MMA - mixed martial arts training

I have been away for a while, and now I am back. My current mma assignment finds me back on the road with Paul Smith and the IFC. Paul called me and asked me if I wanted to hit the road again and help out on the Battleground Boise show in Boise, Idaho. Having never been to Idaho, (there is a large segment of Americans that never hit all of the different states), I jumped at the chance. Also, as I have found out by now, any trip with Paul Smith will be entertaining if not a little educational. The following is my travelogue.

Monday Night: I arrived at Paul’s house around 9 in the evening. The truck was already loaded and ready to go. The new trailer was hooked up and loaded with the new cage that we unveiled in Denver. Before we set out on the road, we had to hit Taco Bell, you cannot start out on a road trip with out some junk in your belly. The diet usually goes out of the window for at least one meal a day while you are on the road.

We started off into the night , rolling over the Sierras heading towards Nevada. We mainly talked about the upcoming show and all of the craziness that would follow. Eventually some of us tried to catch some sleep as this would be about a 13 hour drive.

Tuesday Morning:

We are still are on the road, we pulled over in McDermott , Nevada so that Paul could grab a little sleep. Having adjusted to the graveyard shif in my other jobs, I was wide awake while everyone else was snoozing. Having just received my latest copy of BadBreed.tv , I pulled out the trusty notebook, and started to check out the latest events and happenings of mma in this highly entertaining dvd. Having shot a little footage for badbreed.tv before may make me a little biased, but all of that aside, it is a bad ass dvd.

John Pack, owner and proprietor of badbreed.tv, has gotten himself an rv which he has taken all over the country in the last couple of months chronicling every show that he could.

This months latest edition of badbreed.tv did not disappoint in the slightest. This issue had it all, highlight footage of no less than 5 different shows as well as tons of footage of new and up and coming fighters. By the time I was done with the dvd, everyone was up and headed back out on the road.

About an hour away from the Idaho border, there almost was no IFC show, there was almost no more IFC. A huge tractor trailer came barreling down out of the mountains in our lane. We were quite a ways away from the huge ass truck but there were two pick up trucks in front of us that had to panic swerve out of the way, one went left and one went right and we just slammed on our brakes. We reduced our speed and attempted to pull of to the side when the huge 18 wheeler finally decided to get back into his own lane and let us live. It was quite possibly the closest near-accident I have ever seen. The trucks in front of us pulled over and as we drove by them, you could see the sheer terror and then relief on their faces.

We finally arrived in Boise Idaho, having never been there, I was surprised to see how clean Boise was as a city. Even though it is a city , it is a small city. The buildings are tall, but not sky scrapers. The one drawback though, is that there are several one way streets which can make navigating through the city a little difficult.

While we were attempting to turn on to a street, Paul accidentally took the turn a little tight and scrapped a huge concrete flower pot. Hoping to avoid any further damage to the trailer which was lightly touching the flower pot, we stopped and had to slowly back up as several people gathered to watch our latest folly.

I entertained the crowd by suggesting they move the flower pot for us , and that they not worry because we were from California .

Once we hit our hotel , we were greeted by Jens Pulver who just happened to be in the neighborhood. Jens went to college for a while here in Idaho, and this was to be one of the first times he ever fought in his hometown. Jens is always a pleasure to deal with and he was extremely helpful in pointing out the key spots to promote in Boise. Not only has he been training for this , he has also been key to the promotion of this show.

The Bank of America center is connected to our hotel, and sits about 6500 people. This is a huge deal to have the hotel and event center connected. At some of the places we do shows, we have to drive several miles in between the hotel and the event center. This is definitely the way to do a show.

Wednesday:

Caffeine is very, very important to the success of a show. No caffeine, no show. After hitting the corporate juggernaut that is Starbucks, I hit the streets to do some last minute promoting. While I was in my room getting some more posters, I got a call from Randy Spence, a friend of mine and one of the IFC staples. Spence called to let me know that Shaun "Venom" Beckett, Randy’s team mate would probably have to pull out of his fight due to ankle and shin issues. Seeing as how I help manage and train with Randy and Shaun, this is unfortunate news. I know that Shaun has been looking forward to this fight.

Injuries happen, and unfortunately, they are never convenient. Randy told me that Shaun was going to try and fight, but he wasn’t sure about how it was going to go down. I then had to tell Paul that we might lose a fight. Now telling a promoter that he has just lost a fight three days out is never a fun thing. Luckily, Paul has been doing this long enough that he can take the bad with the good.

When I walked into the room, I gave him the look and he just asked "What is it now?". After I told him the current situation , he just kind of looked at me and said, "what is it with these guys?". He was kidding of course, you don’t go into a show thinking that there will be no problems, it just doesn’t work that way. Paul has had shows cancelled on him, title fights aborted and financiers pull out just hours before a show. Name a problem, and he has seen it.

Now the thing you need to keep in mind is that, there is a hierarchy in the fight game. I being Pauls "assistant" on this show, I can beg and plead with a fighter, even my own fighter, but not get anywhere. However, there is always that slight chance that the main Promoter can make that call and convince and injured fighter to keep going.

Having been around Paul I have seen this several times. Sometimes a fighter just needs a little assurance or a little pushing. I have seen guys dragging in, moping around and basically giving it all up, and after a little coaxing from Paul, they go out and put on an awesome showing. Usually. Sometimes, it backfires and the fighter just goes running from the room .

What I have learned in this business, is that you cannot threaten a person with not using them in a future fight, you have to illustrate to them why taking a certain fight is a good idea. You have to show them the positive side, not the negative. In mma , fighters and fans alike, are realizing that losing a fight in mma is not like boxing, you are not out of the game or damaged goods. I know it sounds like a cliché, but anything can and does happen in a fight. There are fluke moves and bad calls, if you lose one fight, its not the end of the world, and that’s what you have to explain to these guys. More often than not, they realize that, and they are cool with that.

Thursday: Today started off pretty well, I had a lot of sleep and I felt good. It helped staying in a nice hotel. My guys, Randy Spence and Shaun "Venom" Beckett, called around nine to say that they were in town. I met them down in the lobby and they were blown away by the accommodations. They hadn’t been to their hotel yet, so they probably assumed that it was a dump, but it actually turned out to be pretty nice.

Randy and Shaun wanted to eat since they had been driving all night. Since they are part of Cesar Gracie they usually roll about 10 deep at every show , but since this show was 13 hours away from they were traveling light and they only had our two other guys with them. Brian Robinson who is actually the brother of the first guy randy fought, and David Morris a full time partier who trains just long enough to win an occasional amateur tournament.

It helps to have your crew with you, but it is not the end of the world to not have every single person on the team with you. We ate at a trendy little breakfast place in downtown Boise. When we entered the place, every head in there turned in our direction. We definitely did not blend in with the locals. All of us have tattoos and what is more, we were all wearing shorts with sandals (we are from California), but had beanies on as well.

As usual, there is always one loud mouth that has to be hardcore. We were talking about some past shows, and some guy was telling his girlfriend that he "didn’t really like the Gracies". Usually guys like that get choked, but when you are visiting another town, you have to represent your state and be careful not to make the promoters who brought you in look bad. Also, you cannot go around choking everyone that has a snide comment. If we did, we would all be in jail and from what I hear, it sucks. All in all though it was a good breakfast .

Later that day , Myself and a co-worker had to make the passes for the show, it is time consuming, expensive, and it sucks.

7: 00 pm. A fairly good size pizza/brew place is set to help host our ring girl competition. When you are throwing a show it is always important to have hot birds carrying the signs to denote what round it is.. We enter the establishment, there are two young looking girls all in black standing off to the right. The guy to girl ratio is like 20 to 1 it seems. We keep stalling for time so that some more lasses will show up. We have the two girls get on stage to strut their stuff, and it quickly evolves into a fully clothed lesbian sex simulation that was cool but had nothing to do with the cards. After about a minute of them grinding their happy spots into each others faces we had to dismiss them for the time being.

The gathered group which included my fighters and a couple of Jens Pulver’s guys kept the mood light with hilarious stories and comments on past shows. About an hour later after the first ring girl contestant fiasco, four extremely hot ladies come in, get undressed down to their black bathing suits and start strutting around on stage, it was sheer chaos inside the restaurant, guys were hooting and hollering and the ladies in the crowd were hating. Needless to say, they did well.

Friday: I wake up, starving, I usually bring a lot of snacks, but not on this trip. We can’t get to breakfast because we are waiting for the financiers and the other vips to get done giving us the rundown on what is going on. Boring. We go to Sushi for the second time this week. Boise is nuts, they are hours from the ocean, but they have great seafood there. Another thing that struck me as odd is that every bar has a plasma screen tv in it. Wacky.

We get back and fool around the production office for a while. Later, our video guy needs some specialized digital video tape that they only sell in one part of Boise. We drive twenty minutes to a tiny, unmarked office that has like 20 million different types of film and audio tape and that’s it. I went to college for video production and I can’t believe all of the different types of bloody tape.

The rest of the day I goof off trying to look busy until we go to the weigh ins. The weigh ins are always fun. I basically run around shooting video. This time like most, it was held inside a popular sports bar. The bar was packed with fighters and their camps. You can tell the guys who aren’t fighting because they are fighting over the three trays of greasy appetizers.

When you walk into one of these deals, everyone is checking each other and the tension is off of any measurable scale. My fighter Randy was not able to check his guy out weighing in because the opponent had to work and made a special arrangement to weigh in. Alternate weigh ins happen but are extremely rare and totally regulated. There are no less than 3 officials and 3 other non -biased witnesses to check and substantiate the weight.

Mike Kyle

Weigh ins are cool because you usually run into somebody that you know. In this case I ran into an up and coming heavy weight named Mike Kyle who coincidentally went to the same Junior college that I did in the late 90’s. He and I had many of the same instructors and I recognized him from those days. He is a huge , in shape black man that, while is intimidating, is one of the funniest guys you will ever meet. While he lived in Idaho for a while, he still has love for the guys like us from Chico.

Tom Sauer

I also ran into Tom Sauer who is not only one of the nicest guys in mma, one of the toughest as well. Not only is he tough in the cage, he goes through a lot to get there. Four Children, just as many jobs as well as training is enough to put anyone into an early grave but not this guy. It was loud in the bar but I caught him saying something about needing shorts. I just happened to have a spare pair of Sprawls (since Steve at Sprawl always hooks me and the fighters up), I told him I would give him a pair and he was stoked. It’s great to help out someone like

Tom who works so hard to get where he is at. As long as people try as hard as Tom does, companies like Sprawl will help them . it’s a cool thing to see.

As usual, John Pack and his lovely wife were their to document all of the action for their wildly popular badbreed.tv dvd magazine. They were gathering footage for one of their upcoming dvds. Its nice to have someone documenting these events because down the road when this sport is insanely huge, people will want to see the beginning.

With the weigh ins over , it was time to build the bottom of the cage and on to the next day.

Oh, I almost forgot, in the morning on Friday, I ran into a famous character actor named Richard Herd who has appeared in numerous films and television. He expressed interest in the show and I arranged to get him to the show vip style. That was cool. I loved it when he played George’s boss on Seinfeld…….

Saturday: The big day. Usually a show day will last anywhere from 12 hours to 20. It is an experience like no other. On this day , it started out with myself and IFC executive assistant Tiffany handing out flyers at the local Boise State football game. American Football fans are not usually the biggest fight fans and with this in mind, our attempts to hand out flyers met with mixed results.

After two hours of handing out flyers , we headed back to help finish building the cage. The new cage is made mainly of metal braces and runners with a plywood floor and dense matting. Most of the fighters seem to like the new cage and its surface. The guys I talked to seemed to think that it was one of the better cages out there.

After completion of the cage, I helped Mike Popp film some of the fighter interviews and still shots for the eventual dvd. This process took a couple of hours due to the fact that we had to go out and find the fighters. Where we were filming was in a veritable maze and very difficult to find. The filming itself actually went pretty well.

Around six o’clock, we held the rules meeting in the large locker room. All of the fighters and their crews were with them. Paul Smith gave his standard speech about not letting the fights go to a judge’s decision. Most of the fighters nodded their agreement. Judges decisions are not always fun.

The state athletic commission for Boise was on hand to ensure that everything were in order. Being Idaho’s first fully sanctioned mma fight, the commission was extremely helpful and very willing to work with Paul Smith on all aspects of the sport.

7:00 pm, the crowd is filing in and taking their seats. As I look into the crowd there is a great cross section of people. Tough guys, soccer moms, bikers, accounts and firefighters fill the seats. As I toured the stands before the show starts, I see two new trends, groups of young ladies just by themselves on their own. Another cool trend, little boys who know the fighters or are super interested in the sport , there with their dads. These young guys are the future fighters and future supporters of this sport. Definitely a cool sight to see.

This show I am working the cage door, since the cage is on top of a covered ice hockey rink, it is a little cold in there, Luckily I have my trusty Sprawl beanie on. The IFC announcer, Jeff Weller , introduces the show and begins to hype the excited crowd . Weller , always the showman is wearing combat fatigues and has his face painted. Weller is an mma icon, having been involved with mma in one form or another since the early days of the UFC. The show begins and it is a blur, I cannot remember every fight or every fighters name, there are just too many. In addition, the results will be up by the time you read this. I do know that the Jennifer Howe/ Judy Neff fight was both thrilling and surprising. My fighter Randy broke his opponents arm after two huge slams. I have never seen anyone get their arm broken like that and be so calm. That guy is definitely a tough individual.

The ring girls were some of the hottest I have seen, we used most of the ones from the contest and they did not disappoint. These girls were not shy and the fans appreciated that.

The show itself went off with out a hitch. Great music, great fans , and a great company to work with, the Battleground in Boise show will be one that I will remember for a long time. If you are interested in seeing clips go to badbreed.tv to check out some of the action.

The Fusion crew