'm totally looking for that tweet. | ||
| I don't remember what it was, but he had, I want to say maybe Stung Gun Kim? | ||
| That might have been. | ||
| Was that it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Somebody's... | |
| It might have been that. | ||
| Somebody's looking it up right now for us. | ||
| Young Jamie's on the case. | ||
| Is that... | ||
| Is it... | ||
| What does it say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't have his weight listed on the thing I was looking at. | |
| Well, put it up so I can take a look at it. | ||
| Yeah, we see it. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Is it Wiki? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just go to the Wiki MMA record and it'll show it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, look. | |
| That's nice. | ||
| Oh, there we are. | ||
| Two eggs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Down here, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| What do we got here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Ryan McDonald, Dunyunkin. | ||
| Yeah, Dunyunkin. | ||
| Yeah, so it was that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it was. | |
| So it was right. | ||
| So he tried it for a little bit. | ||
| After he beat Marcus Davis, he just was having a hard time making the weight. | ||
| And then he came back to 55 and beat Takanori Gomi, beat Donald Cerrone, beat Jim Miller. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That Cerrone fight was, I think, maybe his finest fight. | ||
| He took Cerrone apart in that fight. | ||
| He mentally fucked up Cerrone with the trash talking. | ||
| He got in Cerrone's head and it became very emotional for him. | ||
| Donald likes to be friends with the guys he fights. | ||
| Yeah, well, that was the Diaz's. | ||
| That ain't gonna happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| Donald just likes to fight. | ||
| He's a really nice guy, though. | ||
| To loop it back to our earlier discussion about weight cutting, there's a reason guys do it. | ||
| Diaz, who's a great 55er, is a so-so 70. A fantastic BJ Penn. | ||
| To me... | ||
| The worst thing that ever happened to BJ Penn was when he knocked on Matt Hughes and thought, I can fight at 70. He was 1-5-1 at 70. Right. | ||
| We choked him out once, then he knocked him out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, initially when he went to 170 pounds, it was the only fighter he ever beat at 170 was Matt Hughes in the UFC. So what that did is that, I think he fought at 185 when he took on Gracie. | ||
| Two Gracies. | ||
| He fought Rodrigo, too. | ||
| But once he had that idea that he could beat these guys at 170, I mean, you saw what Diaz did to him. | ||
| I mean, he just wasn't ready. | ||
| Rory ate him alive. | ||
| It's just a great 55er isn't always a great 70. Robbie Lawler at 70 is not a great 185er. | ||
| No, the Rory and the Nick ones are particularly hard to watch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which, you know, and then was sort of accentuated back when BJ made his return at 45. And then you go, okay, well this makes more sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like you were, at 55 when he fought Diego Sanchez, he was one of the baddest 55ers of all time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ever. | |
| He was a monster. | ||
| But for whatever reason, he just, you know... | ||
| That level was only attained a few times. | ||
| He's one of those guys where... | ||
| I was talking to Josh Thompson recently backstage in New York and he used to train with Frank Shamrock and BJ Penn and said they were sitting there with an exercise ball and they'd already been training for a while and they said we're trying to stand on this exercise ball and we're trying and trying and falling and falling and BJ walks in like an hour late for practice And he says, what are you guys doing? | ||
| And he says, oh, we're trying to stand on the exercise ball. | ||
| And BJ jumped on it. | ||
| And went, okay, and walked back in it. | ||
| They've been trying for like an hour to stand on this thing. | ||
| And so, you know, I've heard a million stories of that. | ||
| BJ, you know, coming in late to practice smoking everybody and leaving. | ||
| Like, you know, I never trained with a guy, I don't know. | ||
| But you have that sense. | ||
| He's one of those who go, man, if I had, if you had, you know... | ||
| B.J. Penn's ability, which is off the chart incredible, with the longevity and work ethic of like a Matt Hughes. | ||
| I mean, he might still be champion. | ||
| It's unbelievable what the guy had. | ||
| Really unbelievable. | ||
| But like you said, it was in spurts and fits. | ||
| And then he left the UFC for a while because he didn't like the minor. | ||
| They got rid of the 55 division and, you know, these fits and starts, man. | ||
| He fought Machida. | ||
| At heavyweight. | ||
| It was insane. | ||
| It was over 205. It was insane. | ||
| Over 205? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think Machina was like 2'10 or something in that fight. | ||
| He fought Dwayne Ludwig over there. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| On Triangle choked him out. | ||
| And the Rumble and the Rock fights were fucking great. | ||
| Oh, the Gomi fight is awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's great. | |
| I love that fight. | ||
| It was a great idea. | ||
| He's like, fuck it, I'll make my own promotion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's balls. | ||
| And Hawaii used to be a really fertile ground for MMA. That used to be, man. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Super Brawl, Rumble and the Rock. | ||
| The Super Brawl fights were fucking great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Back in the day. | ||
| Vitor John Hess, bro. | ||
| Come on, dude. | ||
| Vitor John Hess was over there. | ||
| John Lober. | ||
| Mayhem. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
John Lober Shamrock. | |
| Way back in the day. | ||
| Mayhem had a bunch of fights over there. | ||
| They had big tournaments over there in the beginning. | ||
| Mayhem and Egan Inoue. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Egan Inoue got Mayhem in a crazy Kimura. | ||
| Mayhem just kept rolling out of it and wouldn't tap. | ||
| Spanking him and then hitting him. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| Frank Trigg and Robbie Lawler back then, remember, in Hawaii? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Holy shit. | ||
| Miller Lawler. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Miller beat him. | ||
| That's right, he did. | ||
| Miller choked him out, yeah. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Dude, Mayhem Miller was a bad motherfucker. | ||
| Monster. | ||
| He was a bad motherfucker in the day. | ||
| He was one of my first training partners. | ||
| I started with Team Punishment in like 2000, 99, 2000. Wow. | ||
| And Mayhem was there. | ||
| And, you know, rolling with that guy was crazy. | ||
| Super skillful. | ||
| Unbelievably skillful. | ||
| And funky and crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Flexible and everything, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think his finest performance was against Sakuraba. | ||
| That's what I think Mayhem's finest performance was. | ||
| He was so, like, just technical and clean and just went through him. | ||
| Just chop, chop, bang, bang, smash, choke. | ||
| I think he was one of those guys, looking back on it, there are certain guys who... | ||
| I'm thinking around Josh Barnett a bit. | ||
| I think Shaolin a little bit. | ||
| He didn't settle down on a promotion right in his prime. | ||
| He was bouncing around a little bit. | ||
| Josh Barnett spent his prime kind of bouncing around a lot. | ||
| By the time he made his UFC run, it was late in his career. | ||
| Remember, he fought GSP, took a long break off and came back and just wasn't the same guy. | ||
| And you wonder sometimes. | ||
| I think maybe in his prime, Vitor Shaolin might be the best 55er in the world in his prime, but he was in Shuto, he would move around a lot in Japan, and just was off the U.S. radar. | ||
| And that was Cavalcante, too, right? | ||
| Jay-Z. That was a big issue with him. | ||
| Back in the day, people were saying he was the best 155-pounder alive. | ||
| A lot of the guys had trained with him. | ||
| By the time he came to the States, it was just a little bit further past it. | ||
| Yeah, there's been a few of those cases, right? | ||
| Like Josh Thompson, who we're talking about, at one point in time was the best lightweight in the world, or one of them, and then had some of his best fights with Gilbert, who was also at the same time in the same bracket, and they fought in Strikeforce while they were peaking. | ||
| Fantastic fights. | ||
| Go back and watch those folks. | ||
| They are awesome, guys. | ||
| But what people don't understand, who maybe are new to the sport, the ecosystem used to be different. | ||
| You could make good money fighting for icon sports in Hawaii. | ||
| There wasn't a lot of incentive to move around. | ||
| And guys moved around Much easier. | ||
| It was, you know, oh, I fought here a couple times and here a couple times. | ||
| They weren't as restrictive with talent as it is now where it's, you know, Belter fighters don't move over and UFC fighters don't move over until they're done with their contracts. | ||
| Guys moved around a lot. | ||
| And so somebody like Josh Barnett could move around a little bit more and make more money than he would settling down somewhere. | ||
| But it kept him off the radar of a lot of U.S. fans. | ||
| Well, how about Eve Edwards? | ||
| Eve Edwards is probably the best 155-pounder in the world and the UFC got rid of the division. | ||
| It's hard to explain that to people. | ||
| They once cut the 55 division. | ||
| At the time, he had just knocked out Josh Thompson. | ||
| With that head kick off the spinning back fist. | ||
| One of my favorite of all time. | ||
| And they got rid of the 55 pound division right after that. | ||
| Right in that era. | ||
| And once again, by the time he came back, he fought in Pride. | ||
| Beat Mishimo over in Pride. | ||
| Lost to Joachim Hansen. | ||
| By the time he came back, it was just too late. | ||
| He was at the end of his run. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| He fought Jorge Masvidal and Bodog, too. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Yes, he did. | ||
| Got knocked out. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| Right here. | ||
| Cuts him. | ||
| Spinning back fist. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| They both threw at the same time. | ||
| Bloodsport shit. | ||
| Yeah, that was when Yves was at the top of the food chain. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| Love Yves. | ||
| Oh, the best. | ||
| Strayed with him a couple times when I first started. | ||
| Super skillful, super nice guy. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| So those guys were, you know... | ||
| Cut loose. | ||
| They had to go somewhere. | ||
| They had to find a place for them. | ||
| And then Strikeforce became the spot where you had the Gilbert-Josh Thompson wars. | ||
| You had Tim Kennedy had some great fights over there. | ||
| Clay Guida, that's where he got his start when he beat Josh. | ||
| Big, huge upset. | ||
| Rockhold came from there. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's when Clay beat Josh. | ||
| It was a huge, huge upset. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Man, there were some good fights over in Strikeforce. | ||
| They really were. | ||
| I liked the tournament format. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| The heavyweight division was awesome at a time when the UFC division was at a low point. | ||
| The heavyweight division was at a low point. | ||
| I thought Strikeforce was great. | ||
| It's just hard for people to accept talent levels of folks that aren't in the big shows. | ||
| It's like it took Marlon Marais to come over and look the way he looked in his last fight. | ||
| When you see... | ||
| When you see like... | ||
| Justin Gaethje come over from World Series of Fighting and see the fucking brawl he had with Michael Johnson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Then the crazy fight with Eddie Alvarez, you realize like, oh, this guy's been like this all along. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and then when Marais knocks out Aljamain Sterling with that, well, he's trying to kick him, but he hit him with a knee. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But I mean, K-Os him, flatlines him. | ||
| And you realize like, oh, this guy is fucking for real. | ||
| This is a guy that just beat Hennen Burrell, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Aljamain just beats Hennen Burrell. | ||
| Marais starches him with a high kick, and you're like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| This guy was in the World Series of Fighting. | ||
| People didn't really look at that. | ||
| It's like, he's top-shelf talent. | ||
| When Eddie came from Bellator. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He comes over to the UFC. You could argue that Eddie was in his physical prime Bellator. | ||
| He's a little bit younger, a little bit sharper. | ||
| He comes over to the UFC, does the same thing, knocks me out, wins a belt, and suddenly he's on everybody's radar. | ||
| But you remember he lost to Donald first. | ||
| Yeah, he did. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Donald exposed the weaknesses to leg kicks. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Yeah, that was one of Donald's best fights. | ||
| When you think about what Eddie went through, When you go Cowboy Sorote, there was Gilbert Melendez was next for him. | ||
| Dos Anjos was like, Jesus Christ, murderers run. | ||
| And the Dos Anjos KO was just crazy. | ||
| Eddie is always going to have power. | ||
| He's a savage. | ||
| He's a fun fucking dude to watch. | ||
| And he gets dropped in almost every fight he's in. | ||
| It was just like a thing. | ||
| When's Eddie going to get dropped? | ||
| Boom! | ||
| And he gets up and keeps fighting. | ||
| It's almost like it wakes him up. | ||
| Well, he's just so ferocious. | ||
| Great guy, too, if you haven't met him. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| He's so ferocious that it's almost inevitable that he's going to get tagged. | ||
| Because he's just so, like, throwing it all to the wind. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Let's find out. | ||
| He's confident that he can get through it better than you can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, everybody's going to get cracked. | ||
| Like, that's why the Geiji fight was so engaging. | ||
| Like, you knew this is what this fight was going to be. | ||
| And it was one of the rare fights that 100% lived up to the hype. | ||
| It was exactly what we thought it was going to be. | ||
| It was fucking madness from the beginning to the end. | ||
| And when you look at how many, somebody listed it, how many champs from different organizations he's beaten in his career. | ||
| Eddie's beaten them all. | ||
| He's beaten them all. | ||
| Because he was one of those guys, once again, going back to what we were talking about, where he moved around a lot in his prime. | ||
| Went from Japan to Bellator and was off a lot of fans' radars. | ||
| He was like the people that really follow MMA knew Eddie Alvarez. | ||
| But your casual fan didn't until he made his UFC transition. | ||
| Is he the only guy that ever won the title in both organizations? | ||
| Bellator on UFC? Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No one else else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty goddamn impressive. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| I think the other guy who has a chance is Lima or Rory, depending upon who wins that fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the winner of that fight is right there with everybody. | |
| I mean, you can't deny it. | ||
| Rory beat Tyron in a very dominant decision. | ||
| Completely, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and he's lost to guys. | ||
| He lost to Lawler. | ||
| And, of course, Lawler got knocked out by Tyron, so you can't do MMA math. | ||
| Doesn't work. | ||
| But... | ||
| Tyron's the champ, and Rory beat him. | ||
| There's no MMA match involved in that. | ||
| He's there. | ||
| I think Tyron's better now. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And maybe it would be different if they fought again, but it's just statistically interesting. | ||
| He says the things when I talked to him when he came over to Bellator. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| We do fighter meetings, fighter interviews, where I sit them down and I talk to them about the upcoming fights and everything. | ||
| And I don't pay attention to what they say as much as how they say it. | ||
| And I have to say, Rory McDonald, when he came in, I went, this guy wants to be champion. | ||
| He's not coming over here going, I'm going to get paid. | ||
| I mean, he really has a fire in him to be champion. | ||
| He is 100% devoted to it. | ||
| And that puts him in rare air. | ||
| And Lima... | ||
| If you haven't seen that guy fight, he hits you, you don't know where you are. | ||
| He puts everything behind every punch. | ||
| And he can start to anybody in the division. | ||
| The question to me is, can he handle the takedown? | ||
| His takedown defense has been suspect in the past. | ||
| And we'll see if he can handle the takedown of Rory. | ||
| Yeah, because that's exactly what Rory used on Paul Daly. | ||
| He just went right through Paul Daly. | ||
| And he cracked him first. | ||
| That's what impressed me, is he cracked him. | ||
| And it kind of made Daley hesitate, and then, boom, take down some issues. | ||
| Yeah, you could see that he wanted to let Daley know, this is a fight. | ||
| I'm going to be a danger on the feet standing, and then guess what? | ||
| Oh, look, I'm on the ground. | ||
| I'm not afraid of you anywhere. | ||
| And I'm on top of you, and now you're getting strangled. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, as long as he's not afraid of him standing up, then there's no hesitancy in engaging. | ||
| And he wasn't afraid. | ||
| I mean, he's the one who drew. | ||
| I mean, he's the one who landed first. | ||
| He's top of the food chain, in my opinion. | ||
| I think he's right up there with anybody at 170 pounds in the world. | ||
| And I'd like to see him back in the UFC for selfish reasons. | ||
| Of course you would. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| And I want to see what the fuck is going to happen now. | ||
| I mean, the whole division is just topsy-turvy right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| 155 and 170, it's all craziness. | ||
| There's so much happening right now, with RDA just dominating Robbie Lawler like that, and people clamoring for a title fight for him, and now Tyron had to get shoulder surgery, so Tyron had a torred labrum, apparently tried to rehab it, and eventually wound up getting surgery, so he's out for several months, you know, where he can't do shit. | ||
| A tough thing whenever, you know, I'm about to order this year or wherever, whenever you have that backlog, Whenever you have a champ who can't defend a title or something like that or he's out for a little bit... | ||
| The piranhas, I mean, they eat each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, if there's no, oh, we're going to get the title. | ||
| You can go through your prime waiting for that guy to come back from surgery. | ||
| It could be a year, a second mile, whatever it is. | ||
| In a division that's that stacked and these guys are killers, you can go through your whole prime trying to climb up that mountain again. | ||
| It is tough. | ||
| That's the difference between boxing and MMA, right? | ||
| Because in boxing, your manager would make you keep that number one contender position. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They would wait on that one. | ||
| Let's wait on this one. | ||
| Or you'd take a risk. | ||
| Or you'd fight... | ||
| Nobody's. | ||
| Yeah, you fight some Joe Lewis bum of the month club. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the thing about boxing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Guys would take warm-up fights, tune-up fights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those would also be like highlight fights. | ||
| Because, you know, you'd tee off on some guy that was below him and everybody would get super excited about this guy that Tyson's about to fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or whatever it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I talked to Steve Hardhood today, actually. | ||
| We ended up chatting a little bit. | ||
| He does the boxing for Showtime. | ||
| He's there. | ||
| That guy used to be editor for Ring Magazine for like 30 years. | ||
| You can't stump him about boxing at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I've tried. | |
| I've had some obscure stuff. | ||
| He is phenomenal. | ||
| Everything he knows. | ||
| We were talking once about the heavyweight division and... | ||
| Oh, it's not really good right now. | ||
| And he looked at me and goes, it usually isn't. | ||
| He said, the heavyweight division usually isn't the most stacked division in boxing. | ||
| We remember the eras when it was because that really stands out to us. | ||
| But generally, it's not that good. | ||
| Usually, 47 is the marquee division with great fighters in it. | ||
| He's like, the reason Tyson stands out so much is, you talk about, oh, there was nobody even to fight in the 80s. | ||
| He goes, well, they're usually, what, they're whole decades where it wasn't that good. | ||
| You know, it happens all the time. | ||
| Remember when Tony Tubbs was a champ? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there was a lot of guys. | ||
| Tony Tucker, remember him? | ||
| Sure, there was a lot of guys. | ||
| Post-Larry Holmes, there was just a massive amount of guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Trevor Burbick, I mean... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Guys are kind of lost to history at this point. | ||
| Yeah, that's who Tyson beat, remember? | ||
| Burbick was the champ. | ||
| Fell down three times from one punch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was crazy. | |
| I remember it well. | ||
| Mills Lane was the referee. | ||
| He was 20, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Sorry about that, folks. | ||
| Youngest heavyweight champion of all time. | ||
| Boy, I'm coughing. | ||
| I'm not even sick. | ||
| But it's almost like... | ||
| I feel like I have a... | ||
| You don't eat pistachios. | ||
| You get one of them little, not the shell, but that little outside layer of the pistachio. | ||
| I almost feel like I got a little piece of that in the back of my throat. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| You never know, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Could be. | |
| You never know. | ||
| Could be just that jinx of having another commentator across from you, you know? | ||
| Makes you cough? | ||
| Project more. | ||
| You know, you're trying to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think so, dude. | |
| It's like a little battle, bro. | ||
| You know how it is. | ||
| Are we battling, bro? | ||
| No, we're good, bro. | ||
| We're good, bro. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I want to know what the fuck is going to happen with Connor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you and everybody else. | ||
| You and everybody else. | ||
| After this performance, Habib has set it up to a place where he's the most terrifying, lightweight contender in the world. | ||
| Then you have Tony Ferguson, who's a motherfucker, who's the interim champion. | ||
| And then you have Conor, who knows what's going to happen with him. | ||
| And I think the UFC is going to give him a little while. | ||
| I'm going to give them some time, you know, hey, let the holidays pass, see what the fuck happens, and then they're going to have to make some moves. | ||
| But they want to do a Russia fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if they want to do a Russia fight, I know a guy. | ||
| I know a guy that'll sell some fucking tickets in Russia, baby. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tony Ferguson and Khabib Nurmagomedov in Russia. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Khabib is... | |
| See what he said on Twitter about this? | ||
| Connors? | ||
| What did Connors say? | ||
| I skin your pets and only wear them once. | ||
| That was his response. | ||
| Come on, that's... | ||
| It's witty! | ||
| Truly, truly, get on your fucking knees and beg me. | ||
| Otherwise, I don't give a bollocks. | ||
| My whiskey is out this year and that's Diddy bread. | ||
| No, but I think below that is the... | ||
| So he tweeted the bear thing, and then it was, I skin your pets and I wear them once. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's right. | ||
| That was pretty funny. | ||
| That's pretty funny. | ||
| That was comparatively witty. | ||
| Yeah, I slaughter your pets and wear them as coats and only wear them once. | ||
| And I only wear them once? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's pretty funny. | |
| It's good trash talk. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Have you ever seen a documentary called Bobby Fischer Against the World? | ||
| No. | ||
| There's a documentary about Bobby Fischer called Bobby Fischer Against the World. | ||
| And whether or not you're into chess, you should really, really watch it. | ||
| I'm into Bobby Fischer. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| It's called Bobby Fischer Against the World. | ||
| Yeah, he was. | ||
| And anyway, they interview one of his friends, his long friends, lifelong friends, named Dr. Anthony Sadie. | ||
| And their last conversation before Bobby cut him off, he said, Bobby, if you don't play chess, eventually there'll come a time where no one will ask you to play chess. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| That's the situation. | ||
| You can keep doing this in tweets, but the reason you're famous and the reason what you have in front of you is because you fight. | ||
| And there comes a time when, like I said, the division, the sport and the division, it'll move past you. | ||
| Now, Conor may have enough money and he doesn't care about that, but that's always a risk. | ||
| You're an old schooler. | ||
| Sugar Ray Robinson tried to be a dancer entertainer and it got old and they went... | ||
| We want to see you fight, and that's all you're going to get paid for. | ||
| Now, he may not have enough money that he doesn't care about that. | ||
| It's certainly possible. | ||
| But there's no sport, there's no division that won't move past you eventually. | ||
| And that would be a shame. | ||
| And he thinks he has enough money. | ||
| But he's spending like Floyd Mayweather. | ||
| I mean, he's going off. | ||
| If you go off like that, after a while you're going to run out of money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it might be 20 years from now, but to see him... | ||
| Still 20 years. | ||
| And your window to make money is this big in professional sports. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm holding up my fingers so people are just listening to this. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if that's... | ||
| I don't know if it's sustainable. | ||
| I don't know if he's got enough money to live the rest of his life. | ||
| But he certainly doesn't if he just spends like crazy. | ||
| I mean, he might just go through a phase, and then he might decide to cherry-pick specific fights to make tremendous amounts of money. | ||
| And there was some talk about a Pacquiao fight in boxing. | ||
| Who knows what he's gonna do? | ||
| But his only sustainable avenue is MMA. Meaning, once again, in boxing, let's say he fights Manny Pacquiao. | ||
| For argument's sake, let's say he loses that fight. | ||
| People are going to be tired of spending $70 on a pay-per-view to watch him take on a great guy and fall short. | ||
| But if he fights Tony Ferguson in a unification fight and KOs Tony Ferguson, Then he can fight Manny Pacquiao all day long. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's MMA that sustains him. | ||
| Don't get mad at me, Tony. | ||
| It's just a, for instance, a possibility. | ||
| For argument's sake, Tony. | ||
| Yeah, I'm taking the devil's advocate position, Tony. | ||
| Tony got mad at me wearing the hat. | ||
| He's like, what are you, chaining your 10-planet gear, bro? | ||
| What were you wearing? | ||
| I don't know how to say it. | ||
| Papuka? | ||
| Oh, that for... | ||
| Come on, it's a gift. | ||
| You have to wear that. | ||
| And listen, just because he's got a problem... | ||
| I love Tony, but I also love Khabib. | ||
| Khabib's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| To deny that is ridiculous. | ||
| So, alright, I gotta ask. | ||
| Commentator to commentator. | ||
| What's the maddest a fight that's ever been at you for what? | ||
| Man, I don't know. | ||
| Because we all have these stories. | ||
| Not many of them. | ||
| Usually, I get along with just about everybody, but there are a couple of stories. | ||
| I get along with just about everybody, too. | ||
| And if there was every... | ||
| Oh, Rampage was dramatic once. | ||
| I remember that, yeah. | ||
| Because I was saying that he needed to throw more leg kicks or something like that. | ||
| But it's just because I want him to be successful. | ||
| And when he does, he's... | ||
| I just think that guys get a little too knockout heavy sometimes, and I like to see people be more technical and mix it up. | ||
| It's an addiction, man. | ||
| And you're never going to get away from the power that Rampage had and has. | ||
| He's always going to have that power. | ||
| My thought was what I would like to see as a person who's a fan, I'd like to see him mix it up more and become more technical. | ||
| He's always going to have that ridiculous chin. | ||
| He's always going to have that unbelievable power. | ||
| Those things are not going away. | ||
| First guy I ever grappled with. | ||
| Rampage? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| First guy I ever grappled with. | ||
| Really? | ||
| At a legit studio? | ||
| I grappled with him once. | ||
| We were doing something for some television show. | ||
| That's right, that inside the UFC thing that I used to do way back in the day. | ||
| That was like when Spike first had the UFC. We did some stuff, and he was getting ready to fight Chuck. | ||
| And we did some stuff together. | ||
| A lot of people didn't know who he was. | ||
| We drove around LA in his monster truck. | ||
| He had some crazy monster truck. | ||
| It was like jacked three feet up in the air. | ||
| If you weren't into Pride, you didn't know who he was. | ||
| No, nobody knew who he was. | ||
| At that point, of course. | ||
| We ran into one of the Wu-Tang Clan. | ||
| Beat Marvin Eastman before that? | ||
| I was with Rampage. | ||
| We ran into one of the Wu-Tang Clan in a weird section of L.A. on Hollywood Boulevard. | ||
| The Wu-Tang dude was coming out of a check-cashing place. | ||
| I forget which guy it was. | ||
| We were having a good fucking time, though. | ||
| That was before anybody knew who Rampage was. | ||
| I misunderstood him, because he was going by this, once again, like 99, 2000. I had finished at UCLA, where I... First, I got my taste of jiu-jitsu at UCLA, and then I graduated, and I went to Team Punishment, and I get on the mat, and Fabiano Iha was a coach there at the time. | ||
| Fabiano Iha. | ||
| One of the best arm bars in the day. | ||
| Good foot locks, too. | ||
| His arm bar was fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sick. | |
| Especially far side. | ||
| And so I got on the mat, and I shake hands with this dude, and I said, Hey, my name's Jimmy. | ||
| And he goes, I'm Rampage. | ||
| And I thought I misunderstood him. | ||
| I was like, he can't sit. | ||
| You know, I was like, is it Randall or something? | ||
| And I just misunderstood him. | ||
| And all I knew was I knew armbar and a footlock at the time. | ||
| And he was so big, I was like, I'm just going to footlock him. | ||
| And I went for all these straight footlocks on him. | ||
| I got him, I got him, I got him. | ||
| And then I got an armbar on him and he lifted me up to the ceiling. | ||
| With one arm and just aroned my ass. | ||
| Just went, boom! | ||
| Dropped right on me. | ||
| And Fabiano comes running over mad. | ||
| Like, oh, you're not supposed to do that. | ||
| And he starts screaming at him. | ||
| And he walks off. | ||
| And Rampage turns to me and goes, yeah, we're cool, right? | ||
| And I said, yeah, we're fine, man. | ||
| I'm a wrestler. | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| I've been slammed before. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| That's how I met Quentin, man, back then. | ||
| He was fighting King of the Cage. | ||
| It was like his second fight. | ||
| I was there right after his first fight or before his first fight. | ||
| Like, literally, he was just getting started. | ||
| Like, living in his car stuff. | ||
| And now he's come very, very far. | ||
| He's one of those guys I'm really glad... | ||
| Didn't he fight Marvin Eastman in one of his first fights? | ||
| I believe that was his first fight. | ||
| His first fight at King of the Cage in California was Marvin Eastman. | ||
| I think he fought once in Tennessee or something. | ||
| But yeah, his first fight was Marvin Eastman. | ||
| He lost by decision. | ||
| Man. | ||
| And then he just started beating guys up. | ||
| Long history this sport has now when you think about it. | ||
| It's interesting because it's all just sort of accumulated. | ||
| Like the different styles and the different abilities. | ||
| Do you remember how tough, especially in California in the early 2000s, The local scene was a motherfucker. | ||
| Oh, yeah, man. | ||
| Because the UFC, like, MMA was big. | ||
| It was not big, but it was pop. | ||
| It was cool. | ||
| It was popular. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| And there weren't many big shows. | ||
| So guys had to fight on the local level for a while to get enough fights to get there. | ||
| And also, once again, the contracts weren't that restrictive. | ||
| So in between UFC fights, because they didn't have that many, guys could go down to King of the Cage and make some money. | ||
| So you'd see some really talented guys. | ||
| At King of the Cage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
King of the Cage was always weird Indian shows. | |
| Indian casinos. | ||
| Suboba Casino, man. | ||
| That's where I fought the first time. | ||
| I fought like four of my fights up there. | ||
| There was a bunch of casinos that would have it, and it all had to be Native American reservations, but they had their own rules. | ||
| Yeah, it was illegal. | ||
| Weighing in on a bathroom scale? | ||
| Like literally on a bathroom scale in the lobby of the hotel and Ted would look down and go, yeah, you're good, you know, whatever. | ||
| The doctor's chest was like, can you find your nose? | ||
| Can you stand on one foot? | ||
| Can you stand on the other foot? | ||
| Okay, get in there. | ||
| It was literally, that was it. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| Wild West, man. | ||
| Do you remember when the King of the Cage, it got rainy and they decided to let everybody fight anyway? | ||
| Wet and wild, bro! | ||
| Wet and wild! | ||
| That was crazy. | ||
| Eve Edwards fought on that card against Jeremy Winters. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| From Team NG? Team Next Generation? | ||
| Remember him? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a solid team. | ||
| Chris Brandon's camp, man, back then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Solid dudes, man. | ||
| Yeah, there was the two Jeremy Williams, right? | ||
| It was the one who eventually fought in tough, who wound up getting locked up. | ||
| And then it was Jeremy, the original one who took his own life. | ||
| Yeah, took his own life. | ||
| Very sad story. | ||
| He was a really interesting guy. | ||
| Super talented, too. | ||
| I fought in a grappling match against Jerry at No Limits. | ||
| Remember No Limits? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I got a call from the guy who ran No Limits, and he called me. | ||
| He said, hey, I have a grappling tournament coming up. | ||
| Would you like to... | ||
| Fight! | ||
| Because I was doing grappling terms at the time. | ||
| I said, yeah, sure, no problem, man. | ||
| And he goes, you have a super fight against Jeremy Williams. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I went, fuck. | |
| Because I had seen Jeremy Williams. | ||
| He was locally in California. | ||
| He was known. | ||
| And we got in this ring or whatever and we fought. | ||
| And I caught him in a toehold. | ||
| And he tapped and... | ||
| I went back into the locker room and he's bawling, like, bawling, bawling, bawling, like, devastated. | ||
| And I remember thinking at the time, It wasn't a grappling tournament he got caught. | ||
| I mean, it happens. | ||
| His whole team was around him like a funeral or something. | ||
| And I went up to him and I was like, man, I've always been a huge fan, which is true. | ||
| On the local level, especially at that time, he was here. | ||
| He was a level above most guys. | ||
| And I told him, man, I'm a huge fan and it's an honor to fight you. | ||
| And he said, thank you. | ||
| And he hugged me. | ||
| But I remember thinking at the time, something's going on. | ||
| He just seemed so... | ||
| Emotional, so devastated. | ||
| I didn't know what was going on in his lifetime. | ||
| When I went to Japan for Fight Quest, I read that he had taken his own life. | ||
| That was tough, man. | ||
| That was tough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woof. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not all sunshine and rainbows in MMA. Well, it certainly isn't in any combat sport, right? | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| And it's hard to tell what's happening. | ||
| Is it what leads you to it in the first place? | ||
| Is you have this burning desire to get back at people and your emotions are in turmoil? | ||
| And obviously everybody's different. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| It's one of the things about Rory that's so unique. | ||
| People have this idea of him. | ||
| And then he did my podcast, and one of the things that people said, like, oh, he's fucking normal. | ||
| Like, he's like a regular guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He just, when he's fighting, he's really serious. | ||
| Yeah, but when you talk, everybody thought he was like this complete, like, total silent psycho. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then he's doing the podcast, he's joking around, he's self-deprecating, he's super honest about, like, what happens to him when he trains too much, you know, he breaks down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he can't do it anymore. | ||
| He's scheduled his training differently. | ||
| He's not like I'm some Superman. | ||
| I can't be stopped. | ||
| I'm never tired. | ||
| I'll fucking keep pushing. | ||
| There was none of that. | ||
| People always ask me about Chael. | ||
| Like, what's that dude? | ||
| He's a totally normal guy in real life. | ||
| He's funny. | ||
| He's engaging. | ||
| Self-deprecating, too. | ||
| I talked to him after the Tito fight. | ||
| He comes up to us. | ||
| We were calling a fight after he'd already fought Tito. | ||
| We're calling this fight. | ||
| He goes, well, I'm a competency shot. | ||
| Beyond that, I'm done crying. | ||
| I was in the bathroom just bawling. | ||
| He's a funny dude. | ||
| He's really a funny guy. | ||
| When he choked out Shogun, he said something to the effect of, he goes, if you think I'm going to sit here and listen to a middle-aged comedian tell me what to do, I just choked out a world champion. | ||
| Something along those lines. | ||
| You just wait for it. | ||
| When I interview him, and by the way, for people who say, I don't know how it is for you, interviews are... | ||
| If not the hardest part of our job, the X factors in interviews. | ||
| Because everybody asks me, and this is kind of like a behind-the-scenes thing. | ||
| People don't know. | ||
| Whether or not we do an interview is a production call, 100%. | ||
| We don't decide. | ||
| I don't decide personally whether or not somebody gets an interview. | ||
| When I was doing Bellator, we have commercials. | ||
| So they have a commercial inventory. | ||
| We've got to get to them. | ||
| If fights end quickly, we get interviews. | ||
| If they don't, we don't. | ||
| It doesn't matter who the fighter is and what they're doing. | ||
| But it's not my call. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're geeked up on adrenaline. | ||
| They're all over the place. | ||
| The producers in my ear are going, you have one or two questions, how many I have time for. | ||
| They can go off crazy. | ||
| You just don't know. | ||
| It's the most X-factor part of our job because it's off the format. | ||
| You're up there holding the mic and they could... | ||
| Say whatever. | ||
| You have no idea what they're saying, what they're doing. | ||
| You're trying to keep them in one place? | ||
| People don't realize that. | ||
| People go, oh, you guys are always touching the fighter. | ||
| If they start moving, all the cameras move, guys, and it ruins the shot. | ||
| We're trying to keep them in one place. | ||
| When I put my hand on a guy, what I'm trying to do, or gal, whatever, I'm trying to keep them in one place so the two cameras get a shot of them. | ||
| And they kind of sense it, too. | ||
| It works. | ||
| It really works. | ||
| But when they have adrenaline, they'll start spinning around. | ||
| Or they're trying to address the crowd, and they start turning around. | ||
| You're trying to keep them in one spot. | ||
| I had one guy, one of the weirdest tweets I've ever gotten. | ||
| Sometimes you'll catch me on camera pointing at the ground. | ||
| And what I'm saying is, stand right here. | ||
| Come to me and stand right here. | ||
| So that's where the camera shot is. | ||
| And so every now and then you'll catch me doing that. | ||
| And what I'm doing is, yeah, stand right here. | ||
| Because my director used to always get mad at me because I would go to the fighter and ruin the shot. | ||
| He wants them to come to them, so it's the center. | ||
| This weirdo tweet me, he goes, it is so racist the way you point to your shoes when it's a... | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I swear to God. | ||
| He said, like, you point to your shoes when it's a black fighter. | ||
| And the last card hadn't had any black fighters. | ||
| Dude, you got trolled. | ||
| I was crying laughing. | ||
| That's some kid from 4chan fucking with you. | ||
| But, like, how demeaning. | ||
| And you point to your shoes when you're... | ||
| I was like, what do I do? | ||
| Explain to you how a two-shot works? | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| Or people get mad at me because, why didn't that fighter get an interview? | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| It's literally a timing thing. | ||
| Yeah, you can't read that stuff. | ||
| Oh, you can't at all. | ||
| I'll read it. | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| I don't engage with anybody. | ||
| I don't have better shit to do. | ||
| But you can't get upset at people that don't understand the format. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You're upset. | ||
| You're legitimately upset. | ||
| That's not what I was doing. | ||
| Not the fucking shoes. | ||
| Yeah, they really lose it over shit. | ||
| But it's a small percentage. | ||
| There's a million people watching and you get one shitty tweet. | ||
| You've really got to think about the numbers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Well, the thing to me, too, is when I left Bellator, when it came out, whatever it was, the 26th, The response, like, kind of blew me away. | ||
| I mean, I was hearing from people that I didn't even know, they knew who I was. | ||
| Just, you know, everybody was just, it was a huge deal. | ||
| I couldn't believe it. | ||
| You know, I didn't expect all the support I got. | ||
| And I really appreciate anybody listening. | ||
| I really, really appreciated it. | ||
| When something like that happens, it's the first time I heard from you was when I left Bell for the first time. | ||
| When Bjorn was, you know, being Bjorn, and I left. | ||
| And you wrote me, man, keep your head up. | ||
| It's gonna be great. | ||
| And I was like, I didn't know you knew who I was. | ||
| You don't know. | ||
| You're kind of cut off. | ||
| You have no idea. | ||
| But the support you get when you really need it's really amazing from MMA fans. | ||
| Well, if you're a fan of the sport and you enjoy watching it, you want a commentator who appreciates it and knows what he's talking about and is entertaining. | ||
| Like, you take good paths, you know, when you describe things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You criticize referees if they make shitty calls. | ||
| You do the right thing. | ||
| You know, you speak up for the people that are watching. | ||
| That's something that's so hard. | ||
| You have to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You have to do it even if you love the referee. | ||
| Even if you love the referee. | ||
| But a lot of things are like... | ||
| I love this. | ||
| And Big John, if you're listening, I would love to hear an explanation of this because this is one of the funniest moments I've ever had commentating. | ||
| It was Marlon Sandro versus Frodo Hospeliev at 145 in Bellator. | ||
| And I forget who got a cup shot, but somebody got a cup shot. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Kick to the nuts. | ||
| And Big John walks up to him and goes, And he was mic'd, so I could hear it. | ||
| He goes, that wasn't a bad shot. | ||
| I'm only giving you two minutes. | ||
| And I went, I'm on air going... | ||
| I don't think he can do that. | ||
| It's either five minutes or he didn't get hit. | ||
| He has to keep fighting. | ||
| But he went up to him and goes, that wasn't bad. | ||
| I'm going to give you two minutes. | ||
| So I have to explain that to an audience and go, as far as I know, he can't do that. | ||
| It's either five or it's nothing. | ||
| When a referee does something like that, I'm trying to explain to the audience what he might be thinking. | ||
| Like, ah, that didn't look bad to me, but here's what he's thinking. | ||
| And then a lot of people think you're defending the referee. | ||
| No, I'm trying to think about what could possibly make him do that. | ||
| You have to ride that line. | ||
| And go, ah, this is what he's thinking. | ||
| I disagree about that, but that's got to be with him. | ||
| I bring in Ratner. | ||
| The good thing about the UFC is you bring in Mark Ratner, and Mark Ratner goes over the actual law, or the rules, rather, and how it's set up. | ||
| One of the things that's interesting, we did a show in Detroit, And I believe it was in Detroit and Michigan, they make use of the replay, but when they use the replay, the fight is over. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| So they make use of their instant replay, but if they do have to go to the instant replay, the fight is over. | ||
| For what? | ||
| For a no contest? | ||
| For anything. | ||
| Only if it's a no contest. | ||
| But when would that even be useful? | ||
| If you have to end the fight? | ||
| Well, it's some sort of an injury, or if someone claims that a shot was in an illegal area. | ||
| So to declare a no contest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the only way it could really work. | ||
| Well, the only way they can go to, once they go to a replay, so if the referee makes his call, and then they request some sort of a going to the instant replay, the fight is over. | ||
| There's no fighting after the instant replay is played. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| It's so funny when people ask me about why there's so many controversies in MMA. | ||
| Combat sports is the only major sport, boxing and MMA, where the rules are kind of subjective. | ||
| The scoring is kind of subjective. | ||
| When a fight is over, it's kind of subjective. | ||
| There's just so much room for interpretation in every facet of our sport. | ||
| When a referee stops a fight, it's his judgment as to whether or not intelligently defending yourself is the case. | ||
| The scoring, 10-8, 10-9, that's completely... | ||
| They make criteria, but in the end, effective striking and effective grappling is subjective. | ||
| And also the fouls. | ||
| When I was in Israel, a guy took, Jeremiah Labiano took a groin shot and then shot to the back of the head and the referee took a point. | ||
| Two different infractions. | ||
| A lot of referees won't do that. | ||
| You have to have at least two of the same infraction. | ||
| The ref took a point away. | ||
| He's allowed to do that. | ||
| So, so much of the sport is subjective. | ||
| That's why there are so many arguments about this sport is, you know, So many subjective elements in it. | ||
| That's why it's so important to have really good referees. | ||
| It's hard to find them. | ||
| They don't get any praise and they only get hate when they mess up. | ||
| Yeah, that's about it. | ||
| They don't get praise when they do the job well. | ||
| I mean, what you said is perfect. | ||
| The most locked solid is the rules. | ||
| That's the most locked solid. | ||
| But the scoring is very subjective. | ||
| And when we were talking about the Khabib fight, even though they were using the old system, I mean the scorecards were crazy. | ||
| Khabib was way ahead of him. | ||
| See if you can find it, Jamie. | ||
| But Khabib was way, way out in front. | ||
| That's something I do not miss doing is... | ||
| Scoring? | ||
| Scoring. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think it's smart. | ||
| I do not miss that at all. | ||
| I know they used to make you do that over at Bellator. | ||
| I don't miss that at all. | ||
| I mean, I'll mentally kind of score a fight as I'm going along, but... | ||
| What's so funny is people's reactions to it. | ||
| It's not that I mind doing it. | ||
| It's that people... | ||
| You know, Steve Farhood, like I said, I just finished talking to you, who does it for Strikeforce, he's like, oh yeah, you can't make a scorecard that everyone agrees with. | ||
| Most people agree with it, it seems. | ||
| We're on a 10-point must system, meaning 10 or less, and we have 30-25, 30-25, and 30-24 for a three-round fight. | ||
| So clearly, these are extraordinary scores. | ||
| 30-24 is 10-8 in every round. | ||
| 10-8 in every round. | ||
| I would say the other two were 10-8 in the last two rounds. | ||
| That would be my guess. | ||
| I think it's right, though. | ||
| I think 30-24 is right. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| That was a mauling. | ||
| What I used to look for before the rule change was... | ||
| Complete dominance. | ||
| It's got to be one-sided. | ||
| And there have to be moments where I go, this should be stopped. | ||
| And there were a couple of those moments in every round in the Khabib fight. | ||
| We talked about in between rounds, Dominic Cruz and I, after the fourth round, or the second round rather, we said, do you think that this is a good argument for a stoppage right here? | ||
| That the corner could be really within their best judgment to say, hey, this is enough. | ||
| The people I was with turned to me and they said, what do you tell your guy at this point? | ||
| I say, show me something. | ||
| If you don't show me something, first minute of this fight, towel's going in. | ||
| You gotta tell your guy, look, you're getting handled here. | ||
| We gotta start thinking about your health and your future. | ||
| If I don't see something in the first minute, I'm calling this motherfucker. | ||
| Yeah, could you imagine if Edson landed a flying knee three minutes into the third round? | ||
| I mean, if he did turn that fight around, it would have been one of the greatest comebacks of all time. | ||
| Which he was capable of doing. | ||
| He's the kind of guy who could maybe throw that kind of thing. | ||
| It just didn't seem like it was going to work on Khabib. | ||
| He was mauling him to an extent where he was draining his energy to the point where Edson would get up And he was trying to be mobile, but you could see the wobble in his step. | ||
| He just wasn't steady. | ||
| He wasn't able to uncork, and he was just under assault. | ||
| Constantly under assault. | ||
| There's a difference between a guy who can knock you out and a guy who's naturally heavy-handed. | ||
| Everything they throw is hard. | ||
| Barbosa is a knockout guy, but it's essentially his accuracy. | ||
| He's very, very precise with what he throws. | ||
| He's not heavy-handed enough to necessarily club you with a shot and knock you out. | ||
| It's more his kicks than anything. | ||
| Yeah, know what kind of guy you have, in a sense. | ||
| Once again, Patricio Pitbull and Beltor, that dude's just heavy-handed. | ||
| He can hit you with anything that's going to hurt you. | ||
| So, if your guy is that kind of guy, maybe he wins it last 30 seconds the last round. | ||
| But if you're a kicking guy who needs accuracy and timing and a guy is coming forward like Khabib was coming forward, You don't have a ton of options. | ||
| Know what kind of guy you have. | ||
| What guy you are. | ||
| In a lot of ways, it was a giant test for Khabib because we wanted to see what he looked like against one of the most elite strikers in the division. | ||
| With a lot of time off, too. | ||
| It also was a big test for Barboza. | ||
| You're going to have to use your hands here a lot, and that's never been his strong suit. | ||
| His strong suit has been his kicking. | ||
| Well, he knew how to negate that. | ||
| He moved forward the whole time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Fedor Krokop. | ||
| Fedor stepped forward the entire time knowing that Krokop needs an outside game for that to work. | ||
| He needs to set the footwork traps. | ||
| And it's so difficult to move back constantly. | ||
| It's so much more exhausting to constantly moving back and, you know, Barboza was just getting chased. | ||
| Imagine if that fight was in, you know, we have two cages. | ||
| We have the smaller cage they use for the ultimate fighter and then the bigger cage they use for... | ||
| I kind of like the idea of the smaller cage for everything. | ||
| I kind of think that you can move around a certain amount. | ||
| That big-ass cage. | ||
| Like, let's get some more seats in this bitch. | ||
| Let's put that little cage in here. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| The only problem is... | ||
| I fought in some tiny cages. | ||
| There's been some real little ones that they used to have. | ||
| Some of those local shows. | ||
| Real little ones. | ||
| Like, smaller than this room. | ||
| Whenever I trained, it was always never more than, like, two steps backward. | ||
| Because you hit the cage. | ||
| You start hitting the fence. | ||
| You get cornered. | ||
| So whenever we train, it was two steps left, two steps right, two steps left. | ||
| That severely limits a lot of your striking. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| But it is what it is, man. | ||
| Have you ever thought about, like, alternative venues? | ||
| Like, what would be a good alternative venue for everybody? | ||
| We talked about it on the podcast with the fight companions all the time where I think like a football field or a basketball court. | ||
| I think like something where you fight in the center and you have plenty of room where you never go outside of it and you duke it out there. | ||
| Like Lionheart and shit? | ||
| Like that? | ||
| Like an underground basement? | ||
| No, I mean, that's like outside. | ||
|
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|
Like in a pool. | |
| Remember when they fought in a pool, motherfucker? | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| We show fights in the same arenas where they have basketball games, right? | ||
| We've got all these dudes running around in this area, but then when the fight takes place, all of a sudden we've got to put up a cage. | ||
| How about you just keep that same size area, the guy standing in the center, And there's a warning track where people are waiting on the outside edges to tell them to go back in. | ||
| But there's never a time we can press someone up against the cage to try to get a takedown. | ||
| It just doesn't exist. | ||
| There's no cage. | ||
| So you don't have that extra thing that's in there that's a factor. | ||
| Because the cage is a factor. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's a factor in your backward movement. | ||
| It's a factor in your ability to get back up. | ||
| It's also a factor in some people's ability to hold you in place and to defend against submissions. | ||
| The cage, you can't roll into certain things. | ||
| Well, if that wasn't there, that would change a lot of what a wrestler can do inside the octagon for sure. | ||
| It would either be awesome or absolutely terrible. | ||
| There's not a lot of middle ground for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| I think... | ||
| Do you remember when Frank Shamrock tried to do something like that? | ||
| He had a thing called Shoot Box. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| I never saw. | ||
| It was like a shallow bowl. | ||
| And you would fight in the middle of it. | ||
| Yama did that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The Yama pit fighting thing, yeah. | ||
| So did Chuck Norris's World Combat League, and they have kickboxing and that kind of a thing. | ||
| They had like a little... | ||
| Raymond Dan was fun. | ||
| Yep, he did. | ||
| I think Wonderboy might have as well. | ||
| Yeah, I think he did. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Raymond Daniels is a fucking monster. | ||
| That guy's beastly. | ||
| John Wayne Parr, bro! | ||
| Dude, John Wayne Parr. | ||
| Representing the old man in the sport. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| 41, still smashing people. | ||
| Dude, unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, Bellator kickboxing, that's one thing that I really enjoyed that they did. | ||
| That they really focused on world-class kickboxing, you know? | ||
| I mean, guys like Joe Schilling, Raymond Daniels, they have... | ||
| Like, some of the best people from the kickboxing world that came over, were competing for them, and they're making a big deal out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And just putting on exciting fights. | ||
| Scott Coker's baby. | ||
| He really loves kickboxing. | ||
| I know, he does. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, didn't he used to work for K-1? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It was his thing, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where he started. | ||
| Way back in the day. | ||
| I think I got tickets for him from the Bellagio. | ||
| Like, way back in the day when Peter Ertz fought Stefan Lecco. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Old school. | ||
| Touched lumberjack, man. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Brutal. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a big fan of kickboxing. | ||
| I like the fact that Bellator decided to engage with both of those things. | ||
| Kevin Ross, Gaston Bellanos, but I just wish they would have a completely separate thing. | ||
| And they're calling it Bellator too, and people get confused. | ||
| Is this Bellator? | ||
| Bellator kickboxing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, what they do is, obviously, they piggyback off the MMA shows that already exist, so we shoot them together. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they just change the ring to a cage. | ||
| How long does it take? | ||
| It lowers from the ceiling. | ||
| It's actually really cool if you've ever seen it before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what happens is, when they start out with the ring, they have the ring set up, and all they have to do is change the mat, and they take out the ropes, and then the cage comes from the ceiling. | ||
| They have it suspended up there with the lights. | ||
| And it comes down, and they play 2001, and they latch it in, and then MMA starts. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty cool. | ||
| Some people have recorded it. | ||
| Well, you know what's interesting? | ||
| Bellator, whether intentionally or not, they nailed the correct shape for a platform in which a ring sits on. | ||
| Because the Bernard Hopkins fight, when he fought Joe Smith Jr. and he got knocked out, he went flying through the ropes and fell and hit his head. | ||
| I was like, ah! | ||
| How is this not protected? | ||
| How do they not have that figured out? | ||
| Well, the way to have figured it out would be to have more space on the outside of the ring. | ||
| The idea that you could just fall right through the ring and there's nothing there to catch you, all you would need is an extra four or five feet. | ||
| That's what we have. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| It's perfect. | ||
| You guys, they figured it out. | ||
| You're not them anymore, bro. | ||
| I'll get used to it. | ||
| Eventually. | ||
| They fucked up. | ||
| Who's going to take your spot? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I really have no idea. | ||
| I mean, I have a couple theories, but I don't know. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Now, when it goes over to the Paramount Network, when does that happen? | ||
| Now? | ||
| Is it 2018? | ||
|
unidentified
|
On the 18th. | |
| Look at this. | ||
| Yeah, see, they lowered it from the ceiling. | ||
| And they use a round one. | ||
| Yeah, we use a round cage, yeah. | ||
| So it sits right in. | ||
| I like round, too. | ||
| There's no need to have sharp edges. | ||
| But the octagon, it's like, it is what it is. | ||
| It's a thing now. | ||
| It's a thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Round's pretty dope, though. | ||
| Not bad, man. | ||
| Works pretty well. | ||
| I'm sorry, what were you saying? | ||
| Who might replace me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Have they ever taught about changing their name? | ||
| No. | ||
| They did years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Years ago. | ||
| What were the options? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think at one point they were thinking about using the network name. | ||
| So it'd be like Spike MMA. But I don't know how far that went or how many options they had. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Like HBO Boxing. | ||
| Showtime Boxing. | ||
| Yeah, kind of like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Spike MMA. I think that's the way to go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The UFV... Well, now it's not going to work. | ||
| The Paramount Network MMA, which doesn't roll off the tongue exactly. | ||
| Spike MMA sounds good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, Paramount MMA. They were considering that. | ||
| Well, yeah, the 18th, I think, they change over? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and then their first Bell Tour show on there was on the 20th, two days after. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Spike TV MMA. Yeah, why Paramount Network? | ||
| Paramount. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| You had Spike for a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not the HBO boxing champion though, right? | |
| You're right. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Yeah, that actually is a very good point. | ||
| There should be some sort of a sanctioning body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they tried that. | ||
| Remember Whamma? | ||
| Remember when Fedor won the Whamma Championship? | ||
| I was there. | ||
| It was Affliction. | ||
| They tried to, like, kind of make a belt that was, yeah. | ||
| But it was Whamma. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you realize how that would sound? | ||
| Whamma! | ||
| Whamma! | ||
| So what happened was they tried to make a belt that was independent of any particular promotion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Meaning the Whamma belt would move when that fighter went somewhere else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just the way MMA works. | ||
| That was never going to fly. | ||
| But people are like, well, why not? | ||
| I mean, it does that in boxing. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| And there's no good answer. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Well, the answer is that the brands are much more protective. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| It's Donald Trump with the Wham-a-Belt. | ||
| Donald Trump with the Wham-a-Belt, yeah. | ||
| That is hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, he was there. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| He was there for Tim Sylvia versus Fedor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the first Wham-a-Belt, right? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Dude, that's hilarious. | ||
| And then Shinya Yoki won it beating somebody. | ||
| I forget who. | ||
| Who's got that Wama belt now? | ||
| Who's got that bitch? | ||
| Somebody has to Wama. | ||
| Yeah, you have to find out now. | ||
| Like, maybe we need to bring Wama back. | ||
| So whatever became of Fedor Emelianenko's whamma belt anyway? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I do not know. | ||
| Yeah, there's things that you wonder, like a fighter's union, like, urgh, maybe. | ||
| Is that going to work? | ||
| You know, a sanctioning body outside of the UFC. It seems like the momentum is so strong in the fact of the UFC being the dominant organization. | ||
| It's like Q-tips. | ||
| You know, it's like that name like cotton swab. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, but there's the Q-tips like the NFL. Can I have a facial tissue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A what? | |
| Kleenex. | ||
| Come on, bitch. | ||
| Well, all right. | ||
| So one of my pet peeves that I'll explain right now that falls in line right with that. | ||
| I hate with a passion. | ||
| I hate explaining to people what I do for a living. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I fucking hate it. | ||
| When I was with Bellator. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Oh, because you work for Bellator. | ||
| No, because what happened was, like, I'm in a cab, leaving LAX, and they go, and they go, uh, hey, uh, so, where are you coming from? | ||
| Oh, you know, Miami. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Work. | ||
| What kind of work do you do? | ||
| I'm a commentator for mixed martial arts fights. | ||
| And you just get a blank stare. | ||
| They just have no idea what you are talking about. | ||
| And then you go, you know where they put people in a cage and they fight. | ||
| And then they go, oh, UFC, you work for... | ||
| No, no, it's... | ||
| I've got to explain that MMA is a sport. | ||
| I've had this conversation 50 times. | ||
| Once again, if I say I need a cotton swab or I need to clean my ears with it, what? | ||
| I need a Q-tip. | ||
| Okay, I got it. | ||
| It's like that. | ||
| Donald Trump's coming up with the XFL. He's re-bringing it. | ||
| Re-bring it, Rich. | ||
| The XFL? Yep, he used to have the XFL. Yeah. | ||
| Now he's coming back with the XFL again. | ||
| Is that what we're going to call it? | ||
| Donald Trump. | ||
| It was Vince McMahon. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| Vince McMahon, yeah. | ||
| Just joking around. | ||
| But didn't Donald Trump have something to do with the XFL? He did, right? | ||
| But now Vince McMahon's got it. | ||
| Vince McMahon, XFL. XFL return dream gets closer as WWE head Vince McMahon files to sell shares. | ||
| You ever had any doings with Vince McMahon? | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm a fan of that guy. | ||
| He's a character. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Fun dude. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Jacked as fuck at 72. That's unreal. | ||
| He's on all them steroids. | ||
| 70 years old, just fucking super jacked. | ||
| One of the camera guys in Bellator is a guy named Bubba Dean who worked for- That's a good name. | ||
| Yeah, great name. | ||
| He worked for Vince for like 20 years. | ||
| He was Vince's guy. | ||
| This guy's stories- You guys... | ||
| Come on, son. | ||
| He got all his teeth knocked out by Stone Cold Steve Austin while doing a shoot. | ||
| Vince did? | ||
| No, the camera guy. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But he has these crazy stories of doing stuff, and he got his teeth knocked out and all that stuff, and all these crazy Vince stories. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| That means it's nuts. | ||
| Remember when Vince blew his quad out? | ||
| He, like, jumped into the ring and slammed his muscle on the edge of the ring accidentally and just literally separated his fucking quad muscle from the bone and just sat there on his ass and kept going? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, just that alone, man. | ||
| Selling it like that? | ||
| I mean, he couldn't even walk, dude. | ||
| And he's selling the whole thing. | ||
| When you talk to people behind the scenes about WWE and what goes into it, it's really incredible. | ||
| Look how jacked he is. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| He's so jacked! | ||
| That's the most jacked 70-year-old of all time. | ||
| Ever seen. | ||
| Who's that fake Mark Coleman behind him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who's that dude? | |
| That's the dude who gets him the juice. | ||
| Goes straight to Mexico. | ||
| That dude wears a prosthetic face and everything. | ||
| I think at that age it's like anti-aging. | ||
| It's legal anti-aging technology. | ||
| Oh, let's be honest. | ||
| He's on more than that. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| He's on quite a bit. | ||
| That's not normal stuff. | ||
| He's going deep. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| You're like Stallone. | ||
| If you're going to do it, go hard. | ||
| I mean, at 70, it's like, why not? | ||
| I always tell everybody Stallone's my canary in a coal mine. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I watch him. | ||
| You're just watching him. | ||
| I want to find out how much he's taking. | ||
| How much he's taking, bro? | ||
| How do you feel? | ||
| You're going to get road rage? | ||
| Well, one of the things that I like about Ryzen is that they can do whatever they want. | ||
| They don't give a fuck. | ||
| When you say, I don't give a fuck, I think of Ryzen. | ||
| She's 26 pounds overweight. | ||
| I think it was 27. Please, Japan, please, if I could beg of you anything, don't let Gabby Garcia beat up any more grandmas. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| They think it's funny that the biggest woman of all time beats up grandmas. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| No, I'm serious. | ||
| This is something I've talked to people about a lot. | ||
| Old school fans of sport. | ||
| Now that Pride's gone... | ||
| Pride forever and Pride never died. | ||
| I love Pride. | ||
| Pride had some matches that made you go, what the fuck is going on here? | ||
| They loved that shit. | ||
| It was for the Japanese audience. | ||
| Weight classes were suggestions. | ||
| They didn't test anybody. | ||
| Experience level meant absolutely nothing. | ||
| Remember Daijiro Matsui, of course? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That guy, they loved watching that guy get beat up. | ||
| He fought everybody and got smashed. | ||
| They loved watching Daijiro Matsui get his fucking face beaten. | ||
| And they loved him. | ||
| They didn't like him. | ||
| There's something in the club. | ||
| They loved that shit. | ||
| And I'll tell people, I'll go, look, you know, Pride did have some great fights. | ||
| It also had some fights that were... | ||
| Crazy, ridiculous, unbelievable mismatches. | ||
| Yeah, the weight classes. | ||
| Their appreciation for a fighter's struggle was, if not more important than the fighter being victorious. | ||
| It's like the fighter being... | ||
| Just being valiant in the face of overwhelming odds was almost more enjoyable to them. | ||
| I liked Bushido more, because they just didn't pull that in Bushido. | ||
| They featured the lighter guys, and I don't remember in Bushido any fights that I was like, oh my god. | ||
| I think you're right, now that I'm remembering it. | ||
| I liked Bushido a bit more. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| They were all great. | ||
| That was when Quadros and... | ||
| Was it Quadros and Boss were the commentators? | ||
| It was either Mauro Quadros or Mauro Boss. | ||
| You know who I liked too? | ||
| They only had one or two shots at it. | ||
| That one guy who was a... | ||
| He was like some sort of a radio sports guy. | ||
| What the fuck is his name? | ||
| Mad Dog or something like that? | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| He only did it once. | ||
| There was one guy... | ||
| For Pride? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One guy who was the play-by-play guy with Boss Root and Once. | ||
| He's fun. | ||
| It's like kind of a silly guy, but a little out of his element. | ||
| A little out of his element. | ||
| Didn't necessarily... | ||
| It's like we were talking about earlier, like... | ||
| It's very difficult to find someone who's a play-by-play guy who is also a martial artist and also really, really invested in the sport. | ||
| Whereas a guy like you, a color guy, those guys, there's more chance that you're going to have a Technical understanding of the sport and also be able to be entertaining about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Whereas they just have to be entertaining about it and read the script. | ||
| They don't necessarily... | ||
| So it's super hard to find a guy who's as knowledgeable as you, but that is also a play-by-play guy. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| I always said Brian Stan should do it. | ||
| Play-by-play. | ||
| Play-by-play, and he could do either or, but it would be different because Brian Stan has, in my opinion, he has the voice and the personality and the delivery, the strength in the way he forms sentences in an entertaining but powerful way. | ||
| He could be a really good, believable play-by-play guy who's also a super legit martial artist, so he'd be the only guy that's doing it that way. | ||
| Well, the problem with having a... | ||
| A play-by-play guy who's too knowledgeable, they start doing both of them, sitting there. | ||
| And that's a problem when a guy's like a freak fan or thinks they know a lot about sport. | ||
| They start doing it. | ||
| They start doing color as they're doing play-by-play. | ||
| I think that's okay as long as it's... | ||
| As long as everybody is aware, not one person talks too much and everybody kind of lets everybody get in. | ||
| One of the things that I like to do when we have DC or when we have Dominic Cruz or whoever sits next to me sometimes, I like to ask them questions. | ||
| I want to give him a position. | ||
| What do you like to do here? | ||
| How do you approach this? | ||
| What's your thought process here? | ||
| Dominic was amazing too this weekend about breaking down clinch work and what someone's doing wrong or why this is a stagnant position for them. | ||
| I think if you had a guy who is a play-by-play guy, just as long as he knows, as long as everybody's cool with everybody's flow. | ||
| But that is one of the things that came in really well with me and Goldie. | ||
| Because we'd worked together for so long. | ||
| We were friends. | ||
| We knew how to slide things in. | ||
| We knew when to talk. | ||
| And sometimes we just talked over each other like some shit was happening. | ||
| But that's okay, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've gone through four. | ||
| Four? | ||
| In the last year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| A year and a half. | ||
| I did a few different guys back in the day. | ||
| Hey, what the fuck? | ||
| Cut that out of the show. | ||
| Yeah, we can edit that, right? | ||
| Cool. | ||
| I worked with a few different guys back in the day, but one of the guys that people forgot who was amazing was Bruce Beck. | ||
| Bruce Beck? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| I worked with him in boxing. | ||
| At PBC, yeah. | ||
| He gave me really good advice for what you were talking about. | ||
| It's difficult. | ||
| Post-fight interviews. | ||
| You know, he just gave me advice and, you know, having things to say and planning things out and, you know, how to, you know, how to word things. | ||
| You know, I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. | ||
| Matt Mitrione, when they hired him to do belter kickboxing, we were in Turin, Italy. | ||
| And Matt Matreon, I think he was with Bruce Beck, actually, at that time. | ||
| He hadn't flown out yet. | ||
| So Matt Matreon is there by himself, has never done color commentary before, and all the kickboxing fighters are showing up. | ||
| I've already done MMA. I wasn't doing kickboxing at the time. | ||
| I take Matt, and I go, okay, cool. | ||
| I'll walk you through this. | ||
| So I stayed and helped him interview all the kickboxing fighters. | ||
| And he's sitting there. | ||
| He's like, need some advice. | ||
| He'd never done this before. | ||
| And I said, the only advice I gave him was, don't say anything my mom knows. | ||
| If my mom's watching boxing and somebody gets punched in the face, I turn to my mom and go, that guy just got punched in the face. | ||
| My mom would go, yeah, I know that. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| My mom knows when someone's getting punched in the face. | ||
| My mom doesn't know how the footwork set that right hand up. | ||
| That's your job. | ||
| It's not, that guy just got punched. | ||
| Oh, look at that. | ||
| It's not fucking radio. | ||
| They can see it. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So your job as the expert is to... | ||
| The things that a layman or someone not experienced in sport doesn't quite know, like footwork accommodations and stuff like that. | ||
| And I said, stick to that. | ||
| I go, just stick to filling in the gaps that your expertise will help fill in. | ||
| Don't say everything in the world. | ||
| And when everybody talks, everybody loses. | ||
| That's how you have to think about it. | ||
| He knows when to talk, and I don't want to talk. | ||
| If we don't talk over each other, everybody loses. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When we talk over each other at the same time, we both sound like crap. | ||
| So just know when... | ||
| You'll get a feel for when to lay out and when to go in. | ||
| But my number one advice was... | ||
| Don't say anything that someone on the street could look at the TV and figure it out. | ||
| Someone at Buffalo Wild Wings can yell at the TV, why are you here? | ||
| We don't need an expert. | ||
| Anybody could say that. | ||
| What do you fill in? | ||
| It made him feel way better. | ||
| I said, hey, look, just fill in the stuff that your average person wouldn't know. | ||
| That's a very good game plan. | ||
| That's very wise. | ||
| Very versatile. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Use its power for good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I always tell guys. | ||
| Don't say what my mom knows. | ||
| So you get caught up in, and there's a right hand. | ||
| You don't have to call every, they can see that. | ||
| Now, the hard part is, the grappling, a lot of people are totally lost. | ||
| We have to fill in a lot more of that. | ||
| But you also sometimes want to react to certain punches that get landed, too. | ||
| You just got to know when to, when not to. | ||
| That develops, man. | ||
| You just get a feeling for that, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird thing that you're thinking of it, at least I am when I'm doing it, also as like, it's a product. | ||
| Like, you're contributing to a product. | ||
| You're adding to it with sound and with description and with the entertainment value of the way you distribute your words, you know? | ||
| A good broadcaster knows they're not tuning in for us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We can make it better. | ||
| We certainly can. | ||
| We certainly can. | ||
| We're there to get out of our own way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| We don't want to fuck it up. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| We can also detract from a broadcast. | ||
| You've got to be careful about it. | ||
| Detracting is the worst. | ||
| I mean, I think probably we've both been guilty of that at some point. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| At any moment. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You're free-balling. | ||
| You're doing a live thing. | ||
| When you're anticipating things happening, and they're happening, or something's different than you thought was going to happen, and you're trying to put the words to it correctly, in the moment, live on TV... It doesn't always work out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it doesn't. | |
| I mean, it works out a lot. | ||
| And I beat myself up so bad, man. | ||
| When I make a mistake, man, I'm mad. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Fucking until the next show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, and then I'll look sometimes and I'm like, nobody noticed it. | ||
| I'm the one that's mad at myself. | ||
| But that's why you're really good. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That's why you're really good. | ||
| I mean, anybody who is really good at anything, you get that way because fucking up on it just seems horrible. | ||
| You know, it just really messes with your head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've just come to accept that weird feeling, you know, and use it and go, all right, whatever that shit feeling is where I flubbed that word or forgot that guy's name or whatever it is, and I conflated the two people, whatever it is. | ||
| Get over it. | ||
| Keep moving. | ||
| Just do your best. | ||
| And that feeling... | ||
| Because of the fact that I can't just blow it off. | ||
| I can't just be like, who gives a shit? | ||
| I don't have that in me, man. | ||
| Yeah, I do not. | ||
| But that's why I try hard. | ||
| And that's why with every broadcast, when I get through it and it's good, I'm like, okay. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| I still get that juice, man. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Every time. | ||
| And it's funny. | ||
| I'm known for... | ||
| Disappearing after a show, I'm known for that. | ||
| For, like, the show's done, and everybody goes, well, A, I don't drink, so I'm out of that loop completely, but... | ||
| What about your heroin use? | ||
| You know, that's a home thing. | ||
| I'm not gonna bring it on a plane. | ||
| Come on, you're a rookie. | ||
| Anyway, so, so, anyway, I'm known for disappearing after a show, because a show just takes a lot out of me. | ||
| Like, everybody else is at the bar doing whatever, and I go to my room and I just download. | ||
| Dude, I'm fucking starving after shows. | ||
| Or that. | ||
| And the problem is that a lot of times it's, you know, when I'm out in Backerville or something, or I'm out in like Mulvane, Kansas, and you're at a smoky casino and there's one place to eat, and a fight just let out, and you're like, oh my god. | ||
| You know, it's like a real decision I have to make a lot of times is, am I too hungry to sleep or am I too tired to eat? | ||
| Which one of those am I? I almost always choose sleep if I have to. | ||
| I almost always choose sleep. | ||
| I almost always choose sleep. | ||
| But yeah, I just disappear. | ||
| I just go to my hotel. | ||
| Because it's hard. | ||
| It just takes a lot out of you. | ||
| I bring stuff with me anyway. | ||
| I always bring protein bars. | ||
| I bring canned oysters. | ||
| I bring different things that I can eat that I know are healthy. | ||
| I bring like a bunch of cans of canned oysters. | ||
| Because it's like they're soaked in olive oil. | ||
| Super healthy. | ||
| Bang a few cans of those out. | ||
| Go to sleep. | ||
| What is your family talking? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| What is your family talking? | ||
| Oh, nationality. | ||
| Mostly Italian, a little bit of Irish. | ||
| My family's Greek. | ||
| My mom's Greek. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah, okay. | |
| Cool. | ||
| The rest are German-Irish, so yeah. | ||
| Olive oil's a big part of the diet. | ||
| Olive oil's the shit. | ||
| That is one of the best fucking things your body can take in. | ||
| Olive oil's fantastic, and what a pain in the dick it is to make. | ||
| Think about all the stuff they had to go through. | ||
| Like, when you see, I had an olive tree in my yard, and the olives would fall down. | ||
| These nasty little fucked up olives. | ||
| I'm like, this is an olive? | ||
| And they're like, oh yeah, there's a whole process to turn that into an olive you eat. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought an olive came from a tree like an olive. | ||
| You could just pick it like one of those green ones. | ||
| No. | ||
| I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. | ||
| They had the whole thing set up there, man, until I was nine years old. | ||
| A lot of olive stuff out there. | ||
| Yeah, a buddy of mine makes olive oil in his yard. | ||
| He's got a shit ton of olive trees in his yard, and he set this whole thing up with the hopes of eventually making his own olive oil from his own yard. | ||
| Okay, good luck, dude. | ||
| You can buy it in a store, you fuck. | ||
| It's much easier to buy it in a store. | ||
| But big part of the diet growing up. | ||
| Mom cooks a lot, man. | ||
| It's phenomenal for you, man. | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| My mom had cooked for the Bellator crew before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| They'd come over to her house and she cooked for like 25 people. | ||
| The whole crew? | ||
| 25 people. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| She's like a caterer almost. | ||
| She loves that shit. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| She loves that shit. | ||
| Anyway, so literally, I left Bellator and literally one of the people went, Your mom will still cook for us, right? | ||
| I was like, dude, any time, like, we want mom in the divorce. | ||
| And I was like, okay, cool. | ||
| Mom's okay with that. | ||
| Mom loves everyone in Bellator crew and they love my mother. | ||
| So it was kind of funny. | ||
| She had them all over for dinner. | ||
| And so they were really, really upset about my mom. | ||
| I hope Bellator makes it. | ||
| And I say that with all due sincerity. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Now that we're both not with Bellator. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Now that we're both not with Bellator. | ||
| We can talk about this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like I always said this before. | ||
| Maybe they're in competition with UFC, the corporate entity. | ||
| But in my opinion, it was never that they were in competition with me. | ||
| My thoughts are that they're valuable, that it's important, and that the more competition you have, the better. | ||
| And then I also felt like having a guy like you out there who's doing commentary, who's kicking ass, makes me better. | ||
| I know that you're really good at it. | ||
| I listen to you very sharp. | ||
| I listen to people, and I'm sure you're the same way, that they're uncomfortable or clunky doing commentary, and it makes for an awkward experience for you watching it. | ||
| Yeah, but we listen to it a lot. | ||
| I mean, I really listen with that ear, because that's our job. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, you really listen with that ear, and you're probably overly critical. | ||
| We are, at least, when we're listening to our peers. | ||
| And yeah, I do the same thing. | ||
| Bad commentary can really... | ||
| It's like a producer can hear things where you go, I don't even hear that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Something's a little off and just bugs them. | ||
| Yeah, it's just clunky. | ||
| You know, especially for someone who's called and seen as many fights as you have, your idea of what's clunky is like the data chunking that you're doing is very different. | ||
| It's very much more high level than the average person. | ||
| There's just not a lot of people doing it, which is weird. | ||
| Ten years have been. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, more than ten. | ||
| When did Belgium start? | ||
| No, I was doing M1 before that. | ||
| And I did Affliction too. | ||
| Those were both before Bellator. | ||
| Was Jason Chambers the first Bellator guy? | ||
| For the first year, he was the Bellator guy. | ||
| When it was on ESPN Deportes. | ||
| And it was just a web series in English. | ||
| So you could just see it on the website in English. | ||
| It was Anik and Jason Chambers. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Jason and I have lived weirdly parallel lives. | ||
| Yeah, you guys both had that show. | ||
| We both had that show. | ||
| We fought each other. | ||
| He was my last professional fight. | ||
| He was the guy at Bellator before I was there. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Yeah, it's really weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's really strange. | ||
| Yeah, he was... | ||
| You were on... | ||
| What show was he? | ||
| I was on Fight Quest. | ||
| He was on Human Weapon. | ||
| You were on Fight Quest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, funny story. | ||
| When I first got the call about Fight Quest, they said... | ||
| So, to go back a little bit further, I fought Jason in my last pro fight, and remember Jamie Walsh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sure. | |
| He was the promoter. | ||
| Very well. | ||
| He used to train me. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He used to be my personal trainer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He taught me about kettlebells, that... | ||
| Crazy Englishman. | ||
| He's one of John Jock's black belts too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Great grappler. | ||
| I grappled against him twice. | ||
| Anyway, so I was going to fight Jason at his promotion called Pangea, and he told me all about this show he was going on. | ||
| He goes, man, if you beat this guy, man, he's going to be bad. | ||
| It's going to be great for you. | ||
| And I was like, and he described the show to me. | ||
| You travel around and you do different martial arts. | ||
| I was like, man, that's a great idea. | ||
| And then... | ||
| I beat Jason with a reverse heel hook, and you know how dangerous those are. | ||
| And Jason really held out, and it tore pretty good. | ||
| And anyway, a couple days later, I get a call from, I forget who, and they said, yeah, they're doing this show, and give this producer a call in New York. | ||
| I said, okay. | ||
| I called the producer, and she described the show, and she described the exact same show. | ||
| And I went... | ||
| Oh fuck, I hurt him and they're looking for a replacement. | ||
| And I felt... | ||
| There's an unwritten rule in MMA that you can beat somebody up and do whatever. | ||
| You don't take food out of somebody else's mouth. | ||
| You don't want to hurt somebody and they can't fight for a year. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We all fight, but when it's over, it's over. | ||
| You don't want to like... | ||
| Injure somebody where they can't make a living. | ||
| That was also back in the day when heel hooks were like sort of shunned in jujitsu a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, but this was an MMA fight. | ||
| I know, but I mean, there was a stigma to heel hooks. | ||
| There still was, yeah. | ||
| But that's what I used, and I thought I injured him, and they were looking for a replacement. | ||
| I was just like, oh my god. | ||
| So it was like one of those deep impact Armageddon things. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And so then I found out, and then I realized they were on different shows, and it was so funny because people have said since then, That I was chosen because they beat Jason. | ||
| That's their assumption, which makes sense, but they had no idea. | ||
| The producers of the show, once I got the gig and we're talking, they said, yeah, there's another show on History Channel. | ||
| I went, yeah, I fought that guy. | ||
| And they looked at me and they went, what? | ||
| They go, yeah, I fought him like a month ago. | ||
| They literally, I'm serious, had no fucking clue. | ||
| They had no idea. | ||
| It's just so weird that they both came out at exactly the same time. | ||
| Yeah, they were out a few months before me. | ||
| There hasn't been one of those shows since. | ||
| There hasn't been one before. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| What kind of weird shenanigans were going on back then? | ||
| I didn't produce the thing, so I don't know where it came from. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I'm not blaming you. | ||
| It wasn't me. | ||
| It wasn't me. | ||
| I didn't go, hey, I could take this idea. | ||
| But it's just weird to me that those shows become interesting and popular, and then they stop being. | ||
| It's like someone tries it out, and they go, this is it. | ||
| And the two companies are willing to invest it, and two different channels are showing it. | ||
| Remember, this is a way back one. | ||
| In one summer, it was The Abyss, Deep Space Nine, and Leviathan were all these underwater horror movies that came out in the same summer. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| It's just, I don't know why. | ||
| Just like we were seeing with the asteroid movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon. | ||
| Both of them came out exactly the same time. | ||
| That was weird. | ||
| It was really strange. | ||
| Yes, fucking Hollywood's bizarre like that. | ||
| It is. | ||
| You find out, like, what did... | ||
| I almost don't want to know. | ||
| I don't want to know what kind of weird shenanigans where all three of you fuckheads are coming up with underwater horror movies. | ||
| Yeah, what's going on? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| It's like they find out that someone's doing it, so they get a head on and they try to release it first. | ||
| There were two Battle of the Sexes movies. | ||
| Will Ferrell was supposed to play Bobby Riggs in a Battle of the Sexes tennis movie. | ||
| When Steve Carell was doing the other one? | ||
| Yeah, and then they found out Steve Carell was doing one and they canned it. | ||
| That match happened in the 70s. | ||
| Yeah, that was the Billie Jean King? | ||
| Billie Jean King. | ||
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| Went to my high school. | ||
| Strangely enough. | ||
| Powerful. | ||
| Powerful Billie Jean. | ||
| Anyway, but... | ||
| 40 years later, they make a movie and two studios want to do it at the same time? | ||
| It's fucking weird. | ||
| And both with comedians, which is really weird. | ||
| Oh, Bobby Riggs was that guy. | ||
| Steve Carell is so goddamn good. | ||
| He just knocked it out of the park. | ||
| He was great playing that fucking creepy DuPont guy, too. | ||
| Dude, Johnny DuPont. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember when Dave Schultz got killed. | ||
| What a huge deal that was. | ||
| But it was just... | ||
| He was so creepy playing him in the movie. | ||
| It's like you bought it. | ||
| You bought that he's a weird guy wrestling with these guys. | ||
| He nailed it. | ||
| Teaching them and shit. | ||
| And they're just like letting them do it. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Weird, weird, weird. | ||
| Have you seen the documentary about it? | ||
| That shows all the real footage and everything? | ||
| I've seen some of the real footage, but I don't think I saw the documentary. | ||
| There's one, 30 of 30 to 1, and then there's one on Netflix. | ||
| And I've seen both of them. | ||
| One is more focused on Mark Schultz. | ||
| The other one is the other story. | ||
| And, man, it's, once again, it's fucking. | ||
| Really out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wrestlers just had no outlet to make money back then. | ||
| And this billionaire says, I'll put you up and make this amazing team, and they jump on it. | ||
| And isn't it kind of stunning that wrestling never had a real actual professional, not that there's anything wrong with pro wrestling, but pro wrestling obviously is a show. | ||
| There's never been like, you think about how many people love wrestling, how many wrestling fans there are, how many people wrestle in high school and college, and how many people like to watch it in the Olympics. | ||
| It was always a big deal. | ||
| Like, why didn't they ever figure out a way to make some sort of professional venue out of it? | ||
| Remember they did for a little while? | ||
| Remember Real Pro Wrestling, remember that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Yeah, they tried that. | ||
| And, you know, it's funny. | ||
| I used to teach. | ||
| I used to be a teacher. | ||
| That's what I did before I was fighting. | ||
| What did you teach? | ||
| The longest I ever taught was, because I worked for Long Beach Unified School District. | ||
| I did a bunch of stuff for them. | ||
| So sometimes I would teach, sometimes I'd do this testing stuff. | ||
| The longest I ever taught was 7th grade. | ||
| Math. | ||
|
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Which, if there is a hell, that is where it is. | |
| 7th grade math, algebra. | ||
| I only taught that. | ||
| My mom's a teacher. | ||
| And the girl, the lady two rooms down from her, got sick or had some kind of breakdown. | ||
| And mom went, can you please come in and teach for a year? | ||
| And I went, okay, cool, because I made it easier on her. | ||
| I said, all right, fine. | ||
| So I ended up teaching. | ||
| So what did you have to have? | ||
| A degree and some sort of certification? | ||
| A degree and a certification, yeah. | ||
| And I had both of those. | ||
| So you'd already planned on teaching, or you had it as a possible side gig? | ||
| I had it as a possible side gig. | ||
| It was always what I was doing kind of while I was fighting. | ||
| But anyway, I had a teacher tell me one time, he said, If there's a sign at the zoo that says, please don't throw tangerines at the elephants, it may not make any sense to you. | ||
| All it means is one time somebody threw a tangerine at an elephant, something really bad happened. | ||
| And I thought about that a lot when... | ||
| Whenever you think about, you know, why is pro wrestling pro wrestling? | ||
| Well, there was a time when it was real, and it was too boring, so they started scripting the endings to it, and so it became pro wrestling. | ||
| There were catch wrestling matches, and they lasted three hours. | ||
| It was like the old Gracie fights. | ||
| They just lasted too long. | ||
| Guys couldn't catch each other, and so they started scripting the innings. | ||
| Real pro wrestling was an effort to make it work, and if it had made money, it'd still be around. | ||
| So it sucks, and I wish wrestlers even had more of an outlet than MMA. And wrestling itself has gotten bigger in terms of... | ||
| I went to my old high school to watch a duel meet, and back when I was there, we had one varsity team and half a JV team. | ||
| They had varsity, JV, fresh soft, and a women's team. | ||
| Wow, a women's team. | ||
| A full women's team. | ||
| I have 14 weight classes right now. | ||
| You couldn't get anywhere near that when I was in school. | ||
| It just wasn't that popular. | ||
| Now, MMA has made it huge. | ||
| Wrestling now, people really follow a lot. | ||
| You had to be a real geek to follow college wrestling. | ||
| Well, when you see a guy like Nurmagomedov smash Edson Barboza using essentially just wrestling and vicious ground and pound, you realize like, okay, that is so fucking important to have. | ||
| It is the cornerstone, or rather the foundation of MMA. And I think that fight really highlighted it. | ||
| It really showed the dominant, super dominant wrestler over the dominant striker. | ||
| If the dominant wrestler can get a hold of the dominant striker, Unless the striker's close! | ||
| Like, that's one of the things that was most impressive about Mirko, was that when Mirko started fighting for pride, his takedown defense got really good really quick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He fought some fucking tough guys, but figured out a way to keep the fight standing a lot. | ||
| What I liked about him so much when you watch him is not only was he a southpaw, he was so good with the range of his footwork that he never lost his distance while throwing. | ||
| He was always really good at picking you apart from long range. | ||
| So you were shooting from outside. | ||
| You were shooting from way far back. | ||
| He could see it coming. | ||
| His footwork set up his takedown defense so well. | ||
| That dude was amazing. | ||
| Yeah, he also was very powerful. | ||
| So his explosion was a big part of his fight style when he was a kickboxer. | ||
| So unlike maybe Peter Ertz or Ernesto Hust, who had more of a methodical, technical style of striking, Krokop would throw those one big shots all the time. | ||
| And that really works well in MMA. And he was able to use that explosion, that fucking left high kick, and the one to the body that he hit Heath Herring with. | ||
| You remember that shot? | ||
| Oh, just collapsed him. | ||
| Well, you see Heath Haring's body just wrapped around Crow Cop's leg. | ||
|
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Like, whoa! | |
| You just realize the amount of power in that fucking kick, and Haring's taking it right on the ribcage. | ||
| The worst. | ||
| Now, the thing to me is, when you watch what I tell people, I said... | ||
| When you watch Chuck Liddell's three fights against Randy, the third one against Randy, Randy is just shook by that power. | ||
| He's felt it before. | ||
| And that kind of, you know, bull in a china shop, Greco style, to get inside, it's not there. | ||
| He's just thinking about that power shot the whole time. | ||
| And that's what a power striker does against a wrestler. | ||
| He gives you that kind of barrier of, to take me down, you've got to get through here. | ||
| And here is fucking dangerous. | ||
| And I think, Khabib, what he knew is, long range is dangerous against Edson. | ||
| So if I keep moving forward, I keep putting pressure on him and take away that spinning range, he's not going to knock me out with his hands. | ||
| And that's why he was pushing forward so incredibly hard as he didn't worry about that second wall. | ||
| It really didn't concern him. | ||
| Yeah, and Chuck would make you fight him, because Chuck was a very good wrestler himself. | ||
| The thing that made Chuck so unique is that Chuck was a striker, you know, Hackleman trained, Kempo, karate, all that stuff, in a traditional sense, but also had very good boxing skills and serious fucking power in his hands and kicks. | ||
| But he also knew how to wrestle, so good luck taking him down. | ||
| So now you're forced to stand up with this long, powerful striker who has an iron chin and just had this psychotic desire to move forward and land bombs. | ||
| Yeah, he wrestled it slow. | ||
| I'm probably slow if I remember correctly. | ||
| And that's where Hackleman's place is still up there in San Luis Obispo. | ||
| He was something interesting because he was one of the very first wrestlers that was a feared striker. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So he had the wrestling skills, great taketown defense, very good at getting back up off the ground when he got down to the ground, but also destroyer on his feet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's the kind of guy that we're going to need to test Khabib. | ||
| We're going to need a guy who can keep the fight standing, who can test Khabib on the feet, some guy who's going to be able to stuff some of those takedowns. | ||
| Those guys don't come around often. | ||
| Well, not with him. | ||
| When you see what he did to RDA, he ragdolled Dos Anjos, which is crazy. | ||
| I mean, I do not know. | ||
| There's a timeline of Dos Anjos' dominance, right? | ||
| That's a strong 70. Dos Anjos is a strong 70. But this was a different time in Dos Anjos' training, and I think Dos Anjos made some giant leaps when he started doing strength and conditioning with Nick Curzon. | ||
| He just had way more output inside the cage, but... | ||
| The crazy thing was that Dos Anjos is one of the best grapplers in the division. | ||
| And you see what he was able to do with Neil Magny. | ||
| Leg kicks Neil Magny, gets him to the ground, smushes him. | ||
| You know, I mean, his fucking ground game is really legit. | ||
| So to see him get ragdolled by Khabib, you're like, how's he doing that to RDA, you know? | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| At 55! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's something special. | ||
| So it's like, who is left at 55? | ||
| Especially now that Dos Anjos has moved on successfully to 170. Who the fuck has left that's going to be able to keep the fight standing? | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's the tough part. | ||
| I don't think there are many answers. | ||
| I really don't know. | ||
| I don't know either, man. | ||
| I think they've got to put together the Ferguson fight pretty quickly. | ||
| That's the fight. | ||
| It's a big fight. | ||
| That's the fight. | ||
| That's the fight. | ||
| The question is, is it going to be for the title? | ||
| Is it going to be Ferguson and Conor get stripped and Ferguson and Khabib fight for the undisputed title? | ||
| Because they'll just make Ferguson the undisputed champion if Conor gets stripped, which I don't think is a bad thing. | ||
| No. | ||
| Look, Conor's still fucking Conor. | ||
| If Conor comes back a year from now, he's still Conor. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| He's still fighting probably for the title right away. | ||
| Everybody's going to want it. | ||
| Everybody's going to want the pay-per-view money that comes with it. | ||
| Hop on board. | ||
|
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But Tony versus Khabib is very interesting. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| Khabib is a guy you have to get his respect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to give him reason to back up. | ||
| Tony knows how to fight off his back. | ||
| Very good. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Very dangerous off his back. | ||
| Not just dangerous off his back in terms of submissions, but very good defensively off his back. | ||
| You know, he's got really good composure. | ||
| Very good wrestler. | ||
| His chokes are fucking nasty, man. | ||
| He catches chokes from weird angles. | ||
| You know, he's good at sweeping you. | ||
| He's legit. | ||
| He's a legit champ, but that's the fight. | ||
| Yep, that's the fight. | ||
| I mean, anything else is the fans going to be calling for it could be. | ||
| Yeah, it's just what do you do, though? | ||
| Like, what do you do and how do you do it? | ||
| Do you strip Conor? | ||
| That's always the question, man. | ||
| Because if Conor's like, fuck it, I want to fight Tony in Dublin! | ||
| If he decides to come back and fight Tony and then the winner fights Khabib in Russia, the world explodes. | ||
| That'd be huge! | ||
| That'd be the biggest thing in the world. | ||
| That'd be fantastic. | ||
| The winner fights Khabib in Russia for the undisputed title. | ||
| You ever call a fight in Russia? | ||
| No, but Khabib's gonna ride a bear out to the cage. | ||
| Gangster, man. | ||
| Put a cage over the bear's face. | ||
| It's literally gangster. | ||
| It's a mobbed up place. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| That's fun there, yeah. | ||
| How many times did you... | ||
| I think four? | ||
| For Bellator? | ||
| No, when I was with M1, they were running out of Russia. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So I did St. Petersburg, and then I did... | ||
| Did you enjoy it? | ||
| Oh, man, I had a great time. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| How's the food over there? | ||
| Food's good. | ||
| I don't like the way you said good. | ||
| No, the food's good. | ||
| The food's good. | ||
| It's not like you're not known for it. | ||
| All right, so I got to tell a story. | ||
| We're on this ship in the Neva River, and it's owned by one of the guys who runs M1. And... | ||
| Yeah, so we're on this ship in the Neva River, and it's got a restaurant on it. | ||
| And we're sitting there, and Sean Wheelock, my old broadcast partner, is very persnicky about his food. | ||
| He's persnicky about a lot of stuff. | ||
| And we're sitting there with our boss and everything, and the guy who runs this ship, this big heavy in St. Petersburg, who's affiliated with M1, serves us this borscht, which is like a beet stew, basically. | ||
| And he goes, man, we're really proud of our borscht. | ||
| It's a big deal here. | ||
| And... | ||
| Oh, we hope you enjoy it. | ||
| It's a point of honor for us. | ||
| And he walks away, and Wheelock looks at the bowl and goes, I'm not eating this. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| And our boss goes, you will fucking eat it right now. | ||
| Like a seven-year-old, like, you won't eat this right now. | ||
|
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You won't fucking eat it. | |
| And he's like, no, I'm not eating it. | ||
| Like, folded his arms, like, I'm not eating it. | ||
|
unidentified
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No way. | |
| No, I eat so fast. | ||
| White people. | ||
| White people. | ||
| I eat so fast that I already ate it. | ||
| I like borscht, so I just ate it. | ||
| And I set my thing down. | ||
| The guy who was all proud of his borscht Turns around and is heading back to us and my boss looks at me and goes, points to Sean's food and I grabbed it and I drank an entire bowl of that shit and threw it down before the guy came back. | ||
| And he saw it and said, oh, thank you so much. | ||
| Sean was just refusing to touch it. | ||
| Persnickety is a nice word. | ||
| Persnickety. | ||
| I like how you use that. | ||
| He's very selective about it. | ||
| But it's a nice way. | ||
| Nobody can get mad. | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't like he was like... | ||
| Yeah, he called something persnickety. | ||
| Yeah, you're not saying they're a complaining bitch. | ||
| No. | ||
| I wouldn't say that. | ||
| I didn't think you would. | ||
| Would not. | ||
|
unidentified
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Persnickety. | |
| I understand. | ||
| No, I didn't eat that. | ||
| I was like, I'll eat it. | ||
| I was like, fuck it, give it to me. | ||
| I know there's been some talk about doing a UFC in Russia, and I think a lot of it is probably based on the idea that Khabib at 25-0 is most likely somewhere along the line going to fight for the title. | ||
| I mean, if everything continues to go well as long as there's no injuries or something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially now that he can make the weight. | ||
| Like, he made the weight pretty easy. | ||
| Yeah, it didn't look bad. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| That would be a huge fight. | ||
| Fucking A. You have enough Russian talent that, you know... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It would work well. | ||
| Just from Dagestan alone, you could fill the whole roster. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Dagestan versus the world. | ||
| You really could. | ||
| You almost could. | ||
| We had a fighter in Bellator, Shabalat Shomalayev, and ended up getting shot like five times in Dagestan. | ||
|
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Jesus Christ. | |
| He lived. | ||
| He lived. | ||
| He went after some gangster with a gun or something in a club, and he got like torn apart. | ||
| It's crazy, man. | ||
| It's a tough world. | ||
| We're so soft over here. | ||
| Sean Wheelock need to go camping over there for a little while. | ||
| Dude! | ||
| Like, you know, the wrestlers in Chechnya are amazing. | ||
| Saitiev Brothers is the greatest ever. | ||
| Well, fuck, man. | ||
| If you grew up in Chechnya and it's like either be a standout wrestler or, I don't know, pick up a gun and, you know, be a gangster. | ||
| They, you know, dude's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting to see a guy from that really hard part of the world coming over and just dominating in MMA. With Khabib, you know that a lot of it is technique. | ||
| A lot of it is being trained by his father. | ||
| A lot of it is iron sharpens iron. | ||
| He's at AKA. He's wrestling with big giant guys that are really skillful all the time. | ||
| It's an amazing roster over there. | ||
| But a lot of it is this fucking mental toughness that he must have picked up some of that from being in Dagestan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just has to. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| I mean, the Russian fighters that I've dealt with, you can know them and call a ton of fights with them and they'll still kind of look at you like, they want to fight you or something. | ||
| You know, I know, hey, how's it going? | ||
| And they kind of like break character. | ||
| Like, hey, how are you doing? | ||
| But there's always this wall you got to get through almost every time. | ||
| You know, one of the... | ||
| Great fighters, though. | ||
| That Korshkov guy, that guy's a fucking beast. | ||
| Oh, monster. | ||
| That guy's a beast. | ||
| That was one of the most impressive Lima fights, too. | ||
|
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Whew! | |
| He put that guy to sleep. | ||
| I was like, whoa. | ||
| Yeah, that left hook. | ||
| But it was a leg kick that set it up. | ||
| He was kicking the shit out of that leg. | ||
| I think Korshkov went like, I've got to trade now. | ||
| I've got to get this guy out of here. | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| And Korshkov, in my opinion, in a lot of ways, was one of the first guys to validate Bellator's 170-pound division from the performance he put against Henderson. | ||
| He shot Henderson down and beat him up. | ||
| Teed off on him and let him know, like, this is, I'm a real welterweight. | ||
| And then Lima made him look like, maybe he's not. | ||
| You know, like, maybe Lima's, that's a real welterweight. | ||
| He's a lot bigger. | ||
| He looked bigger. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Way bigger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then, you know, it's one of those things where that was a, that was, there was a big disparity between what people within the organization and people out of the organization thought. | ||
| Because a lot of people thought Henderson was going to come in and clean house and have two belts. | ||
| But there's one jinx. | ||
| That I have seen more than any other. | ||
| If you're listening, fighters, this is to you. | ||
| Don't talk about two belts before you have one belt. | ||
| Ooh, that is the jinx. | ||
| Dude, am I wrong? | ||
| Brandon Vera. | ||
| Brandon Vera. | ||
| I'm going to be a two belt champion. | ||
| He didn't win one belt. | ||
| Benson Henderson talked about winning two belts. | ||
| He didn't win one belt. | ||
| Talking about two belts before you've won one belt is a huge jinx. | ||
| Don't ever do that. | ||
| I've never seen it be good. | ||
| I've seen it a couple other times. | ||
| And it's never worked out. | ||
| When he left the UFC, he was one of the best guys in the division. | ||
| This 170-pound weight loss was just not right for him with a big guy like Korshkov. | ||
| And it would have been more prominent if it was against Lima. | ||
| Did you see their weigh-in? | ||
| Yeah, big difference. | ||
| It's one of those things where you think about, if a guy has trouble making 55, Well, he's a 70. No, he's not. | ||
| He's not. | ||
| There's a huge difference between a big 55er and a natural 70. They are not in the same class. | ||
| And Korshkov looked like a giant compared to him. | ||
| Well, the difference is Lima's just not going to fucking make 55. It's just not happening. | ||
| It's not in his DNA. If you can make the weight? | ||
| Yeah, make the weight. | ||
| Make the weight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Boy, it's one of the most unfortunate parts of the sport. | ||
| It's like if the cut isn't tough, then you shouldn't be there, almost. | ||
| If you can make it easily, it's tough, man. | ||
| As long as it doesn't drain you, because everybody's different too, right, in their response to dehydration. | ||
| But Andy Foster, what he's done in California by instituting a bunch of new weight classes, I really hope that people follow suit. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I really hope there's one every 10 pounds. | ||
| I just think giving people more options is going to... | ||
| There's some fighters that are just on the cusp where it's just dangerous. | ||
| And then maybe if they fought... | ||
| Like Dos Anjos goes up to 70. But that's a 55 to 70 15 pound jump. | ||
| That's a lot of weight, man. | ||
| 50% more than if it was just 10. And I think 10 is the move. | ||
| I feel like every 10, you're not watering it down too much. | ||
| You're making it reasonable. | ||
| Just bang everything down to 5s. | ||
| 55, 65, 75, 85, probably 95, 205, 225, heavyweight. | ||
| So we were having a discussion with this once again. | ||
| Boxing. | ||
| I was talking to Steve Farhood. | ||
| And I said, when they initially, because there weren't that many weight classes in boxing, they ended up adding a bunch of them. | ||
| I said, when they initially added those, were they seen as secondary weight classes? | ||
| And he went, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Always. | |
| It took years until 155 got any respect. | ||
| It was considered people who couldn't hang at welterweight. | ||
| Well, here's a big one. | ||
| How about cruiserweight? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cruiserweight never got respect to Holyfield. | ||
| Cruiserweight never gets respect to Holyfield. | ||
| When Holyfield fought Dwight Muhammad Kawi, that was the first time anybody gave a fuck about cruiserweight. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| And who else was cruiserweight? | ||
| Like, who the fuck else was there? | ||
| Dwight Muhammad Kawi. | ||
| Cruiser? | ||
| Was Saad Muhammad a light heavyweight? | ||
| Jean Pascal was. | ||
| Who else? | ||
| Michael Moore? | ||
| Did he stop at cruiserweight? | ||
| I think he went from light heavyweight to heavyweight. | ||
| I think he did too. | ||
| He did. | ||
| He didn't stop at cruiserweight. | ||
| It's just been one of those weird weight classes. | ||
| Like, why not? | ||
| Aaron Pryor. | ||
| Fucking monstrous fighter, but he fought at 40. And just, other than the Alexis Arguello fight, there weren't many stars at 40. You've got to go to 47 to get paid. | ||
| There's a reason... | ||
| Everybody talks about, oh, Floyd can't knock anybody out. | ||
| Floyd's like a fucking 35er. | ||
| He's really a lightweight. | ||
| If you've ever met him, he's not a big dude. | ||
| He had to go to 47 to get the big money fights. | ||
| That's why Roberto Duran went from 35 to 47, because he just couldn't make money at 35. Yeah, guys get tired of making the weight class, but they also realize you've got to chase the cash. | ||
| They go where the money is. | ||
| Like Terrence Crawford moving up. | ||
| Yeah, that's the problem. | ||
| It's very hard in MMA or any... | ||
| Combat sport, 47's kind of your limit. | ||
| Below 47, they've had some great fighters. | ||
| It's hard to build interest below 47 or 45 in MMA. Boxing's had the same problem. | ||
| So what happens? | ||
| People keep coming up. | ||
| So if you added a bunch of weight classes, guys who won it at 160 for a while would be seen as, oh, the guys who couldn't make it at 55 and 70. So it would take a while, maybe a star in that division, before it would become a legit division. | ||
| That would be the problem. | ||
| There'd be a lag of a few years. | ||
| When you'd go, oh, the 180-pound champ is just the guy who couldn't do it at 70. It's almost like there's too many fighters now and too many events. | ||
| It's almost like you couldn't have enough UFC events. | ||
| You would literally have to have UFC fights every week. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, maybe that would be the future model, where they have fights every week on television, and then they have pay-per-views, like, rarely. | ||
| Like, every four weeks or something like that. | ||
| It would take a lot to fill up four or five extra divisions. | ||
| That'd be tough. | ||
| It's hard to fill up the ones you have, depending on how you look at it. | ||
| Yeah, it would be, but I mean, man, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I never get tired of watching fights. | ||
| If they had fights on every week, I wouldn't be complaining. | ||
| It's just I wonder whether or not it's sustainable. | ||
| That's the hard part. | ||
| That's always been the hard part. | ||
| So I went to see something that... | ||
| Nowitzki's on tomorrow, right? | ||
| Jeff Nowitzki, formerly of USADA, now working for the UFC, took me to the UFC Performance Institute this week. | ||
| Holy fucking shit, man. | ||
| That place is insane. | ||
| I don't know how much money they spent on that, but it's just like... | ||
| This is like some science lab for training fighters. | ||
| I mean, everything you could imagine they have in this giant-ass building. | ||
| I've heard every fighter on the roster can go there. | ||
| Anytime they want. | ||
| They feed them. | ||
| They take care of them in the cafe. | ||
| They make them healthy food. | ||
| They have all these different things that monitor your body composition, your hydration levels, all these different modalities for healing and recovery. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| You fucking name it, they have it. | ||
| It was super impressive. | ||
| Super impressive. | ||
| They have all these video systems that are around the octagon constantly with their monitoring, sparring from like a bunch of different angles. | ||
| They can get 3D video of it. | ||
| They can rotate it. | ||
| Well, they can watch you spar from any angle. | ||
| Your coaches could point out little weird things that you might be doing that you're not aware of, but pointed out they always have the angle. | ||
| They get every single angle. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| They have a thing there that, like these punch registers, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the video game, except much more scientific. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here's a little trivia. | ||
| You know, I was told... | ||
| Who is the number one pound for pound puncher? | ||
| Francis Ngannou. | ||
| By weight class. | ||
| No, by weight class. | ||
| By weight class. | ||
| By weight class. | ||
| Like, pound for pound. | ||
| Justin Gaethje. | ||
| That's what I was told. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's impressive. | ||
| Forrest Griffin told me that. | ||
| I wonder how many people have punched it, though. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This is what I was told by Forrest Griffin. | ||
| Well, he certainly punches hard as fuck. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| Pound for pound, I believe it. | ||
| Pound for pound, yeah. | ||
| I mean, Ngannou just punches harder than anybody, period. | ||
| Ngannou blew it out of the water by some insane amount of thousands of pounds a square inch. | ||
| They said he's getting hit by a... | ||
| Fucking Drago shit. | ||
| Whatever he hits, he destroys, bro. | ||
| They said he's getting hit by an escort. | ||
| Like a Ford Escort. | ||
| That's what it's like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought of a totally different escort for a second. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| They got a video of it, of him hitting this thing. | ||
| That's Duncan French. | ||
|
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Boom! | |
| So they have him do this thing, and they had this limit before, or this record before, that actually I think was set by Tyrone Spong. | ||
| No surprise there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's an interesting fucking character, Francis Ngannou. | ||
| You want to talk about a guy that is literally right out of an author's pen. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| You're going to have a guy who, you know, like Robert E. Howard when he used to write the Conan books. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| Like, he used to work in a sand mine. | ||
| He used to dig sand when he was a young man. | ||
| Like, you know how much fucking hard work it is? | ||
| Digging in the sand every day and carrying it away and just getting stronger and stronger. | ||
| It's literally like when Conan was strapped to the wheel. | ||
| Conan pushed in the fucking mill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then he was homeless five years ago. | ||
| Moves to Paris. | ||
| Wants to try boxing. | ||
| Someone sees him in a gym and goes, hey, you should be in MMA. And he's like, okay. | ||
| So he goes into MMA. Goes to the UFC, in two years he's fighting for the title, and he's a big favorite over the champion, who is, if the champion wins, breaks the longest-running title fight streak, winning title fights in the heavyweight division, which is only two. | ||
| It's a great story. | ||
| It's a fantastic story. | ||
| Five years ago, homeless. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, you know, Henry Armstrong was working on a railroad. | ||
| Saw a newspaper article about a guy winning a fight and said, fuck this railroad shit. | ||
| And went and started boxing. | ||
| Came one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| Yeah, or when Jack Johnson first became the heavyweight champion. | ||
| I mean, everybody kind of knew. | ||
| You know, you saw Jack Johnson like, oh my god, these guys are fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all downhill from here. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, him versus Stipe is very, very interesting. | ||
| I want to see if Stipe can figure out a way to avoid the big shots, close the distance, get a hold of him, and if he can take him to the ground. | ||
| Here's my advice for anybody calling that fight. | ||
| You included. | ||
| I would look at everything but power. | ||
| In terms of who's got the better footwork, who's moving their head a little bit more, who's got a little more defense, because, man, that's going to be, I think, tell the story, is one who avoids getting hit. | ||
| Because they can both knock you the fuck out, man. | ||
| They both certainly can knock you the fuck out, but... | ||
| Francis does it in a weirder way. | ||
| Yeah, he does. | ||
| He does it in a superhuman way where you're like... | ||
| We see the angle of his punches. | ||
| It's like he's trying to rip your soul out of your body, man. | ||
| The Alistair left hook, uppercut, combination punch, that shovel hook was just one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen anybody get hit with in all my years of calling sports. | ||
| Looked like a Pez dispenser. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Head all the way back. | ||
| The photo is so crazy. | ||
| It's almost like a really bad action movie where the guy who's rising through the ranks is just blasting everybody into orbit. | ||
|
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You! | |
| You go to sleep! | ||
| Even talks like those people. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every now and then you get a story like that. | ||
| It seems like it's like Adam. | ||
| Like Justin Wren. | ||
| His story is just ridiculous, man. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| No, he's amazing. | ||
| You know? | ||
| The other thing about Ngannou is the way he trash talks is hilarious. | ||
| Like, Stipe said he's not intimidated by any man, and Francis goes, Don't lie, Stipe. | ||
|
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Don't lie. | |
| Like, it's... | ||
| He's so calm with it, and it's so fucking terrifying. | ||
| He was doing a press conference with Alistair. | ||
| It was like Thursday before Saturday's fight. | ||
| They're facing off wearing their suits, and Francis goes, Saturday night you go to sleep. | ||
| Saturday night you sleep. | ||
| And he's like, oh no! | ||
| Oh no! | ||
|
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Oh no! | |
| That trash talking bothers me. | ||
|
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He's so confident about it, too, and he was right. | |
| Rory's like that. | ||
| I will take the belt, and I will take your health. | ||
| And I'm holding the mic like, who? | ||
| Okay, I want to hurt him so bad that he goes to the hospital and never wants to fight me again. | ||
|
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And you go, okay? | |
| He's not talking shit, man. | ||
| He's not talking shit, man. | ||
| Sometimes people talk shit, and they're just trying to put up a bluff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even great fighters have said some shit. | ||
| Might have believed at the time, like when BJ was saying to George St. Pierre, George, we're going to fight to the death. | ||
| And I'm serious, George. | ||
| I'm going to try to kill you. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Yeah, I remember it well. | ||
| Yeah, but it didn't work out that way. | ||
| It did not work out that way at all. | ||
| No, it did not work out that way. | ||
| He might have believed it when he was saying it. | ||
| But man, when you're in that dark, dark moment. | ||
| Big-ass French-Canadian dropping knuckles in your face. | ||
| Different world, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was another one where you're like, there's a big difference between a big 55er and a real 70, dude. | ||
| Because he put it on him that night. | ||
| Well, he was so fucking strong, and George was in his prime back then. | ||
| And he also was a really good guy, and he was very motivated by BJ's talking shit to him. | ||
| It really pissed him off. | ||
| Because he's a nice guy, you know? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| The best way to fight a guy like George is to be respectful. | ||
| If he's going to kick your ass, he's going to kick your ass anyway. | ||
| Yeah, it's not like you're going to give him extra ass-whooping motivation. | ||
| I think he had a little extra ass-whooping motivation for Bisping, though. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Bisping talked so much shit to him that when he got his back, he's like, You're going to sleep, my friend! | ||
| Put it on him, man. | ||
| Put it on him. | ||
| Put it on him standing up, too, man. | ||
| Just starting to wear down, too. | ||
| Just when I thought, man, maybe the tights start... | ||
| Because, you know, Bisping, his whole thing is he's not a particularly hard puncher. | ||
| His wrestling isn't great. | ||
| It's he wears you the fuck down. | ||
| Not a big 185-er. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's just he wears you the fuck down. | ||
| He was also particularly effective off of his back with elbows. | ||
| He was. | ||
| I was impressed with that. | ||
| Cut George up with those elbows off his back. | ||
| That made it a real problem because George was having a hard time seeing him. | ||
| Man, that blood was everywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| What a good fight. | ||
| I kind of like the story of George just retires. | ||
| It doesn't bother me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| He bucked it. | ||
| He bucked it. | ||
| Everybody doubted him. | ||
| Came back, won. | ||
| Won by a finish. | ||
| Like, yeah. | ||
| Take it easy. | ||
| Now I'm out. | ||
| See ya. | ||
| Now I'm seriously out. | ||
| No, really. | ||
| This time I mean it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or he comes back in a year and 155. Yeah, then it's what? | ||
| Whitaker Rockhold? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I like that a lot. | ||
| I like that fight a lot. | ||
| That's a dangerous ass fight for both guys. | ||
| You ever train with Jacare? | ||
| No, never. | ||
| Dude, he was one of the first guys when I was a blue belt. | ||
| He came by and he was getting ready for This is back when he beat Holger at Worlds, broke his arm and still won. | ||
| Yeah, that was insane. | ||
| Yeah, that was insane. | ||
| He would not tap. | ||
| He wouldn't tap. | ||
| Wrote it out. | ||
| They changed the rules after that, you know that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, because Jacare literally stuck his... | ||
| For people who are listening and don't know about it, Holger Gracie broke Jacare's arm in the absolute division in the Worlds... | ||
| 2005? | ||
| 2006? | ||
| 2004? | ||
| Around there. | ||
| Mid 2000. Snapped it. | ||
| Snapped it. | ||
| Good. | ||
| But Jacare gets out. | ||
| So he breaks it, but he steps over the head and gets out. | ||
| Jacare stands up and Holger looks at the referee and goes, I broke his arm. | ||
| And Jacare takes his broken arm, stuffs it in his belt. | ||
| And wins the match. | ||
| Because he was already ahead. | ||
| He just kind of like, you know, stalled out for like two minutes and won the fucking match against the greatest of all time with a broken arm. | ||
| So I trained with him at that point. | ||
| He was like in beast mode. | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| It's like being in a washing machine. | ||
| The only way I can describe it. | ||
| Because once he grabs you, it's like he just flings you in your head and you see your feet fly into the ceiling. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, there it is, man. | ||
| Yeah, I remember this, man. | ||
| I remember it. | ||
| He just snapped that fucking arm. | ||
| Pulls it out and it is... | ||
| Look at his left arm. | ||
| It is just... | ||
| Just jacked. | ||
| Done, man. | ||
| And he went out of bounds. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then he gets up. | ||
| And Hojer at some point, I think right there, tells the referee, his arm's broken. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And Jacare stuffs his broken arm in his belt and keeps fighting. | ||
| Which is beastly. | ||
| He did a seminar at our place and at the end he fought everybody in the room. | ||
| There were like 60 people there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And he fought everybody. | ||
| Tapped everybody out. | ||
| Yeah, in his prime, in particular, in jiu-jitsu, he was unbelievably good. | ||
| And in MMA, probably one of the best jiu-jitsu guys ever. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| Beat Hojer, beat Verdum. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| He beat everybody. | ||
| He beat Ted today. | ||
| He's one of my favorites. | ||
| I saw him live in Abu Dhabi, too, in like 2003. Yep. | ||
| He lost to Salo that year. | ||
| But he made it to the finals. | ||
| He beat Haiyan Gracie, and then he beat Ricardo Almeida, and then he lost to Salo. | ||
| I remember that Hai and Gracie fight. | ||
| That was amazing. | ||
| Man, he was all over Hai. | ||
| The Salo fight was amazing, too. | ||
| Yeah, he was all over Hai. | ||
| Salo's another guy that people forget about. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Love him. | ||
| Him and his brother, Janji, that fucking smash style of jiu-jitsu. | ||
| That's where I'm from. | ||
| That's kind of like my, you know, I'm a Carlson guy, and, you know, my instructor's a guy named Hediogo, and he's always telling me, he goes, Jimmy, he always uses the old people metaphors. | ||
| He's like, Jimmy, he's like, he goes, then Mario passed your guard, Jimmy, you'll finish. | ||
| It's over for you. | ||
| Like, don't, like, so he's always like, Jimmy, pfft. | ||
| Alan Goas, Mount you, Jimmy? | ||
| You're fucking dumb, bro. | ||
| He's got those old school names in his head. | ||
| Bro, you're fucking dumb, man. | ||
| Carlo Borio, take your back. | ||
| Pfft, poha, Jimmy, you'll finish. | ||
| That's a guy that people sleep on is Laborio. | ||
| Laborio, from what I have heard, obviously this is even before my time, competitively he was the guy in the 90s. | ||
| People who were around in that era, who was the guy? | ||
| They're like... | ||
| Ricardo Laborio was the guy. | ||
| He took Worlds the first year it happened. | ||
| It's interesting that these guys are still around, still coaching MMA fighters, still in the mix of the sport. | ||
| They have to be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you look at Dede Penares, Ricardo Laborio... | ||
| We're both from the same team. | ||
| Both Carlson guys. | ||
| A lot of Carlson guys. | ||
| Sperry, Murillo Bustamante, Carlos Pajeto. | ||
| You think about it, that was the first greasy team that had a real MMA team. | ||
| So those guys spread out and created so many teams. | ||
| Vitor. | ||
| A huge V tour. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, what happens now with Jimmy Smith? | ||
| Jimmy Smith sits back until Jimmy Smith can make some sort of announcement? | ||
| Yes, that is what Jimmy Smith does. | ||
| Jimmy Smith's got some pieces in motion, though. | ||
| I have pieces in motion. | ||
|
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Allegedly. | |
| Maybe not. | ||
| Maybe we're just bullshitting you folks. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I'm working a Jamba Juice next week. | ||
| But you fucked up, Bellator! | ||
| I'm telling you, you fucked up. | ||
| Straight from Joe Rogan's mouth. | ||
| You made a mistake. | ||
| We'll do this more often, my brother. | ||
| Dude, anytime, man. | ||
| You're an L.A. guy. | ||
| I'm an L.A. guy. | ||
| It took me 20 minutes to drive up. | ||
| There's a ton of fights to talk about. | ||
| We'll definitely do this more often. | ||
| I wish we could say more things, folks, but you're going to figure it out. | ||
| Yeah, you will. | ||
| JimmySmithMMA on Twitter and on Instagram. | ||
| And... | ||
| I hope we work together, my friend. | ||
| Always a pleasure, my brother. | ||
| Thank you very much, very much. | ||
| And we'll be back tomorrow with the Golden Snitch, Jeff Nowitzki, and more! |
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