Train, Travel, Teach, Fight

Done and Done.

2011-07-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

King of the Cage: Underground 69 is over and it went well. I won the main event fight via armbar at 1:48 of the first round, even though it seemed a lot longer than that. More than anything I am relieved to have that fight over with. While my preparation going into the fight was good, the week before the fight was not. Almost exactly a week before fight time I injured my back. I'm not sure how, but I could barely put pants and socks on. Just getting around and doing everyday activities was tough, never mind fighting. A few chiropractor and massage appointments helped a little, but I was still in a lot of pain, and not very mobile. To make things worse, at the same time I got sick and had to go on antibiotics. Those things really kicked my ass and made me feel sluggish. Cutting weight while on antibiotics was brutal. Needless to say, the week leading up to the fight was less than ideal. Luckily all of the hard work had been done by then anyways.

Sizing up the opponent.

As for the fight, everything went pretty much according to game plan. My brother Mitch and I had done the scouting report and put together our plan. It was as if Mitch choreographed the entire fight. I was able to stay patient and make it through my opponents striking and exploit a few positions we knew I could get to. I would have liked to pull the trigger a lot more in the striking aspect of the fight as I feel that my striking is much better than I showed in the fight. The one thing I didn't want to do though, was get in a firefight with a guy who's strongest skill is boxing and who's most dangerous weapon is fast flurries of punches. With my limited mobility in my back I was much more keen to get my hands on him, control some heavy top positions and take what he would give me, which turned out to be an arm-bar.

Looking to finish.

For those of you that were at the fight and booed my opponents apparent lack of respect in the cage after the fight it's worth noting that I went and talked with him afterwards and he was pretty cool about everything. For people who've never fought it's tough to describe what happens to you at the end of the fight. You have so many chemicals being dumped into your system that it's tough to keep your composure, especially after losing a tough fight that you spent countless hours preparing for. trust me, I've been there.

Now I'm looking forward to healing, relaxing a bit and getting ready for my next fight which looks to be not very far away.

Thanks to Trevor Dowhaniuk for the pictures I've used here, he captured some great ones.

No, I Am Not "Getting Jacked" For This Fight.

2011-07-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

"Are you jacked?" "Are you excited?" "Are you getting pumped?"

Every time I fight I hear these questions at least a bazillion times in the week leading up to the fight. When I shrug my shoulders and answer with "not really" or "not yet" people seem taken aback. The truth is I've never been one to get all jazzed up before I fight and there's a few reasons.

It's counter-productive. Some people think that fighting angry, or "psyched up" is the way to go. That may be true if you think that overwhelming your opponent is the only way you can win. If you have faith in your training, your skills and your game-plan though, getting all "psyched up" is a detriment to clear thinking.
When your emotional level gets too high you run the risk of an emotional crash when something doesn't go your way; and in a tough fight there are bound to be moments where not everything is going your way. In such moments it pays to have a clear mind and be able focus on correcting the situation.
Getting psyched up burns a lot of mental energy. It can zap the system as badly as using up too much physical energy before the fight. I often chuckle to myself when I see new fighters with their hands taped and mouthguards in, walking around with angry faces several hours before they fight. Do they know how much work it takes to look that pissed off for that long?
This is not new. This will be my 8th professional fight. Before that, I had several amateur fights. I've fought overseas. I've wrestled for a National Championship. This fight is important. It does not, however, overshadow everything I've done previously.
This will not be me at weigh-ins.

If you are coming to watch me fight on Saturday you'll probably see my opponent come into the cage yelling, jumping around, gesturing to the crowd and mean mugging. He might try some of the same stuff at weigh-ins. That's fine. Maybe, for his own confidence, he feels like he needs to do that, but you won't see any of that from me. A few hours before the fight you're likely to find me hanging out, playing cards, having a nap or sneaking out to talk to some friends in the crowd. When it comes time to focus on the task at hand I'll be all business, but there's no sense wasting all of my energy before hand.

I'm not saying that I don't get nervous or scared; I do. I've said before that anyone who says they don't is either lying or stupid. You should be nervous or scared. Those feelings you get is your body preparing itself for battle, pulling out those fight or flight (hopefully fight) responses that have been ingrained in our DNA for millenia. If you aren't getting those feelings, your body and mind are not properly prepared to do what you are going to do. I recently heard a quote from Urijah Faber that sums it up nicely. It went something along the lines of "Yeah, I get butterflies; I just make them fly in formation".
Word.

Why Do we Fight (or... Why Fighting is Important)

2011-07-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

People often ask me why I fight. There's a hundred reasons, and I could talk about each of them for hours. I could talk about the evolutionary or anthropological reasons that people fight; the reasons that the fight or flight response is hardwired into our brains to facilitate human survival. I could talk about growing up in a family where stories of warriors, be they athletes, schoolyard scrappers or decorated WWI and WWII veterans figured prominently into family history. I could talk about the need to test my limits and challenge myself both physically and mentally. I could talk about the purity of combat sports; no balls, nets, hoops or equipment. Just you, your opponent and all of the skill and preparation you could both muster. I've heard a lot of different fighters explain why they fight a lot of different ways. I ran across this video recently and enjoyed a slight twist on the overcooked question of "Why do you fight?" Instead of dealing with the question the speaker in the video discusses why fighting is important.

King of the Cage: Underground 69

Fight night is about a week away and I've done most of the hard work. it's time to let me body heal, finalize some gameplan ideas, sharpen a few technical skills and make sure that my weight is good. I'm looking forward to getting back in the cage, even though it's always a bit of a crazy feeling. People who tel you they don;t get nervous are either lying or stupid. That nervous feeling is your body preparing itself to do something it doesn't normally do. If that's not happening, something's wrong. I've fought 10 or 11 times now and I still get those feelings. The only real difference is now I expect them and they don't really bother me.

Steel City MMA

Steel City MMA is opening it's doors on Sept. 1st 2011. You can now register online for Jiu Jitsu, Kickboxing, Wrestling, MMA or any combination of the above. Check out the on-line registration page. Click on the "Steel City MMA tab, change the date to September and select the class or classes you'd like to enroll in. Also, join our facebook page and check out our website for prices, schedule and other info.

Ontario Couch Surfing Tour 2011 Wrap Up.

2011-07-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

Best dressed guy in the room!

Is it lame to have a signature shirt when you aren't even remotely famous? Probably. Can you turn someone down if they offer to make you a signature t shirt? Nope. That's why you won't catch me wearing my shirt except on fight day. I did however spot my buddy Adrian Vilaca wearing my shirt in his facebook profile picture while training in Ottawa.

Adrian is a good dude to have around for mma training camps. Always ready to help, able to push people in all aspects of the game and knowledgeable about sport specific training methods. Check out his training and coaching blog here. Turnaround is fair play so here's me wearing my "Vengeance" Vilaca shirt training with Jesse Ronson and Chris Clements at Adrenaline Training Center. Both guys have fights coming up so I trained with them for a a few days while I was in London. An ex- wrestling teammate by the name of Andrew Elliot is helping both guys get ready for their fights so we spent a few days together training in the cage and on the mats, working on a few specific situations and sharing knowledge.

Chris Clements is the Ringside welterweight champ and actually has the record for the fastest KO in MMA history.

The Life of a Drifter.
On my trip I was lucky enough to train with some great fighters and people at Xtreme Couture, Bruckman's Martial Arts, MECCA Jiu Jitsu/MMA and Adrenaline Training Center. Another great thing about couch surfung my way through Southern Ontario was catching up with family, friends and teammates, some of whom I hadn't seen in a long time. Big thanks to Andy, Andrew, Andy (yes, two Andy's) Katie, Puds, Dee and aunt Mary for the hospitality, couches, pools, barbeques and meals. It was great to see everyone and catch up.

On the Road, Training and Visiting

2011-07-05T06:50:00.000-07:00

I had a great day of training yesterday. In the morning I went to Extreme Couture and did some no gi jiu jitsu with Micha Circunov and Darson Hemmings and did some bag work. In the evening I went to Bruckman's Martial Arts in Oshawa where I did some wrestling, some light sparring and some pad work with Antonio Carvalho. Carvalho is coming off a big win and recently signed with the UFC. He made a name for himself fighting in Japan and beating some of the top featherweights in the world like Rumina Sato and Hatsu Hioki. When I fought in Japan he helped me a out a lot by hooking me up with some great people that helped me find my way through Tokyo and even ended up cornering me. Definitely one of the most solid and genuine guys I've met in the sport. Check out one of his recent fights back in Canada.

Today I'm off to Train at MECCA in downtown Toronto and tomorrow I'm headed to London to train at Adrenaline Training Center for a few days.

Thanks to Andrew and Andy for letting me crash at their house while in Toronto.

The Pofessor vs. Scrapyard

2011-07-03T14:44:00.000-07:00

What are the chances that one tiny highschool, population 500ish has two teachers that are professional figters? The school I teach at does. Thers' myself, obviously, and another fella named Ray. Ray and I wrestled at the same University (Lakehead Thunderwolves) and train together in MMA. Naturally, kids want to know who would win a fight or wrestling match. Instead of breaking their hearts with the truth that Ray would get twisted up like a pair of hand wraps in the washing machine (kids tend to like him for some reason) I usually just say that it would not be a fight anyone would enjoy. The poor guy is such a head case I don't think he could handle the truth. The only thing in worse shape than his body is his self esteem. That doesn't stop kids from asking though, and we often exchange in smack talk through mutual students. Getting a kid to deliver a well timed chirp to someone on the other side of the school can be very rewarding. We've developed quite a second hand rivalry and kids get more worked up about it than we do. That's why when news leaked out that Ray and I would scrap it out in a wrestling match in front of the school as the entertainment portion of our Intramural awards assembly there was a bit of a buzz aorund the school. Needless to say, people were not expecting us to come out in full sumo suits. I suppose some would say that Ray won the match, but it's only because he's fat.

**disclaimer** I'm now typing and posting from my tablet so I can't embed videos or make secondary titles. I will also blame any spelling or grammar mistakes on this. Any previous spelling mistakes are to be blamed on our education system, especially those dirt-bag English teachers.

Two Weeks Out From Fight Night
Friday was exactly two weeks until weigh in for my fight and I haven't cut weight since November so I decided to do a test weight cut to see how my body handles it. I didn't cut all the way but i felt okay. The full weight cut won't be fun, but it's definitely doable. Instead of going to a gym to do the weight cut I went out to Ray's house because he built a gym and a sauna in his barn (there's a reason his nickname is scrapyard). Check it out.

Traveling and Training
I'm currently on the road in southern Ontario coaching at the Canada Cup of Wrestling and then training at a few different places for my fight coming up. I'll probably post everyday while I'm on the road so hopefully I find my way to a real computer to load some of the vids.

Finally, News.

2011-06-06T15:49:00.000-07:00

Well I have a few pieces of news that I've been holding on to for a while and can now let out. First, the small stuff. I'll be fighting on King of the Cage on July 16th at Kewedin Casino in Sault Ste. Marie Michigan. My opponent is a tough dude with a pro record of 3-1 with 3 Knock outs and a solid wrestling background. He'll be the toughest guy I've faced in King of the Cage yet, and I'm excited for the challenge. This event will also air on television in Canada and the U.S.A., which is pretty cool. I'll post more details about that when I get them.

I had another fight lined up for a big event in Ontario and then it got cancelled. Then it was on again. And then off. There was lots of playing games from the opponent I was supposed to fight, but in the end he declined to fight me. Such is life. I think I'll run into him somewhere along the line.

And now the bigger news. For a little less than a month I haven't been training at Ho Shin Sool. Nothing personal, just a difference of opinion about the direction that our fighters should be going and what they should be doing. In that time I've gone back to fundamentals. I wrestle with wrestlers, I do jiu jitsu with jiu jitsu players and I box with boxers. It's felt good to work on these skills again in isolation. In addition to training, I've been working on opening my own MMA club. Things have moved really quickly and I signed the lease papers this past weekend. So with little fanfare and without further ado I give you...

We don't open our doors until September, but the website is up here with info, schedules, prices etc... Check it out.

Travelling to Train

2011-05-25T20:23:00.000-07:00

I have a disease. An affliction, if you will. No, not the tacky MMA Tshirt kind of affliction. I simply cannot go somewhere, whether it be to visit friends, or on vacation, without checking out places to train in the area. My personal motto could easily be " Training gear. Don't leave home without it." or "Got gear, Will travel." It drives my fiance nuts when we talk about going on a trip and I immediately google what MMA or Jiu Jitsu clubs are in the area. Last year when we were in the middle of a legal battle with our boss we took a 10 day vacation to the Philippines. It was what I imagine heaven looks like. We stayed on the Island of Borocay, named one of the top 10 beaches in the WORLD, in a hut for eleven dollars a night. During the day we drank 25 cent beers and highballs all day long. When we were sober enough we would go snorkeling or on a boat ride with one of the local operators. Apparently that wasn't enough for me. I needed to get punched in the face or have my arm torqued by some local fighters to feel like I really understood the place.


Fighter entrance at the MMA event in Manilla

Luckily for me I did some research and made some contacts before we got to Manilla. As luck would have it the night that we flew into Manilla was also the night of the biggest MMA event of the year in the Philippines. I made plans to meet up with a few local fighters at the event. The event itself was pretty cool, and the fighters hooked me up with some places to train boxing and jiu jitsu for the next few days. It was pretty sweet. Check out the pics.

One of the things I am looking forward to this summer is the opportunity to take a few road trips and do some training. I'll probably hit Adrenaline Training Center in London, Xtreme Couture in Toronto, visit my buddy Adrian who is spending the summer in Ottawa and train with OAMA or FIT MMA and I'd like to take a trip back to my old stomping grounds in Thunder Bay and train with the boys at Leading Edge.


Throwing an omoplata in the Philippines. I know, I know... My hips should be facing the other way.

Super Kid Smashes Some Other Korean Guy.

A while ago I posted a video of one of the "Super babies" that train at Daegu MMA in Korea. I told you to keep an eye on some of them and that you'd probably be hearing their names at some point. Well one of those kids that we often called "Monkey" (His real name is Sang Yeon Kim) turned 16 recently and had his first pro fight. That's right. First pro fight at 16 years old. He absolutely dominated and stopped the guy on strikes from mount in under a minute. You can see the video here but be warned, the video loads really slowly.

Hanging out with Aoki and Imanari. No big deal.

Speaking of travelling for MMA, I ran across a few pics from my trip to Japan the other day. There were two back to back pics of Mazakazu Imanari and Shinya Aoki, two of the best grapplers in the MMA game, that I thought were pretty funny. I was trying to act nonchalant at the weigh-ins for DEEP. You know, act like you've been there before type of thing. I couldn't resist taking a few snaps of these guys though. Funny thing is every time I took a picture they happened to be looking right at the camera with a "why is this other fighter taking pictures of me?" look on their face.


That's my Korean buddy Dong Hyun in the foreground and Aoki peering over the table in the background. What're you staring at Shinya? You need a knuckle sandwich?

You too Imanari? You eyeballing me? Yeah, I didn't think so.

NEWS! (nope, just kidding, still can't say anything)
Lots of people have been asking about my "news". I really thought I'd be able to let it out by now, but that is not the case. I've had a few fights tentatively booked and fall through and there are a few more options on the table. As soon as I know anything for sure I'll post it here. Some of you have sen my face on the poster for a upcoming King of the Cage event. That fight is not confirmed yet, although it is a possibility. The Ontario MMA scene is still new and growing. Here's hoping tings settle down and become a little more predictable over the next year.

NEWS!... sorta

2011-05-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a Teaser... Stay Tuned!

I have at least three separate pieces of news that I am itching to break. But I can't. Yet.   I CAN tell you that I have some fight announcements coming up and that one of the fights will be televised in Canada and the USA. How sweet is that? I last fought about 6 months ago so I am really looking forward to getting back in there soon.

The Canada/Korea/USA Connection
Ever since I've returned to Canada I've had a fair bit of contact with the fellas at Daegu MMA in Korea.   I muddle throught the Korean Language website to post stuff and they always get one of their English speaking members to translate and post a reply.
It turns out that I've also become a bit of an English speaking contact for Daegu MMA. When a foreigner in Korea is interested in training they usually Google "MMA in Daegu", or something similar. My blog is usually the first English language result for that search. Because of this, I've had lots of people look me up on Facebook for information regarding the club. I point them in the right direction and wish them luck in their training. Recently a Facebook contact filmed a bit of a Sambo seminar that was happening at Daegu MMA.   Here are some vids from the seminar. There are some great techniques here that are a little different from your traditional Jiu Jitsu style, but look quite effective. I can't wait to try them out. **Note** I'm proud to be a part of the team from Daegu MMA that won the 2010 East Asian Sambo Championships, beating several Sambo schools along the way. On the day of the tournament I had 7 or 8 matches. (Can't remember for sure. Let's say eight, just to increase the level of my awesomeness in the minds of both people who read this blog). I lost one match and won the rest; it was a grueling day.

The guy is the video is Ron Dayley, an American/Korean who has family in Daegu. he also owns and runs his own gym in Clarksville, TN. Some of his fighters have competed in the UFC and Strikeforce.

Real Life Humour For The Week.
The following story was relayed to me from my fiance. A friend of hers was visiting the doctor, who happened to be an elderly east Indian man. he asked if she was pregnant. She said "No". He asked if she had ever been pregnant. She said "No". Asked if what she method of birth control she was using. She said "Homosexuality".
When the doctor regained his breath after choking on his water he said something about that being a pretty effective method.

Tough guys don't act tough. Strung out, scrawny drunks do.

2011-05-06T20:41:00.000-07:00

While writing a code of conduct for members at our MMA club a friend of mine wrote this:
"Tough guys don't act tough, they do tough things"
That couldn't be more true. Being involved in combat sports at a relatively high level for most of my life, I've been around some tough dudes. I mean REALLY tough dudes. These guys come from all different places, and have all kinds of different stories. The one thing they have in common is that the really tough guys don't act tough. They know they are and they don't have to prove it. Don't get me wrong, most of these guys aren't going to tuck their tail between their legs and run from a situation, but they aren't going to start one either.
There's a whole other league of guys out there though, that some people think are tough. They're the guys who haven't really accomplished much. Maybe they got in a fight with another drunk moron who has no actual combat skills and won, fueling their belief that they are in fact tough. These are the guys who go around posturing, talking tough and mean mugging people all the time. Sometimes they're big guys, all juiced up to help their insecurity, sometimes they're little guys who feel like they have something to prove. Some people actually believe that these guys are tough because no one ever calls them on their BS.

A little while ago I was out watching a friends band and I ran into a guy like this. He was a guy that I knew from around town. He was about the same height as me and about twenty pounds lighter, meaning that he was so small there wouldn't even be a weight class for him in MMA. He was a drunk and had never done anything to prove that he was tough in any way but had a mouth that well overshot his tough-guy experience. This particular night I had already separated myself from the fella in question because I couldn't stand to listen to him talk any more. I had run into another guy that wrestled for a cross-town highschool at the same time I wrestled. We were talking about the good old days and how awesome we used to be when douchy mcdouche strolled up and started instigating. He was saying stuff like "wrestling's for fags and hommos. A bunch of guys rolling around grabbing each other's dicks. If anyone ever touched me like that I'd kick their ass". Those last words left me with only one thing to do.
I poked him in the dick.
He didn't like that. I don't think that he was used to being called on his false bravado.
He imediately got flustered, puffed out his chest and in his best angry-man voice said something along the lines of "I'm not kidding, if you do that again I'll kill you!"
So I poked him in the dick again.
Needless to say, he didn't kill me. He didn't even make a move. I rolled the dice on the fact that he was "all show, no go" and I was right. He didn't have a clue what to do when someone stepped up to call his BS. His friends, some of whom I know, came over soon and ushered him away, apologizing the whole time.
Once again, tough guys don't act tough.

Six months seems like a reasonable amount of time to put together a story about an event, no?
The last time I fought was in November for King of the Cage. After the fight I did a video interview with a local reporter, which never aired. Somebody recently clued me in to the fact that this video was just posted on the local news site this week. Better late than never I guess. Here's the video. Go to 4:35 for my section.

Updates!
Last week I wrote a blog about Karlin Armstrong; a guy I thought was a bit of a poser in the MMA community. I mentioned that the only thing that gave him any credibility whatsoever was that he trained at a respected MMA club called BDB martial arts in Calgary and had some reputable fighters, including UFC Nick Ring, participating in seminars he was helping to organize. Well, it turns out neither of things hold any water. Brad Cardinal, the new Wreck MMA lightweight Champion responded to a post I made about the guy. Here's what he said.

"I was part of the seminar from the link above that was organized by Karlin Armstrong. I'm not going to get into details, as I don't want to contribute negatively in any way to Canadian MMA, but in the future neither Nick Ring or myself will be having anything to do with Karlin.

Also, I read in the blog linked above that he claims to have been training at BDB Martial Arts in Calgary. I don't think I've seen him on the mats there more than a few hours, and I'm there everyday." - Brad Cardinal

On the charges of being an MMA poser/wannabe and vastly overstating his influence, participation and involvement in the MMA community I find Karlin Armstrong guilty.

I also blogged about having a matchmaker put my name on an event that I had not agreed to fight on. It seems that once my manager made this information public the floodgates opened. There's been roughly 50 comments on the story, most by other managers, matchmakers, fighters and coaches who have had problems with the matchmaker in question. You can read what people are saying about him here.
It's also interesting that my name is still listed on the fight card, even though I was never remotely interested in this fight and there have been requests to remove my name from the website. There are also rumours going around that the matchmaker is now offering a lot of money for fighters on this card because it is only a few weeks away and they only have 5 fights booked. Panic time? Hopefully this organization will get with a legit matchmaker for their next fights and make a successful run at MMA in Ontario after a rough start.

That's News to Me

2011-05-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was reading a press release for an MMA event that had a very interesting main event. Tim Wadsworth,a very good wrestler that I had competed against in the past and undefeated in MMA at 145 was going to fight Shigeki Osawa, a very tough Japanese fighter that wrestled in the Olympics and is know for suplexing people on their heads. Like this.

Anyways, as I was reading the press release I noticed a name I recognized. Brent Fryia vs. Jason Sampson. Hey! That's me! Too bad this fight is less than four weeks away and I never agreed to it. This was a fight that I was offered, but turned down because I felt like the promoter was seriously trying to undersell the opponent to get me to fight. They told me that he was 4-0 with some college wrestling experience. A quick google search told me that he was actually 7-0, a div. I All American wrestler, 2-0 as a pro boxer, had won the Pan-Am championships in Jiu-Jitsu as well as placing second at the IBJJF World Championships. I got in touch with my manager who asked the website to remove my name from the post. That started a storm of conversation about the matchmaker on the same website. It turns out that this organization had posted the names of several fighters that were unconfirmed and had never agreed to fight on this event. It turns out that even Tim Wadsworth, one of the main event fighters, is not even fighting on this card. Interesting. Here's a link to the press release (with my name now removed). Press Release If you scroll down you can see all of the discussion that takes place about the event and the promoter/matchmaker.

P.S. Please go follow me on Twitter here: Twitter me!

P.P.S. Please go vote. Some people are cheesed that we're having another election and think it's a bad thing. The fact that when our leader doesn't have the support of the people we can kick him out and try again is a GREAT thing. Let's get this guy outta here.

The Blog is Back!

2011-05-01T14:01:00.000-07:00

When I got home from Korea I was so swamped with getting caught up at work that the blog became an afterthought; something I'd get to if I had time. Considering I was coaching a highschool wrestling team, a club wrestling team, being the convenor for the local wrestling league and trying to find time to train myself there was zero time for anything else. During this time I often had something happen to me, or witnessed something and thought "that would make a good blog post". These days I have a little more time on my hands and in the last few weeks a few people have asked about the blog and if it would ever return. Here it is. It's kind of like "Return of the Mack", but way better. What is a "Mack"?

Posers, Cling-Ons and Wannabes

Poser checklist: 1) Taking pictures of yourself... 2) with no shirt on 3) with all of the UFC and Tap-Out gear you bought from Sport-check 4) in your bedroom with cliche posters in the background 5) mean mugging and/or giving the finger. **note** This is not the guy that this article is about, just a good example of the type of people that try adopt a tough fighter image without putting in the work to actually be a fighter

Whenever something gets popular there's bound to be some posers (or poseurs, as the French say) hanging around and MMA is no different. Everyone's seen overweight tattooed thugs who couldn't throw a straight punch if their life depended on it rocking the Tapout sleeveless jersey and straight brimmed hat combo. These are the guys who want to see sloppy slug fests and could care less about the ground game. Ironic considering the term "Tap Out" comes from the ground game in the first place. For these guys it's about an image that they can cop, not about the sport.
There's another type of poser and cling on in the MMA game too. The one's who actually are somewhat involved in the sport but overstate their involvement, talk about themselves a lot and try to convince people that they are big wheels on the MMA machine. For these guys too, it's about an image. It's about being part of something cool.
A great example of this is a recent article that appeared in my local newspaper. It was about a fella who sometimes spends time visiting his family in my city. To listen to him talk the guy is definitely a big deal; involved in every aspect of MMA including fighting, managing, sponsoring, reporting, promoting, owning an MMA clothing line and training fighters. And all of this at the age of 22. Wow. Here's the article Sault Star Article
There are a few hilarious bits in this article. The first is that he is sponsoring fighters but can't release their names to the public because of privacy issues. Hmm. I have a few sponsors and I'm pretty sure the way it works is they pay you to wear their stuff and in turn they can use your name and image to promote their product. He also talks about training fighters. An 0-1 fighter with no previous combat sports credentials training fighters? Sign me up! Speaking of his 0-1 record, the guy has every excuse in the book from taking the fight on short notice to citing injuries from an accident 7 years ago! Now I've had some pretty decent injuries (broken neck anyone?) and I understand taking fights that aren't on ideal terms but once you accept to fight under those terms you lose the right to complain or use them as excuses. When I fought in Japan there was a laundry list of reasons why the fight wasn't great for me but I took it anyways. I lost. I didn't lose because of all of the particular details around the fight that I thought were BS. I lost a winnable fight because the other guy fought better than me that night and planted a right hook on my chin that sent me wobbling to the canvas. End of story.
When I read the article I wondered how this guy could be doing so much in Canadian MMA without ever having heard of him. I wanted to find out if this guy was a legit or if he was, like lots of other questionable characters involved in MMA, trying to make a name and a few dollars off of the sweat and hard work of fighters and other people who have worked hard to make the sport progress to where it is today. I took my curiosity to a few well known message boards where lots of pro fighters and well known journalists, managers and commentators post and interact regularly. I asked if anyone knew him and what their impressions of him were. Here's a few of the reactions...

"can't help you...but apparently as involved as he is I should've heard of him, no?"

- Sean MacManus, editor of TOPmmanews.com

"He probably got excited in the interview and kind of overstated where he's at in the MMA culture, as evidenced by the fact that the biggest MMA nerds in Canada (like the people on the Canadian UG- and I mean 'nerds' in the best sense) don't know who he is.
Sometimes people try to oversell themselves, sometimes cuz, yes, they want the attention, sometimes just cuz they wanna get laid in their hometown, and sometimes just cuz they get wound up while being interviewed."

- Robin Black, professional fighter, On-air personality for The Score, The Fight Network

"Nice enough guy but touts his own horn way too much. In my brief conversation I tried to figure out exactly what he did, he just told me he does "marketing". I asked him what that entails and he says he makes moves, talks to people, gets people's voices heard and names recognized (paraphrasing here but you get the idea)" ... "His clothing company is "Lights Out Fight Wear" and until recently they only had 2 t-shirts and a hoodie on their website.. there's not much more now (and they claim to have been established since 1982 lol). He probably doesn't talk about the fighters because he only deals with amateur athletes with 1-1 or 0-0 records who swallow everything this guy says."

- Anonymous poster

To be completely fair, I don't think this guy is malicious in any way. He has some ties to BDB Martial Arts in Calgary which is a very reputable gym so at the very least he sees high level training on a regular basis. I think he really does love the sport of MMA and wants to be involved. I just think that he is a little quick to give himself credit and, in this article, has overplayed his involvement in the scene. I'll let you judge for yourself.

A Few Thoughts on UFC 129

Great showing by the Canadian contingent. John Makdessi, Jason MacDonald, Claude Patrick, Ivan Menjivar, Rory MacDonald, and GSP all got great wins. Pierson, Bocek, Jabouin and Hominick will all be back in the big show busting heads soon.
Speaking of Hominick... what a warrior. He fought a great fight against one of the best pound for pound fighters in the world and even when he was behind on the score cards and had a hematoma the size of a baseball on his head he turned up the juice and blitzed Jose Aldo for the last 5 minutes of the fight. Not a lot of people gave him any kind of chance and most didn't think he'd last very long. I told everyone who would listen that Hominick absolutely belonged with Aldo and could beat him. I was down at his training center in March and trained with him while I was there. I look forward to training with him again soon.
I hate watching Randy lose. Anyone else think that fight was bad matchmaking on the UFC's part from a promotional perspective? You don;t want one of your heroes going out on a loss but you also want Machida to get back into contention. Seemed like a lose-lose proposition for the UFC to me.
Can Steven Segal please drown in wet cement?
$129 000 in bonus money for winners of Fight of the Night (Aldo/Hominick) Knock out of the night (Machida's karate kid crane kick) and sub of the night (Garza). Dat's very nice. I know all of the bonuses from now on won't be that high but I can't see them dropping back to the previous ammounts.

Other Stuff
I'm not sure what the format will be for this blog now that I'm back in Canada but I'm trying to figure it out. It will definitely be MMA based with some other side-bar type stories and comments but I'm not sure to what degree I'll include other topics.
I noticed that I have a few blogs drafts that I had written while in Korea and Japan that i never got around to publishing. I think there's some pretty interesting stuff in there that people might like. I'll have a look at them, add any additional info and post them shortly.

An Up and Down Day, But More Up Than Down

2010-06-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

I got back yesterday from a Jiu Jitsu tournament outside of Seoul. In true Korean fashion, I wasn't informed of the tournament until the week before. Also in true Korean fashion I wasn't told that this tournament was the Korean Pro Abu Dhabi qualifier and the biggest BJJ tourny of the year in Korea until I got in the van to go to the tournament. Since I've been focusing on my upcoming fight I haven't really been training in the gi at all and I asked our coach if I could enter the no gi tournament only. He wasn't buying it and entered me into the gi, gi absolute and no gi divisions. Tough luck for me.
The tournament was on Sunday in a city called Bucheon which is about a three and a half hour drive from Daegu. We left from the club at 5:30 am to get there in time to weigh in and start competing at 10:00. Once our team was weighed in I put my gi on for the first time in three weeks and headed down to the mat where I was the second match of the day. My first match was against a guy I had beaten handily at an earlier tournament. I proceeded to get flying armbarred less than 10 seconds into the match. I'm not sure if I've ever been that embarrassed at a tournament before. Not only did I lose, I was out of the tournament and had to watch as a guy I've beat before worked his way through the bracket and won the division. It was frustrating, but I earned that loss. I simply was not ready for that match. Luckily I still had the gi absolute division coming up. What chance would I have against the monsters and winners from all of the other weight classes if I couldn't even last 10 seconds in my own weight class? Plenty it turns out. I think I just needed a good kick in the pants to get going and that first loss was just what the doctor ordered.
In my first absolute match I fought a guy who had competed in the heavyweight (100 kg) division. He smirked at me when the drawmaster put us together, kind of like he thought it was funny. He thought it was a lot less funny when I rolled up an 8-0 lead before submitting him with a north/south choke. If the first guy I fought was big, the next guy was an absolute terror. He was a member of the U.S. Airforce and was a superheavyweight who probably had the same body fat percentage that I did. To say he was intimidating was an understatement. I heard someone refer to him as "Black Hercules". Luckily he was considerably less intimidating when he put his gi on.

I don't think many people gave me much of a chance to beat him (he steamrolled a pretty tough dude in his previous match) but I had a decent game plan. I had watched a few of his matches through out the day. He had pretty much bullied his way through the tournament by using a bull rush double leg, leaning on people until they collapsed and doing nothing on top except not get submitted. I knew that as hard as he pushed on his opponents he would be in trouble if he ever came up against anyone who could throw well. It never occurred to me that it might be me. Sure enough, about a minute into the match I caught him pushing too hard and launched him with a hip toss going out of bounds. He got up, dusted himself off and said "good job". Then he came at me even harder. He blasted me out of bounds and into some spectators 3 or 4 times, but I kept my feet moving and didn't let him in on my legs. At one point he shot a double and had me scrambling. In desperation I turned and threw my hips into a whizzer as hard as I could and threw him onto his back again. This time he did not tell me "good job". He was getting pretty cheezed at losing to a 68 kg. geek. I tried my luck one more time and tried to hit him with a shoulder throw. I was very close to scoring the takedown but we went out of bounds. I thought. You can't see it on the tape, but I landed with both knees and feet completely on the wood floor. Little did I know that one of his feet was still on the edge of the mat, making us still in bounds. I stopped fighting and he took the opportunity to take back mount. We eventually went out of bounds and got re started in the center with him in back mount. I knew if I could sneak my way out of danger and hold him off for under a minute I'd win on points. I managed to do just that.

After that match I had exactly 5 minutes to get ready for the final. In the final I fought one of my teammates who competed at and won the 90kg. division. The match was a little slow but I ended up submitting him with an Americana.

What I Really Came For
After the gi portion was done I suited up for the no gi open division which was what I was really excited for. getting to test myself against the best grapplers in the country in the style that I like best appealed to me. In my first match I submitted a blue belt with a D'arce choke and in my second match I beat a purple belt on points, 10-2. In the final I met a very strong blue belt that sometimes comes to our club to train. I was leading for a good chunk of the match but eventually got my back taken in a scramble and submitted to a choke after fighting it off for what felt like an hour.
A gold in the Gi absolute and a silver in open no-gi was a good way to finish off the day after a tanking out of my first division.

Mfight (a Korean MMA website) was at the event taking video and pictures. They also handed out a "Fighter of the Day" award. They apparently thought that my win in the absolute division was worthy of the award. I was honored to get the award but I know there were lots of better performances and better fighters at the event. For example, my buddy Bo Kue won the Abu Dhabi Trials and the absolute no-gi tournament. In the semi final he got caught in a deep triangle choke that looked like game over. He somehow fought it off for over 2 minutes (he told me later that he was very close to going to sleep) before storming back and wining on points. In the final he dug himself an 11-0 deficit (which I'm sure had something to do with being gassed from his last match) before submitting his opponent with a kimura. To me that kind of fighting spirit is what should earn "Fighter of the Day". But the trophy sure is nice and shiny.

Champions One and All

Daegu MMA won the team title, even without Heung Kul and Un Sik, our two best jiu jitsu players competing. As far as grappling goes, we've won everything in sight this year. Looking at all of the studs in the team picture below makes me realize what a stacked team Daegu MMA actually is. Lots of guys train at different times and you rarely see all of the best guys together in one place, but when you do it's a hell of a team to deal with.

Our team with some hardware

It's Not Mother's Day But...

It's my mom's birthday! Happy Birthday Mom!

Konglish n' Korean Kids

2010-06-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

Konglish
here are four good examples of Engrish that I found on one ten minute walk to a restaurant in my neighborhood the other day.

This is one of my favourites. It's actually in a restaurant called "New York, New York". Someone should tell them that Google translator is not 100% accurate. Click on the picture for a bigger view.

So close... So close.

The best thing about this is that it's a big chain.

Chicken in the home? Chick in the home? Chick and the home? I have no idea.

Kids

I haven't posted or talked much about my school or the kids I teach so I thought I'd give you guys a little view of what I do everyday. The kids I teach are pretty much awesome. Teaching kindergarten has been a lot of fun and obviously very different from teaching highschool. One thing that is undeniable is that these kids are deathly cute. Here's a few pictures and a video as proof.

7b class. Pretty Awesome. They speak enough English that we can have a lot of fun.

7a class. Yes, the girl on the right (Catherine) is wearing an "Extreme Couture" shirt. How wild is that?

Yeah, I taught my kids how to "high five and pound it" and yeah, I have a kid in that class who's name is "Lion"

MMA Update

I'll be travelling to Seoul for a Jiu Jitsu tournament next weekend. I told the guys from my club that I only wanted to do the no-gi division. With a fight coming up i've only been doing about one day of gi training per week, and even then I try to stick to techniques that will work without the gi and not rely on the grips and cloth too much in sparring. My idea of competing in only the no-gi division was duly noted before they registered me in the gi, no-gi, gi absolute and no-gi absolute divisions. Might be a long day.

Training has been going very well lately. I'm still doing mostly general training as far as technical work but we are starting to work out a basic game plan and isolate some situations that I can exploit and some that I should avoid. the intensity and volume of my training has been much higher over the last 6 weeks and with a little over 10 weeks until fight time I feel god about where I am physically, technically and mentally. Having a focus and goal for my training has done wonders for my training. the increased volume and intensity of training coupled with better attention to nutrition has seen my weight come down a lot. I am walking around leaner and meaner than I have in a long time.

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to my dad. When I was younger lots of people used to tell me how much I was like my dad and it used to drive me crazy. It's easy to see now that that's one of the biggest compliments I could get. I've been lucky to have lots of positive influences in my life but without a doubt my dad taught me the most about... everything. I couldn't ask for a better dad.

Monsoon Season is here. It's Raining Fights.

2010-06-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

It's Raining ~~men~~ Fights!
Saying "when it rains, it pours" is about as cliched as it gets, but sometimes the cliche fits. The actual monsoon season is approaching in Korea and along with it I've been flooded with fight opportunities. First I was offered a spot in the Sengoku Asian Bantamweight Grand Prix, but was pulled because I wasn't Korean. Then I was offered a very tough fight in DEEP at the end of August which I accepted. Last week I was offered another fight in DEEP: Grachan to fight on the same card as my friend and training partner Un Sik. I had to decline because of previous commitments that couldn't be changed. saturday I was offered a spot as a short notice opponent for Ikuo Usuda on the Sengoku 13 card. The event is this coming Sunday. Even though I initially jumped at the chance to fight in Sengoku the more I thought about this fight, the more I didn't like it. First of all it is a very big fight on very short notice and I have only been training hard again for a little over a month. As much as I'd like to think that my athleticism would carry me through I know that there are lots of things I need to iron out before I fight a high level fight. I fought once on a lot less preparation than I should have had and told myself I would never do it again. The next thing is that the fight is at 65 kg. This is the weight I have fought at before but I am much leaner right now and will be fighting at a lower weight in the future. After practice today I was 66.5 kg. Usuda on the other hand is coming down for his first fight at 65 kgs. after going 6-0 in Shooto and Sengoku as a 70 kg. fighter. He would be a huge 65 kg fighter and I would be pretty small for that weight. This is the kind of fight I am looking for in the future, but I don't think is a good decision for me right now. Coincidentally, Usuda's original opponent was suposed to be a guy I fought and beat at the East Asian Sambo Championships. On the plus side, it's good to know that I am finally on the radar of some of the bigger Asian promotions.

Some things never change.
Jim Liguori, who owns and coaches Ho Shin Sool MMA used to go crazy because I would leave my stuff all over the place. I would forget my shirt on the floor, leave my hand-wraps hanging on a doorknob, leave my mouthguard on the windowsill... you name it, I forgot it at the club. Well, Jim will be happy to know that it's just not him, I do it to the coach/owner at Daegu MMA too. Usually it's not a big deal because I can pick it up the next day, but about a month ago I lost my custom fit mouthguard that my dentist friend Riley made for me. I finally found it today and was super pumped; I never knew how much better a custom mouthguard was until I tried one. While I'm on the topic, it's great to have a friend as your dentist. How many times have you wanted to swear at your dentist? I can do it freely. When she says dentist-y things like "Hmmm, your gums are bleeding a little bit." I can say things like "No kidding, you just stabbed them with a sharp metal poker; I'm pretty sure I'd bleed anywhere if you did that."

Where Am I and How Did I Get Here?
After a few amateur MMA fights I decided it was time to step things up and fight as a pro. In two years I racked up a 4-1 record as a pro. I can honestly say that none of the opponents I fought were particular studs, even the one opponent I lost to. All of my wins came via TKO or submission stoppage, with none of my opponents making it past the 3rd minute of the first round. The lone loss on my record was disappointing but I don't think reflects on my skills as a fighter. It was a fight I took unprepared. I went into the fight in not great shape and without having put in the training time I should have. Even still, I was dominating my opponent for most of the fight. I picked him up and took him down with a slam and was delivering some ground and pound. As I was standing in his guard I got sloppy (overconfident?) and hung my head lazily, getting caught in a guillotine in the process. I got back on the winning track shortly after, but promised myself I would never fight unprepared like that again. Regardless of the results, I felt like it was time to step up the level of my competition. I had a tough time doing so, in large part because of the expense of getting me from Sault Ste. Marie to a place where big fights happen. Sault Ste. Marie is not exactly a travel hub and organizations weren't very willing to spend big money to fly me to their fights. That's why I decided to temporarily relocate to a place where bigger fights might come my way. Hence, Korea.
While some people might think I'm jumping into the deep end of the pool with my upcoming fight, that was exactly my goal in coming here. I always felt like I could compete at a much higher level than I was and now I'm getting the chance to prove it. I've always thought that testing your limits is an important part of life. How can you really know who you are if you don't know what you're capable of?

Picnic Time!
The Daegu MMA family often goes on weekend outings together and this weekend I was lucky enough to attend my first team/family outing. We drove a ways out of town and hiked up a mountain towards a stream and some mountain top pools. This place was amazing. There were dozens of pools of crystal clear cold mountain water and you could slide down the rocks into them. Here's some pics of the main pool that we spent most of our time at.

View from above the main pool.

Left to right: Po Kue, Jae Hoon and Me.

At one point Jae Hoon dove down to the bottom of the pool and came up saying "pink hat! pink hat!". I wasn't sure why he was so amazed about a hat at the bottom of a pool of water but he eventually said "I get it!" and dove down to retrieve the object in question. When he came back up he was holding a SEVERED PIG'S HEAD. No joke. "Pig head", not "pink hat". Then he threw it at someone.

After swimming we set up our grill and proceeded to eat ridiculous amounts of samguipsal and galbi. If we had twice as many people as were actually there we still would have had way too much food, but that's pretty typical of eating with Koreans.

Quick Question

Who doesn't have a story that starts with "So I'm juggling cans of paint in class..". I'll let you guess how that turned out.

Wow.

2010-06-07T08:11:00.000-07:00

SENGOKU, DEEP, DREAM; It's been a Crazy Ride

For the last three and a half weeks I've been sitting on the knowledge that I would soon be fighting in one of the biggest MMA organizations in the world and competing in their bantamweight Grand Prix. I had been accepted as one of the participants in the tournament and was set to compete in SENGOKU on July 4th. I almost spilled the beans last week, but decided to hold off because SENGOKU hadn't officially announced the participant list. It's a good thing I did hold off because when I got to the club today for training I found out that I was out of the tournament. Someone somewhere along the line had complained that even though I trained and fought out of a Korean gym I didn't meet the criteria to compete in the Asian Grand Prix. That thought had crossed my mind but I was reassured that it would be no problem when I brought it up. Apparently it was a problem.

All is not lost however. I've been offered a fight with a very good fighter later in the summer. The fight offer is against Daiki Hata, a very good kickboxer with a 11-6-3 MMA record. He has beaten some big name fighters, but his last two losses came to opponents who were 7-7 and 3-4 at the time of their fights. He has much more experience than I do, but style wise, the match up is good. He seems to have trouble with grinding type wrestlers. He also looks like an anime character from some kind of Japanese neo-samurai cartoon. The fight will be in late August for the DEEP organization. The bonus is that the winner of the fight earns a spot on the nest DREAM event. DREAM is arguably the second largest MMA organization in the world. It's where the big dogs live. Some people spend their whole careers waiting for an opportunity like this. It's pretty crazy now that it's here. TopMMAnews posted a story about the fight on their main page. Go check it out.

Submission of the year?

Some people have been talking about this submission by Dan Hornbuckle at a recent Bellator event as a potential submission of the year. It's a nice Kimura into a modified armbar. Go to the 45 second mark of the video and then...

... look at this picture.

This was one of my matches at the Korea Machado Open. Look familiar? I know, I know, I didn't do it to professional fighter in a major event... I'm just saying. What am I saying? I don't know, probably something about me being awesome.

Un Sik Song
Un Sik lost his fight at DEEP: Cage Impact last night. He lost what sounds like a boring decision to someone who mostly pressed him against the cage. I knew that cage skills might be an issue for Un Sik. His wrestling is getting much better, but there is absolutely nowhere to practice anything against a cage or wall. We don't even have any padded walls right now. People have been saying for quite a while but Asian fighters who want to fight in a cage have to practice in a cage. I think it makes a much bigger impact than people think. So many techniques change next to the cage, and learning to use it and get off of it is a skill you have to practice, it does happen magically.

New Ho Shin Sool Website
Ray started a new Ho Shin Sool website and it's pretty awesome. It has lots of cool stuff on it, go check it out.

Squatters, Gymnastics and Tough Training

2010-05-30T05:46:00.000-07:00

Gymnastics in Wrestling, MMA, Jiu Jitsu
I stumbled across the video below by chance, but it reinforces what I've always believed. Athletes with gymnastics backgrounds or skills have an enormous advantage in any sport that requires balance, kinesthethic awareness, agility and explosiveness. When I run gymnastic type warm ups when I coach wrestling or grappling at home lots of people complain. Some people cop out and don't even try. It's frustrating because those people can't see the benefits of these types of skills. I'm fond of telling those people "If you can't control your own body, how in hell are you going to control your opponents body?"
When people say "Why are we doing this? We're not going to do a cartwheel or handstand in a match."
I respond with "Why do you lift weights? You're not going to bench press or clean and jerk in a match." The answer is the same for both activities. They both develop and enhance physical characteristics that are important to wrestling, jiu jitsu and fighting. I would go so far as to say that if you had to pick only one, gymnastics training trumps weightlifting. My girlfriend used to coach at the National Training center for mens gymnastics. Some of the guys there were the most jacked guys I've ever seen and they never lifted a weight in their life.
Consider the following

In Russia and Turkey (where wrestling is the national sport and athletes start in the sport at a very young age) youth programs focus mostly on gymnastics before introducing much actual wrestling technique. They believe it's important to develop a strong physical foundation before trying to learn things that your body is not prepared to do.
Most big time BJJ dudes from Brazil practice what they call "gymnastica naturel" which is basically just tumbling. They say it gives them a much better awareness of their body.
The sheer number of high level wrestlers I have met that have some sort of gymnastics background is staggering. It can't be a coincidence.

A little background... AACC is a wrestling and MMA school. Lots of top MMA guys (and girls ie. Megumi Fuji) train there. It's one of the places that lots of pros stop in to train when they are in Jaoan for fights. The youth wrestling club is also world famous, having produced world and Olympic medalists.

New Gym, Hard Work
The new gym has been up and running for a few weeks now. It's a smaller space, but there is much less wasted space. The main mat area is bigger than at the old club, but we don't have a ring at the new location. We still have a bag area, weight area, an office and (a big improvement) showers with hot water.

View of the new club

Un Sik has a big fight coming up in DEEP against a very tough Yasuaki Kishimoto (10-3) and the two of us have been working out together a lot lately. We've been working on lots of wrestling and lots of situational sparring. I've been getting as much out of it as he has, which is good as I'm looking to fight sooner than later. My body is definitely feeling it. Today is Sunday, and my 7th day in a row of training with Un Sik. We'll go in tomorrow and do some work and then I'm going to take Tuesday off and try to explain the concept of "tapering" to him. Hopefully someone with decent English will be there to help translate.
There are a few young guys that train at Daegu MMA that have really enjoy the wrestling training and are getting pretty good. A few of them heard Un Sik and I were training on the weekend they came in to work on their wrestling too. The smaller guy in the video is only 15 and has better jiu jitsu technique than I do. When we roll I have to be a bully and muscle him around to avoid getting beat. Add in some solid takedowns and defense and that's a tough kid to beat. The bigger guy is about 20 and has a great single leg. When we scrimmage he can score if I'm not really focused on defending the leg hard. I think I've been able to leave a few of the older guys and two or three of the younger kids with some much improved takedowns and takedown defense and I think that makes them a lot more dangerous, whether in Jiu Jitsu or MMA

Korean Crappers
This is a "squatter". If you can't see why it's called that please use your browser's back button and go back to whatever internet hole you crawled out of, your presence alone is hurting the average IQ of visitors to this blog and I have standards to uphold around here.

Squatters are a bit intimidating at first. Which direction do you face? What do you hold on to? It's a bit like the old "grab a tree in the woods and squat", but with no tree to grab. For these reasons I was pretty apprehensive of squatters during my first few months in Korea. Sometimes there just isn't a regular toilet to be found though. In these cases I usually just take my pants right off to avoid a stain that would be very tough to explain to your friends. Everyone's heard the story of the guy who answered nature's call in the woods and ended up with a present in the hood of his snow-suit right? Nobody wants to be that guy.
Despite the awkwardness and potential danger of using a squatter there are some benefits. My friend Margot mentioned a while ago that there is absolutely no skin to seat contact and you flush with your shoe covered foot, not your bare hand. Hygienic! I guess if you're a germophobe using a squatter is the way to go, although it definitely takes some getting used to.

Has Anyone Seen my Battle Pants?

2010-05-20T08:22:00.000-07:00

The Bolt Strikes Daegu
The Daegu "World Challenge" Track meet was here on Wednesday and a stack of world and Olympic stars showed up. Daegu didn't disappoint and put a LOT of people in the stands for this event. Without a doubt, Usain Bolt was the biggest star. He looked like he barely broke a sweat in winning with a time of 9.84 seconds. Crazy to think that in 1996 that time would have not only won him an Olympic gold, but also broken the world record. These days that's not even in the ballpark when compared to the mind-bending 9.58s that Bolt ran last year. For my money Bolt is one of the best pure athletes living on this planet right now. The funny thing is, I read an interesting article about how if Bolt had grown up in the U.S. he would never had been a 100m/200m runner. The thinking that his height put him at a huge disadvantage in the starting blocks would have pushed him into the 400m and 800m races where the effects of a bad start are a bit less. Interesting stuff. Here's a video of the race I shot on my camera. I wasn't sure if I got it all because the display on the camera bit the dust, so no chirps about the bad angle. At least we had pretty good seats near the finish line.

Usain Bolt in Daegu from Brent Fryia on Vimeo.

Crowd Shot. Good turnout.

Missing Gloves and "Battle Pants"
I brought a nice pair of red Twins sparring gloves to Korea with me. A few weeks before we moved the gym they disappeared. I had been leaving them around for some of the other fighters and sparring partners to use in their preparation (there's really only 2 other pairs of gloves you can spar with at the club). The problem is that, like every MMA gym, there's a revolving door of highschool and college kids who come in thinking they're tough and leave after a few weeks of getting their limbs tied in knots and their bottoms spanked like toddlers. At least in Korea they don't show up in TAPOUT and Affliction gear to show how serious they are about MMA. I'm sure one of these wannabes took the gloves. Given the family environment at Daegu MMA I can't imagine any of the regulars touching them. On Monday I was hitting pads with Un Sik and he asked where my gloves were. When he heard what happened he was pissed. He pulled all of the highschool kids to the side as a group and absolutely reamed them out. I'm not sure what he said, but they looked scared. I felt a bit bad because all of the kids that were there are regulars and I'm sure they didn't touch the gloves. I hope he was just mobilizing the troops to find out where the gloves ended up.
Side Note: While I was looking on the net for some replacement gloves that would ship from inside Korea I noticed that Koreans use the term "Battle Pants" instead of "Fight Shorts". I think that sounds way cooler and, effective immediately, I will be referring to all of my shorts as "Battle Pants".

New GYM Location
The new Daegu MMA location is set up ad we've been using it all week. It's a little smaller than the last place but much nicer, a little more open and in a much better location to attract traffic. Being on the fourth floor with no air conditioning makes the new gym a bit of a sweat box. Temperatures are hitting 30 + degrees these days and it's only going to get hotter. When you're training in a gi it's not such a big deal, because the gi soaks up most of the sweat, but no-gi, MMA or kickboxing is a different story. The mats get pretty slick and I've seen a few cases of "bambi legs" already. I'm not looking forward to the temperature in there during the hot and humid monsoon season. I'll post some pics of training at the new place in the next week.

Cans, Bottles, Pets.

2010-05-17T03:25:00.000-07:00

Increased Training
I've picked up my training again in the last few weeks. I have an injury that limits what I can do in certain situations but certainly does not prevent me from training. I got a little caught up in feeling sorry for myself and was letting the things I couldn't do get in the way of the things I could do, and that should never happen. I'm not sure what shook me out of it but my workouts have been a lot better lately. I've been doing a lot more stand up sparring lately, especially because a lot of the guys have had kickboxing fights to get ready for. There are a lot more opportunities to fight for our club right now and I think that I'll take a fight before I leave. I won't be fighting at 100%, but no one really ever does and I've competed with worse injuries. I think if I went home without fighting at least once I'd be mad at myself for a long time.

Usain Bolt and Company
The World Track and Field Championships are coming to Daegu in 2011 and to lead up to it the venue is hosting a few preparation meets to get the logistics ironed out. The last of these meets is this Wednesday. The lineup for the meet is pretty wild. 4 former Olympic Champions and about a bazillion world champs, olympic medalists and world medalists. Usain Bolt will be here to run the 100m which should be pretty awesome. I'm pretty excited for this. I love track and field and I love watching people who are the best at what they do. Watching the best track athletes in the world is double +++ in my books.

ENGRISHEE!
I found a few more good Konglish signs lately. These are two of my favourites.

Man, they recycle everything here.

This is either a place where a dude can get his hair cut by another dude, or one of `those` barbershops.

New club, New Weekend Job
Daegu MMA is moving it's location to an area that is a little more advantageous as far as visibility and passing traffic. Daegu MMA is also starting a weekend kids program for elementary school students. A little bit of wrestling, a little bit of jiu jitsu, and a little bit of kickboxing. In Korea having English speaking instructors is a big deal and a major draw so they asked if I would coach the program. I really like coaching kids, especially in an environment where we can run around, roll around and play combative games. and said yes before I even knew they were going to pay me.

Things Koreans are Awesome at: Parking
Because space is at such a premium in Korea Koreans are amazing at parking. They fit cars vans and trucks ito spaces you would never even attempt in the western world, and they usually do it on the first try.
Today I saw a guy park his van so close to a wall he couldn't even open the sliding door. No joke. Fact is, if you can't park like this, you proabably can't drive in Korea.
Things Koreans Suck at: Signaling
Koreans don't feel the need to signal anything. Instead they just fly their car into the smallest opening and lay on the horn if someone looks like they're coming too close or weren't able to telepathically anticipate the lane change or turn. If you see someone with their blinker on it simply means "Hey loser, quit riding my bumper and go around."

Korea vs. Japan(MMA), Korea vs. Europe (Christmas Trees)

2010-05-13T02:50:00.000-07:00

Here's the Un Sik Song's first fight after coming back from active military service. There's a short video profile of him before the fight starts. If anyone out there speaks Japanese let me know what it says. The guy he fights here (Atushi Ueda, 8-3-3) is no bum, although he is obviously not on Un Sik's level.
As for the fight, Un Sik was really embarrassed about it. He really didn't want me to see the fight on video. It was his first fight in over 2 years and he fought only 2 weeks after being discharged from the Army, so I think everyone would understand the ring rust. Even still he was really mad at himself for gassing and not being able to finish a few of the submission opportunities he had. The fight was probably perfect for what he wanted; shake off some ring rust against an opponent that was game, but didn't pose a major threat. I think his next fight, in DEEP: Cage Impact, will be much crisper and cleaner.

Intro and Round 1

Round 2

How the Grinchy Europeans Stole Christmas (Trees)
Koreans are a very proud people. And they should be. They have managed to accomplish a lot of amazing things without outside help. There are a lot of things that Korea just does better than the rest of the world (or at least the parts I've been to). Sometimes though, Korean pride and nationalism can get a little carried away.
Exhibit A: A few weeks ago I went on a tour of the area surrounding Yeongcheon. The tour included a hike up a mountain guided by a university biology/horticulture student. The mountain had some pretty unique flora, but to say it was mildly interesting would be flattering. The only interesting part was when our guide showed us a tree (looked like a white pine) and told us that 150 years ago Europeans came to Korea and stole this tree. They took it back to europe where it flourished and eventually led to the creation of the Christmas tree, a symbol which spread around the world, thanks to Korea.
Think about it for a second. This guy is saying that there were no pine trees in Europe before 150 years ago and that the Christmas tree is younger than that. I think these guys would disagree.
Like I said, Koreans have a huge amount of stuff to be proud of, but sometimes they lack a little perspective. If you move to Korea you may be shocked to discover that Korea created the I Phone and cloned the first human, among other things. I don't know if it's comforting or scary to know that blind nationalism is a worldwide phenomenon.

The Big MMA Weekend. Plus, Fate is Garbage

2010-05-11T06:58:00.000-07:00

Everybody's ~~Kung Fu~~ Fighting.
Last weekend was a big one as far as MMA is concerned. Most people are well aware of the Machida vs. Shogun results from the UFC event, but there was a lot of stuff going on that hits a lot closer to home.
The Ho Shin Sool boys were in action at King of the Cage on Saturday and didn't disappoint. The guys went 4-0 with none of their opponents making it out of the first round.

Trevor Manchester picked up his opponent and slammed him before finishing him with strikes in 24 seconds.
John Veltri hit his opponent with a straight counter right on the button and dropped him. He pounced on his opponent and finished with an official TKO in 20 seconds, but the fight was over as soon as the first punch landed.
Ray Gowlett was just as dominant but wanted to enjoy his time int he spotlight a little bit more than Trevor and Johnny. He picked up and slammed his opponent, dropped some shots from the top position and took the back of his opponent and almost choked him out. After a scramble he went back to the feet and dropped his opponent with a four strike combo, finishing with a body shot that crumbled his opponent. Ray followed him to the ground and dropped some shots for the first round stoppage.
Jeff Elliot looked good in his second pro fight. He managed to control his larger opponent in the clinch and score a takedown. he eventually passed to full mount and started dropping down punches from the top position. Afte a quick scramble, Jeff found himself on his back where he immediately sunk a triangle choke to get the win. A good win showing some god wrestling an jiu jitsu to go with is well known striking.

Ho Shin Sool has fought for KOTC 5 times now. This is the fourth time that the club has gone undefeated, having gone 3-0 and 5-0 twice in addition to this weekends festivities. We have been set up with tougher and tougher opponents and have responded every time. You can watch all of the fights on the Ho Shin Sool Facebook page here.
Next up for Ho Shin Sool, Mitch and Adrian fight at XCC:58 Battle at the Border, Canada vs. USA.

Three guys from Daegu MMA also fought this weekend in kickboxing fights. Un Sik Song fought his second pro kickboxing fight in the last 4 months and won, although I don't know how because he wasn't at the club last night. John, a Korean kid who just graduated from highschool fought his first kickboxing fight and won by decision. "Korean GSP", as he likes to be known, also won his first kickboxing fight. In his own words he won via "duhty boxshing uppacut, uppacut, uppacut TKO." He's 16. Both of these young guys have really slick jiu jitsu and it's fun to watch them expand their arsenals as they work towards becoming MMA fighters. The next generation of fighters from Daegu MMA looks pretty strong.

Daegu MMA is also moving to a new location this weekend. I've heard that the new location is not any bigger, but a "better environment". I'm anxious to see what it's like.

Pulling a Runner

Some people get to Korea and realize it's not for them. Some get homesick, some can't handle their first real responsibility after University and some can't handle the culture shock. For whatever reason some people leave in the middle of the night, skipping out on their contract, their students and their coworkers. I suppose sometimes there are reasons why someone has to leave, even though the life here is pretty easy. It's one thing to admit to yourself that you can't handle it and you cant stick it out for a year. What I don't get is bailing on your friends and co-workers and leaving them in the lurch.
Last week it happened to us. There are only three foreign teachers at our school and the other one bailed on Thursday. Packed up and left in the middle of the night. Left us high and dry, short-staffed and having to clean up the mess she left behind. Didn't even have the courtesy to give us short notice so we could find someone to fill in for her in the short term. Pretty lame.
The only positive side to it is that I got my friend Scott to fill in at our school in the mornings starting this week. Scott's one of nicest dudes I've ever met and it's nice to have another guy in the office every now and then.

Destiny, Fate
I hate the idea of Destiny and Fate. I find the idea that you are not in control of your life stupid. Fate and Destiny are convenient excuses for people who are too lazy to get up and make something happen. I'm sure nobody who ever accomplished anything great ever attributed it to Fate or Destiny. Those people got up and worked their asses off. They earned every bit of their accomplishments. I saw this commercial on youtube today and loved it for that exact reason. The commercial is about Destiny and Fate as they relate to sports, but like so many other things in sports it can be applied to the rest of life as well. Get up and make your own destiny.

Click Here!

A Brush with Bushwackers, Baseball Games and Boring Workouts

2010-05-06T07:32:00.000-07:00

The Bushwhackers
I saw this hilarious clip of Eddie Bravo giving The Iron Sheik a ride to the airport and it reminded me of one of my favorite PG stories from highschool.

When I was in the 11th or 12 grade the regional wrestling championships were in the small town of Sturgeon Falls, which most people know as the speedtrap on the way to North Bay. The night we arrived and weighed in happened to coincide with the arrival of some mostly washed up "professional" wrestlers who were doing a low budget tour of Northern Ontario. I don't think anyone thought much of it until one of my teammates came running into my room yelling "the ^%*&ing BUSHWHACKERS are in our hotel!" To a bunch of kids who grew up watching WWF superstars pound on the Ted Smiths and John Richards (always in plain black singlets of course) in the 80's and 90's, the Bushwhackers were a big deal. Forget that as real wrestlers we had always made fun of the "actors" that populated the pro ranks; this was our brush with greatness, our claim to fame, our 15 minutes. Maybe they would lick our heads! Maybe they would show us the "double gut buster"! Maybe they would come watch our matches the next day!

Three of us went down to the lobby to see if it was true and sure enough, there were the Bushwhackers, along with The Iron Sheik and some other guy named "The Wolf" (never heard of him). We didn't tell anyone else because we wanted to have these guys to ourselves. Turns out the Bushwhackers were really cool dudes. We sat up and chatted with them until about 2:00 am, getting all kinds of funny stories. One of the Bushwhackers even DID lick my friend`s head after he got the guts to ask. The Iron Sheik was a little more quiet, but he actually knew tonnes about actual wrestling (turns out he was a pretty good greco wrestler back in the day). We hassled all of the wrestlers to come watch us wrestle the next day since they didn't have to perform until the next night. They said they would think about it, but we were pretty sure they were just being nice.
The next day though, as I was sitting in the stands between matches, I heard a big commotion outside of the gym. Sure enough, the Bushwhackers showed up. They came over to say hello and tell us that they couldn't stay long but wanted to pop in to say hi. I was lucky enough to have a match coming up and asked one of them if he would stand in my corner with my coach. And he did. How radical is that? Super radical, that's how radical. Let's recap. I met the Bushwhackers in a seedy small town motel. I stayed up talking shop with them all night. The next day they came to watch me wrestle and were in my corner for one of my matches. Pretty sweet.

Note: The Iron Sheik is a legitimate bad ass. He was born in Iran, wrestled there and worked as a bodygaurd for the Emperor of Iran. He missed making the Iranian Olympic team and moved to the U.S. While in the U.S. he won the National Greco Roman Championships and was the assistant coach of the U.S. greco team.

YeongCheon Starlight Festival
Lisa and I were lucky enough to grab two spots on a free trip put on by a local magazine called Daegu Pockets. The Trip was organized by the government of a city called YeongCheon to promote their "Starlight Festival" to foreigners. It was two days packed full of activities in the area and it was absolutely free. Transportation, accommodations and all of the activities. We started by going to a 500 year old school where a famous Korean poet went to school and taught. After that we went to check out some burial mounds. In Korea the size of the burial mound denotes how important you and your family are. These ones were pretty big, but not the biggest I've seen.
Our third stop was at a local winery and wine school. We got a tour of the place and a free wine school lesson, which no one understood because it was completely in Korean. We got to do some wine tasting (Korean wine is not my cup of .... wine) and then got to bottle and cork our own wine. Again, this was all free, including a few bottles of take home wine. They even made wine labels with our pictures on them.

The only part of the tour that was in English. A little Konglishy, but true.

Our next stop was way up in some of the highest mountains in Korea (almost 6000 feet). We were taken to the largest telescope and observatory in Asia. I guess if you're into astronomy it would be pretty awesome. It was all Korean to me though. being so high in the mountains was pretty spectacular, but the pictures don't really do it justice. There was a bunch of photographers on top of the mountain taking pictures of all the foreigners. They were probably commissioned by the city to show how much fun the foreigners were having. It was pretty funny. There were guys following us around climbing over railings and hiding in the bushes to get good shots. I'm sure we'll all be in the brochures for next year.

View from the top.

The last stop of the day was at a small resort that was in the first stage of development. There were some pensions (big Korean style cabins to sleep in) on a man made lake and some riding stables. This was one of the nicest places I've seen in Korea. The people who were organizing the tour put on a concert for us with all kinds of traditional singers and dancers. There were also a bunch of huge telescopes set up for anyone to look through.

Best scenery in Korea?

Our sweet pensions.

The next day we were all pretty wiped from the activities of the day and night before, but still managed to make it horseback riding (which amounted to being led around in a circle for 10 minutes), to museum of modern art and to the actual starlight festival. The weather was great and it was solid trip. Can't beat it for free.

Children's Day
Wednesday was Children's Day, a national holiday in Korea. Having the day off in the middle of the week seems strange but since Wednesday is my worst day of the week, work wise, it was a welcome break. Me, Lisa and Brian took advantage of the nice weather to catch a baseball game. Our home team is the Samsung Lions, and they smoked the visiting Lotte Giants. Because of the holiday the game was packed and we had to pay a shocking $13 for our tickets from a scalper. I can say this about Korean fans, they are organized. There were about 20 different cheers and all of the fans new them perfectly. An interesting fact about professional baseball in Korea is that almost none of the teams actually make money. The companies that own them write them off as advertising expenses. That's why the teams are known by their corporate names and not their city names. Oh yeah, EVERY ticket to the games is general admission, so if you want to get a good seat you just have to show up early. Strange for a a country has has assigned seating on cross country buses.

Small Stadium, but packed.

Stale Workouts

It looks like I'm pretty much on the shelf as far as training goes until I get home and get some medical attention. I had a few appointments with surgeons who think I have a sports hernia, but would have to do an MRI to be sure. I opted to skip the MRI because if it is a sports hernia, I'm not paying thousands of dollars for the surgery out of pocket and will wait to get it done for free at home anyways. If it's not a sports hernia I'll just be letting it heal on it's own, which is what I'm doing anyways, and I'll have wasted a huge chunk of cash on the MRI. None of this stuff is covered through my insurance because it's all elective tests and surgery. boo-urns. I still go in to Daegu MMA once in a while to coach Un Sik's wrestling and hit some pads. I can do a few things as far as working out, but can't do anything dynamic which is extremely frustrating. I've been really streaky with my workouts for the last month, mostly because I'm getting so bored of doing the few things I can do over and over and over and over again. I'll have a good week where I get 5 good sessions in (sad that that's a good week for me now) and then a week where I can't stand the thought of doing the same stuff any more and won't workout at all. I think I can hear myself getting fatter.

Suspicious Happenings in the World of MMA

2010-04-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

HUM DRUM KOREA
I realized that I haven't written much about living in Korea lately. It's not that I've run out of things to write about, it's just that I've been here for long enough that everything seems normal now. Getting pushed around by old ladies in the subway? Normal. Being buzzed by motorbikes when walking on the sidewalk? Par for the course. Kamikaze cab drivers? I don't even bat an eye. Twelve bucks for a dinner for two... what the? Expensive!
My day to day life here is pretty much like at home. Go to work, go to the gym, eat, sleep, repeat until weekend. The only real difference is that I can't read most of the street signs and I can swear in public as much as I please because nobody can understand me anyways. I'm going to have to try and curb that one before I come back to save myself some trouble.
We've been lucky with nice weekend weather and have been out and about most days off. Last weekend we went to the Daegu Sports Museum (we happened to be walking by), which should have been called the World Cup Stadium Museum as it ignored some of the professional sports teams in the city and only dealt with teams and events connected to the stadium. There were a few interactive displays inside that were kind of cool, but otherwise it was a little on the boring side.

This thing timed your first 10m and averaged how fast you would be over 100m. yeah, it says 10.72. I felt pretty awesome about that until Lisa intentionally jumped the gun and ran 8.72. Whatever Lisa, why is everything a competition with you?

KOREANS GETTING ROBBED IN AMERICA!
The WEC put on their first pay per view card on the weekend. The event was pretty damn good, definitely better than any of the recent UFC or Strikeforce cards. Come to think of it, every WEC card that I've seen has been really good. I hope they got a good number of PPV buys. If the WEC can do a few PPV shows per year that do well it means that the smaller fighters can start earning what they're worth. For the first time this event had the same amount of bonus money for KO, submission and fight of the night as UFC events (65 g's) instead of the usual 25 grand that they get in the WEC. I also heard that fight money for this event was much better as well.
On a side note, Korean fighter Chang Sung Jung "The Korean Zombie" got robbed in a decision vs. Leonard Garcia. It was a bit of a slobberknocker to say the least. The fighters pretty much stood in front of each other and threw punches, kicks and knees at each other to see who would go down first. I watched it twice to make sure living in Korea wasn't giving me a bias towards Chang, but I don't think it did. Don't take my word that Chang got robbed though, check it out for yourself here and see what you think. On a side note to the side note. Chang Sung Jung beat my teammate Heung Kol, in the finals of the Korean "Super Tournament" a few years ago by split decision.

WORST PHANTOM PUNCH EVER?
Fedor's little brother Aleksander Emelyanenko is a pretty tough dude. He was a pretty good heavyweight in the PRIDE days. Unfortunately, Aleks has Hepatitis and can't get medical clearance to fight in countries or organizations that use legit athletic commissions. He still fights though. Usually against no namers in countries you'd be hard pressed to find on the map. On the weekend he fought a guy named Eddy Bengsston. He knocked the guy out with a jab that I'm pretty sure didn't even connect. If the guy was getting paid to take a dive he could have made it look a lot better than that. Even Emelyanenko looked confused when the guy went down. Here's the fight, go to the 1:35 mark to see the punch in question.

By popular demand... ENGRISH!

This one kind of makes sense... I see kids in my class eating bugers all the time. Props to Lisa for spotting this one.

Just in case it's your first day on your new legs and you need some detailed, colour coded instructions on how to WALK!

2010-04-20T08:36:00.000-07:00

The Tornado is Back... Big Time
Un Sik "Tornado" Song (8-0) finished his mandatory military service about a month ago. It didn't take him long to get back in the action. Un Sik fought two weeks ago in DEEP: Grachan against Atsushi Ueda (8-3) and won via unanimous decision. He said he had his opponent in a deep triangle and an armbar and had the guy fully mounted but couldn't finish him. He seemed a bit embarassed that he gassed towards the end of the fight, but give the guy a break, he hadn't fought in two years. Now that he's back to training full time his conditioning shouldn't be a factor for long. Un Sik isn't working a part time job, and is instead focusing on fighting. He has set himself a pretty tough schedule for his first months back. After his last fight he has a pro kickboxing match next month and then another fight in DEEP the month after that. If he wins that fight it looks like he'll be getting a title shot against Katsunori Kikuno (13-2), who also fights in DREAM. The return of 'Tornado San" has been getting some decent attention on the interwebs, with articles and people commenting about his fight here, here and here.

Un Sik has really been working on his wrestling a lot lately. I haven't been able to scrimmage with him lately but we work technique together and then I run him through drills and situational scrimmaging with other guys. the speed that he picks up techniques is mind blowing. His kinesthetic memory is probably the best I've ever seen. He can see a complicated technique once and use it in a live situation almost immediately. Scary. he's really jacked about the improvement in his wrestling. Yesterday he told me that in 20 amateur and professional fights he has never scored a takedown on a leg attack and that is going to do it in his next fight. We've also been doing a lot of pummeling and clinch work, especially against the wall. His last fight and his next one are in a cage and it's an area of MMA he's never really worked on before. It seems like more and more Japanese organizations are starting to use cages and Asian fighters definitely need to learn that part of the game.

Here's a video of me, Heung Kol and Un Sik in between matches at a tournament.

Un Sik and John warming up before some kickboxing sparring.

In other Daegu MMA news "Little GSP" as he's known, has his first kcikboxing match coming up next month. he's been working pretty hard with a lot of the older guys. It's kind of fun to watch a 16 year old kid go from total goofball to focused fighter training for a fight. This kid has really stepped up his training in the last while and I'll be keeping my eye on him when I leave Korea.

Engrishee!
I spotted a good piece of Konglish on my drink the other day. Koreans love their vitamin drinks. I don't even know what kind of vitamins are in these drinks but they must be good right? Even if there's nothing in it at least I'll feel more confident, at least according to the copy on the can.

Ho Shin Sool, KING OF THE CAGE and XCC

The boys are ready to rock again. Jeff, Ray, Trevor and Johnny are going to represent Ho Shin Sool at King of the Cage on May 8th at the Dreamakes Theater. Everything I heard about the last event was great, here's hoping this one is just as good and better. My brother, Mitch, and Adrian Vilaca are also going to be fighting soon in Birch Run, under the MUTT MMA banner. Here's the poster for the KOTC event, with Trevor and Jeff on it. I heard that there are some renovations coming up at Ho Shin Sool. After seeing that poster I hope they put a tanning bed in the basement.

Genki Sudo Appreciation

Living in Asia I've really learned a lot about the Asian MMA scene. I've learned a lot about a lot of differnt fighters and seen a lot of awesome fights that have never been broadcasted in North America. One fighterthat I've become a huge fan of is Genki Sudo. I always knew who he was, but never knew much about him until recently. The guy is a phenomenal fighter, carries a positive message with him all the time and is very interesting to listen to in his inerviews. Sudo started as a wrestler, but developed all around MMA skills so quickly that he was soon taking on and beating World Class kickboxers in Striking only K1 matches. His fighting style is impossible to pin down. He might switch from a pure grappling style into drunken boxing before throwing in "the robot" and using his Muay Thai to finish a fight. That's to say nothing of his ring entrances that make Mayhem Miller look like he's walking in off the street in jeans and a T Shirt. Genki Sudo fought in the UFC three times, going 2-1 but fought most of his fights in Asia, which is too bad for North American fans. Do yourself a favour and watch the documentary that I posted at the top right. It's about 40 minutes long and split into 5 parts. I posted the first two. It's a cool documentary with good fight highlights and interviews and it's well produced. I have a tough time imagining that any MMA fan could watch the documentary and not be a fan of the guy. As a matter of fact I think everyone, fight fan or not, would appreciate a lot of the interview sections. After all, Sudo mentions that to him MMA was a in many ways just the medium to get his message across to as large an audience as possible.

2010-04-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

Jiu Jitsu Jim, He's a Good Guy.
I've got this buddy named Jim Alers, he's a pretty bad dude. He's a professional 145 lb mma fighter, like me. We didn't meet fighting though. We met quite a few years ago when we were working at the same summer camp in Pennsylvania. At the time Jim had recently finished his highschool wrestling career and was starting his journey into Jiu Jitsu. I had pretty much wrapped up my University wrestling career, but hadn't started training in MMA yet. Fast forward about five years and we both have 4-1 pro MMA records in the featherweight divisions as well as some victories in assorted grappling competitions. We still talk fairly regularly, especially when one of us has an upcoming fight.
Recently Jim did something spectacular. Fighting as a purple belt and representing Gracie Barra Orlando, Jim won the purple belt division of the Abu Dhabi World Championships qualifier. Pretty awesome, but not as awesome as what happened after that. Winning his division earned him an invite into the brown/black belt division, which he proceeded to win. Winning the brown/black division punched Jim's all expenses paid trip to the World Championships in Abu Dhabi. WILD! Now Jim will surely be in deep water when he heads to Abu Dhabi today but you gotta love his attitude. Talking to him last week, Jim is pumped about the tournament and is going with a nothing to lose outlook and the intention of giving hell to each of his opponents. Good luck dude, can't wait to hear about it. Check out the video below. It has a few highlights of Jim's last two matches at the trials and some awesome shots of him after his win.
Highlights of Jim Alers at the Abu Dhabi World Cup Trials from Panic Pulse on Vimeo.

And Now, More About Me.
I haven't written much lately because, to be honest, there hasn't been much to write about. A little over a month ago I started having some general pain. I didn't think much of it, sucked it up and kept training. After all, I'm a man, man. After a few weeks the pain started to get a lot worse and I had to drop the training completely. I went to the hospital and have had appointments with two surgeons. I have no solid information on the problem, just an educated guess and an appointment booked for a very expensive MRI. It's been over three weeks of no real training (plus a few weeks of very light training) and it's starting to feel a little bit better, but I still can't do much.
As of right now I'm in the difficult position deciding which course of action to take. I could get the costly MRI and wait to get surgery at home if needed (as an elective surgery it won't be covered by my insurance here). I could also skip the MRI altogether and hope the injury heals itself. If it doesn't get better I can wait to get home and get everything done then. The obvious drawback to that is the long wait times at home. Decisions, decisions.

On a more positive side, the weather has been starting to warm up and we've been able to get out and travel a bit more. Every city, town and gas station in Korea seems to have their own festival of some kind so we've started checking a few of them out. A few weeks ago we went to the Chungdo Bullfighting festival. This wasn't man vs. bull fighting though, it was two bulls that smashed their heads and horns together until one ran away scared and tired. Some of the fights went for 15 or 20 minutes with a lot of stalemating. Some people thought it was lame. I thought it was fantastic.
On the same trip we also went to an abandoned train tunnel that had been converted into a winery and restaurant/bar. Not shabby.

A couple of stubborn bulls fighting

Wine tunnel

Last weekend we traveled to Gyeungu to check out the cherry blossom festival. Lisa and I went with our friends Freddie and Kaelegh and just happened to meet up with two other friends, Tim and Vee, on the bus. When we got to the city we rented some bikes and ripped around town. We saw some cool monuments and temples, but nothing mind blowing.

Kaelegh, Lisa and Freddie riding under the cherry blossoms

Canadian Wrestling Championships
Special shout out to Reyanna Sangestino who wrestles for the Sault Wrestling Club. For the second year in a row Reyanna advanced to the championship match at the National Wrestling Championships. This year she one-upped her performance from last season to become the Canadian Champion. She`s the first national champ from the Sault in a while. Way to go.

A Couple of old Teammates Squaring off for all the Marbles.
When I was in highschool our wrestling team was one of better girls teams around. One of my teammates from those days is Amanda Gerhart who recently won the Senior National Championships at the 59 kg weight class. The tricky thing about the nationals this year is that the women`s national team was competing at the World Cup while the nationals were going on. This means that there will be a special wrestle off between the national team member and the winner of the National Championships to determine this year`s national team member. Interestingly enough, the girl that Amanda will be wrestling is Katie Patroch, a teammate of mine from University. Who to root for? Nobody and both, I guess. Both girls have competed internationally at the World Championships, the Pan Ams and the World Cup and are among the toughest people that I know.

Various Assorted Miscelania...

2010-03-23T20:48:00.000-07:00

A few months ago someone spilled a drink on my computer and fried it. We'll call this guy B. Vance. No, no, that's too obvious, let's call him Brian V. The computer itself was pretty much garbage but I was bummed out about all the files that were on there that I had lost. I finally brought my computer to the "magic Korean computer man" that runs a shop in our neighbourhood and he lived up to his reputation. Not only did he recover the files, he also fixed the computer and cleaned it up to make it run way faster. Total cost? About $40. Nobody does service industry like Koreans, that's for sure. Since I've got all of my files back I've got way more videos and pictures to post. Like this one.

This is a banner that one of my sponsors made from some pictures of some of their fighters. The cool part isn't that I'm in ad (okay, I thought that was pretty cool too), it's that the guy beside me on the right is Jon Jones. Yeah, the same Jon Jones that just busted up Brandon Vera and is making a statement as one of the toughest 205 lbers in the UFC.

The Fight Scene
Before last week I had put in real solid few weeks of training. Good jiu jitsu classes, wrestling and kickboxing with Un Sik and lots of MMA sparring. Heung Kul is leaving this friday to represent Korea at the Abu Dhabi Asian tournament. Usually all of good jiu jitsu guys come in at different times, but lately everyone's been in all together to help get Heung Kul ready for the tournament. The training has been pretty awesome, and I like Heung Kul's chances.
There has also been a fighter from one of our affiliate clubs in Daejeon up training for the last week. He has a title fight in a minor Japanese organization next month and has been around to get some good sparring in. Over the last while I became one of his main training and sparring partners which has been great for me.
Unfortunately all of the training hasn't been great for a nagging injury that just won't go away. Over the last few weeks it has become worse and worse to the point that walking up stairs is a bit of a challenge. I'm going to take a little time away from training because I am apparently incapable of going to the club and not getting sucked into a few sparring sessions. Hopefully it's nothing serious, but we'll have to see how the injury settles down over the next little while. In the meantime I'll be hitting the local outdoor gym to keep my sanity and to make sure that when I feel good I'll still be ready to go.

Still Konglish
Here are a few pictures of funny Korean signs that I've run across lately. I wish I had my camera on me all the time, unless you live here it's almost impossible to understand how often you see hilariously misspelled or miss worded signs and advertisements.

I feel it baby, I feel it.

This one is in every subway station in the city.

I'm glad the Korean toothpaste industry is finally standing up to the evil forces of calculus, algebra and trigonometry.

Ultimate

Our second season of Ultimate Frisbee is underway and the league has a different look than last season. The league is growing. We have six teams of 14 or 15 players and there are players that travel from Busan and Deajeon every week just to play in the league. The quality of play is much higher this season and the games are a lot closer than in the past. There are a lot of really good athletes in the league and some people with some serious disc skills. Most of our friends play in the league and more than anything it's a great way to get together with a bunch of other foreigners and spend an active Sunday afternoon. Here are some shots of all the action.

Daegu Hurricane. You might notice I'm the captain. I'm kind of a big deal. Ha. I'm actually about the 5th or 6th best player on our team. I just got the job because no one else wanted it.

Freddie and Yeung Min, two of the speediest guys in the league. I always get matched up on these guys when we play their teams. Good times.

Edwin, a nice addition to the Hurricanes this season, stretches for a grab.

This is my teammate Steve after Vance broke his nose. Yeah, the same Vance that broke my computer.
That guy is a menace.

2010-03-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

By popular demand,
Other People's Pain: Pt. II
People seemed to really like the story I posted about karma and the guy who got it where it counts. Everybody loves hearing about other people's pain. With that thought in mind I'd like to tell you a little story I was recently reminded me of. Don't worry, it doesn't involve the mutilation of any sexual organs this time.

Me and my brother, Mitch, were born four years apart. That seems like nothing now that I'm 28 and he's 24. People who meet us now assume that he's the older one as often as they get it right. He's a pretty big guy these days and a National Champion as a wrestler. He can generally handle himself. That wasn't the case when I was 10 and he was 6, though. I was by no means a big kid, but my brother was definitely small at that age.
During these years we took the school bus across town to go to school. Some of the kids on our bus were less than class acts. One kid in particular, Tanner was his name, fancied himself a tough guy and was a bit of a bully. Tanner was right between me and my brother age wise, meaning he wouldn't mess with me but had no problem picking on my younger, smaller brother. I didn't know this had been going on until my brother said something about it.
The jist of it was that my brother wanted me to beat up the older kid who was picking on him. This was something that I wasn't opposed to; my brother and I had been taught, even at this early age, that you always stick up for your family, no mater what. I told him that I would handle it but he should try sticking up for himself first. I told him that I would watch and if something happened I'd drop the hammer.
The next day as we got off the bus I hung back but stayed close enough to my brother to see what would happen. I watched as Tanner walked up behind Mitch and pushed in the back, knocking him down with the palms of his hands skidding on the loose concrete. As if he was in a movie, Mitch slowly picked himself out of the dust and turned towards his antagonizer. In one hand he had his backpack that had fallen off his back during the tumble. In the other he held his marble bag. His 'David's sling', if you will.
It's important to remember that in the year 1991 the best marble player was king of the playground. By this point in the evolution of competitive marble playing all of the good action was in 'Jumbos' and 'Super Jumbo's' that were about the size of golf balls.
Mitch stood there, hesitating for a few seconds, and let the marble bag slide through his hand until he was holding it by the end of the drawstring; a full two feet of slack holding five or six 'Super Jumbos' at the end. When Mitch finally swung that marble bag at Tanners head he did so with every ounce of strength his six year old body could muster. The sound the marble bag made when it hit Tanner in the temple is what I imagine it would sound like if you hit a watermelon with a ball peen hammer. Tanner dropped like a sack of wet noodles. If there was a referee hiding in the bushes he would surely have stopped the fight because of the flash KO. If there was a fight doctor on the scene he would have stopped the fight because of the massive cut on the side of Tanners head.
There was a lot of blood right away. Tanner was just lying there and Mitch was standing there staring at him, not sure what to do next. I decided for him.
"Run!" was the only logical thing I could think of. Mitch came back from whatever place he was mentally visiting and ran home as fast as he could. Tanner eventually picked himself up and carried himself home, wailing like a banshee the whole way.
I don't remember the exact time frame, but eventually Tanner's mother called our house to raise hell. Mom was pissed. Dad was pissed. Mitch got it pretty good. Eventually my parents came around to ask me what exactly happened. I told the whole story, right from the start, and that changed things. Sticking up for yourself and giving a bully his deservesies was different than smacking some kid in the head with a sack of marbles for no reason. That was pretty much the end of Tanner picking on Mitch or anyone else for that matter. Once everyone knew that the bully had been dethroned kids weren't as scared of him anymore. As for Tanner I have no idea what he's up to in life but I know that he has a permanent reminder about the dangers of bullying in the form of a scar from eight stitches in the side of his head.
I guess this could be another story about karma, but I like to think of it in terms of a funny T-shirt I saw once. "Violence is never the answer, but sometimes it's the solution"
I'm fully against fighting outside of a sanctioned, organized and refereed sports event, but sometimes sticking up for yourself or others trumps that.

Frustration Mounts
I still haven't found a fight in Asia. I have a line on a few possible events in May, but still nothing solid. It's frustrating on it's own, but even more so because I just found out that a guy (Kyung Ho Kang) that I stomped in Combat Sambo not too long ago just fought in Sengoku. The guy didn't even last three minutes with me and he followed that up by fighting in one of the bigger MMA events in the world. He lost, but he sure had his moments, almost catching his opponent in an omoplata. Further investigation reveals that this guy has also fought in DEEP and the Art of War promotions. Seriously... somebody give me a shot somewhere... please.

Alternative Treatment
I'm not really into holistic medicine as a rule but I'd been having some back pain that was nagging and making it hard to sleep at night. I'm sure that there are solid physiolog9ical reasons why a lot of eastern remedies work, I could just do without all of the airy fairyness that goes along with it. A few friends had recommended a local acupuncturist so I figured I'd give it a try, despite not wanting to listen to someone tell me about why my chi is out of alignment, my chakra is all wrong and my aura is suffering.
I was pleasantly surprised when I got the the office. Dr. Lim (I know, it would be funnier if it was spelled Limb, but still funny) is a western trained M.D. who happens to have some other certifications including acupuncture. To boot, the guy spoke great English. I was in to his office with some needles stuck in various parts of my body within 10 minutes. I was out the door in 20, feeling amazing and didn't have to listen to anything about my physical/spiritual balance. The pain isn't completely gone, but there was a definite and immediate improvement. There are lots of different kinds of acupuncture and I can't say much about most of them but Intramuscular acupuncture sure has it's place.

2010-03-08T19:22:00.000-08:00

DREAMing?
DREAM FC is having their first event outside of Japan in April and luckily for me it's going to be in Seoul. Daegu MMA is planning a big "family trip" to go watch which should be tons of fun. No idea yet about who's on the card but hopefully they put some of the big names on it.

Real Korean Dinner
On Friday I stayed and trained at the club pretty late. As I was leaving some of the Koreans asked if I wanted to go for family dinner with them. They took me to a little restaurant down the street. The word restaurant is a bit flattering. The place had two actual walls while the other two were made from a heavy duty clear plastic tarp. The tables were old oil drums flipped upside down with a coal burner in the middle. These places are pretty common in Korea, but it's hard to go in and order if you don;t speak Korean very well. I like having Korean friends who take me to legitimately Korean places. I know some people here who pretty much stick to the foreign community and never experience a lot of the cool things Korea has to offer.

Monkey Boy
There are four 15 and 16 year old kids that train at Daegu MMA everyday. They're pretty damn good. Before I leave I`ll be writing down their names to keep for future reference; I think we might be hearing from some of them in the future. One kid in particular cracks me up. He calls himself `little GSP`. I call him `monkey boy`. He loves the UFC more than anything and makes me laugh all the time. He does some hilarious impressions of some UFC fighters. I tried to get him to do a few but he was a little camera shy and only did two of them. Check it out, I think his Anderson Silva and Dan Henderson takes are pretty on point.

Lil' Korean buddy from Brent Fryia on Vimeo.

Belt Testing
For the last few months all of the guys from Daegu MMA have been telling me that I should test for my blue belt before I leave to go home. I thought that would be a great idea and told them that I would do it. Then they kept hassling me about. Again. And again. And. Again. At least once a week someone would remind me about it. I know there are belt tests every two months so I wasn't too worried about it. Last Tuesday they told me that there was a test on Sunday that I should go to. I told them that I didn't think I was ready to test for my blue belt at which point they informed me that I had to test for my FIRST STRIPE on my white belt. Silly me, I was under the impression that you tested for your blue belt and if you didn't get it you were awarded however many stripes the instructors thought you deserved. I don't know why I thought that, but i did. I should have known there was no cutting the line here, especially since there's guys here who have been white belts for over two years.
The belt test was administered by a visiting black belt, Jae Hoon (brown belt) and Un Sik (purple belt). There were a few guys from our club testing for various stripes and my friend Yeung Sey testing for his blue belt. there were also 8 or 10 guys from other clubs who were testing for various stripes of white and another guy who was testing for his blue belt. The group was split into 2. The first group was for anyone testing for their first or second stripe white belt and everyone else was in the second group. Each group had about a half hour technique session where they were asked by the upper belts to demonstrate various guard passes, sweeps, submission and proper positional control. Even thought the test for one stripe was very basic it was actually nice to spend that much time working on some fundamental stuff.
After the technique session each group had a 25 minute sparring session with rotating partners. This is where Being with the lower level group I felt a little bit like Adam Sandler in 'Billy Madison'. You know that scene where he says `now you`re all in BIG, BIG trouble!` That`s how I felt. When I spar with the younger or less experienced guys I usually give up some positions and work from a disadvantage. This day was a little different because of the testing. I went pretty hard and didn`t cut anybody any slack. When my group was finished the evaluators moved me into the more advanced group for sparring. That was fine by me as I wasn`t too keen to sit around watching for a half hour and I usually spar with the upper level belts anyways.
After the evaluation the instructors conferred for a while while we layed around and stretched out. Eventually they called everyone t line up for the awarding of belts and stripes. There was a lot of bowing and traditional stuff going on that I had no idea about. I did my best to just follow what the guys next to me were doing and not look like a pumpkin in a watermelon patch. When I was awarded my sad, lonely little stripe on my belt all of the older guys from the club laughed at me. Fair enough, I think most of the guys that I tested with were more concerned about their 10th grade math test than their jiu jitsu belt test. When Un Sik gave me the stripe on my belt he said Ì think you four stripes but today one stripe`, which at least let me know were I stood in terms of actual ability. At least if I test every two months until I leave I`ll have all 4 stripes and will be able to test for my blue belt as soon as I get back to Canada.
It`s interesting to note that not everyone was awarded the rank they were testing for. Yeung Sey did get his blue belt which was a pretty big deal, but the guy who came from one of the other clubs did not. It`s nice to know that it isn`t a `pay and get your belt`kind of deal and that everything has to be earned.

Something I love about Korea.
Dedicated space to run and play. Space is at a premium in Korea. The country is about the size of southern Ontario, is 70% mountains and has 50 million people. Needless to say buildings expand vertically, not horizontally. Despite this, almost every middle and high school has beautiful full sized turf fields and fully rubberized tracks. When not being used by the schools these playgrounds are a freee for al for anyone to play whatever game or sport they choose. There are always young kids with their parents playing some games, old folks walking the track and some serious athletes training all in the same place. it`s pretty cool to see a country recognize the importance of physical activity and set aside space specifically for that purpose, even when it would be wildly profitable to use the space for something else.

A typical school field near my house where I occasionally go to run, kick a ball or throw a frisbee.

Something I hate about Korea

Bath towels. Towels here are about the size of a dollar bill and just as absorbent. That`s fine if you`re Korean. Koreans have less body hair as adults than I did when I was born. Most of them could probably just dry themselves with a squeegee, so the tiny towels are probably ok. If, on the other hand, youve ever been mistaken for a throw rug, like I have, these things just don`t cut it. I`m glad we brought a few regular towels when we came.

Good Action!

2010-02-08T23:20:00.000-08:00

After not competing for the first four months of being in Korea I've now competed twice in a month. It feels good to get back into a competitive environment and let everything fly.
This weekend was the Korean Machado Open. The tournament was mostly the Jiu Jitsu teams affiliated with Team Machado in Korea (there are six) but there was a smattering of guys form other clubs as well. As a sidebar, the word "Machado" was misspelled on one of the main tournament banners as "Machdo". I am coming to expect things like this from Korea. Luckily for me this tournament was in Daegu which meant no late night/early morning weight cutting and no having to pull our coach out of a gentleman's club before the tournament like last time. It also meant I could get home at a reasonable hour instead of going to bed at 2:30 am after fighting all day and then having to work in the morning.

A little more Konglish.. you can't escape it.

The tournament was held in a large school gym, like most tournaments in North America. One of the big differences is that in Korea they tend not to heat a lot places that we heat at home. Places like bathrooms, hallways and, you guessed it, school gyms. The tournament was generally well organized but the lack of heat made things tough. The mats were so hard we might as well have been fighting on the gym floor. Getting warmed up for a matches was a major challenge. If you look at the pictures and video you can see that just about everybody is wearing a winter coats in the gym, even the referees and most of the guys warming up. I'm surprised there weren't more injuries with guys jumping in to action with cold and stiff muscles.
I competed in the gi and no-gi divisions, with this being the first time I ever competed in the gi. I won my first match by armbar after two quick takedowns for points. That would be the last takedown I scored all day. It turns out my first opponent had a reputation as being pretty decent in the takedown department. After my match with him not one single opponent would fight me on the feet. Every guy "buttflopped' as soon as the ref said "fight" They just sat right down and tried to pull me into their guard to avoid being taken down and giving up points. It got so ridiculous at one point that when one of my opponents in no gi sat down I sat down too. We looked pretty stupid sitting there facing each other. He stood up, I stood up. He sat back down, I sat back down. I was trying to make a point but I think it got lost in translation.

My first ever Gi Jiu Jitsu match

I won my first two matches in the gi and then lost in the semi final. The match was very close, but I eventually got caught in a triangle after fending off a half dozen submission attempts. I wasn't altogether happy with the match as I got caught being a little lazy. I was also rushing things. Every time I would get an advantage position I was in such a hurry to score that I made careless mistakes and missed my opportunity. That was the end of my day in the gi. I was awarded the bronze medal as they simply give bronze medals to the losers of the semi finals. I would much rather have fought to declare a true bronze medalist.
When the no gi division started I made a conscious effort to try and finish all of my opponents as opposed to try and outwrestle them and hang on for a points victory. I wanted to attack with submissions and really see where I was i that department. I was at the tournament to test my jiu jitsu after all, not my wrestling.
I won my first no gi match by north-south choke fairly quickly, my second by armbar, and my third by D'arce choke. I was on a roll. I was especially happy with my second match. even thought the score was 0-0 when I submitted him I had threatened with an armbar, triangle and kimura before finishing with an armbar. The video of the match is posted in the top right corner. You can also see how impressed I was after the guy buttflopped 0.01 seconds into the match.
My third match irked me a little bit. I was winning 5-0 when we got into a scramble. I ended up on top in half guard. I set up the D'arce and hit it just the way I wanted to. I heard the guy say "tap, tap" so I let go and rolled off. When I rolled off of him, the guy tackled me and tried to take me down. I looked up at the ref with the universal expression for "What the....?". He shrugged his shoulders and gave me the universal look for "What? Keep fighting." Luckily for me we were right beside the chair judge when the guy verbally submitted. The chair judge came over and explained to the ref that the other guy definitely submitted. Even though I won I was a little cheezed. That's dirty pool where I come from, especially at a tournament where all of the teams are loosely affiliated.
Three wins put me in the finals against the same guy who beat me in the gi division. This time I knew his game a little bit and came with a much better game plan of my own. I was patient while still pressuring him for most of the match. When I was able to gain a slight advantage I kept the pressure on without rushing. I was eventually able to win the match by a score of 6-0 with one solid submission attempt. Sweet redemption.
On the whole I finished the tournament 6-1 with four submissions. The level of competition wasn't ridiculously high, but I managed to have some good scraps and was pretty happy overall. Finishing off the day by avenging my loss from earlier was a nice cherry to top it off.

Most of Team Machado Korea (Those who were still around after the awards ceremony).

Tournament notes
It was cool to have some friends come out to watch. I've never been the kind of guy to say "come out and watch me compete" but when people show up it's always nice.

Extra limbs? It's hard not to stereotype physical traits to an ethnic group when every single Korean I've trained with or competed against has a kind of flexibility that boggles my mind. Sometimes I have an opponent down and think I know exactly what's going on only to have an unaccounted for leg creep around into a dangerous position. I can clearly remember thinking "where the hell is that leg coming from?" during a match this weekend.

Team Wayguk. There are four foreigners (waygukins) who train regularly at Daegu MMA. All four of us competed. I think if we would have entered simply as "Team Wayguk" we would have done pretty well in the No Gi division. We finished with 3 golds and one silver.
There were a couple of other foreigners who came to the tournament from Gwanju. One of them was a blue belt from the Gracie Orlando school. I talked to him for a while and was glad to hear him echo my sentiments regarding the quality of competitors in Korea. He agreed that the standards for advancing in rank here seem very high compared to North America.

Where are the wrestlers? Jiu Jitsu is a growing sport in Korea. I wonder when Korean wrestlers are going to start crossing over like they have in North America. Korean wrestles have a reputation for being as tough as nails, they could do some serious damage in the sport.

Something awesome about Korea:
Sports on TV. Since I've been here I've watched the World Handball Championships, World Weightlifting (Olympic lifting) Championships, Korean Ssirrum (traditional wrestling) championships, Asian Table Tennis Championships and every major MMA event free on cable TV. Don't get me wrong, I love watching football and can be convinced to watch playoff hockey, baseball or basketball but the variety of sports that air here is awesome.
Something not awesome about Korea:
My apartment. Brutally cold, heat and water that breaks in the middle of winter, no air conditioning for the monsoon season and mold on the walls.

Special Shout Out:
To my buddy Jim Alers. Jim and I met when working at Camp Cayuga a few years ago. Jim is a 4-0 pro fighter and recently won the East Coast Abu Dhabi trials in the purple belt division. Way to go dude, have fun in Dubai.

Karma is real and it will get you where it hurts

2010-02-04T07:58:00.000-08:00

This post is completely unrelated to MMA, Korea or anything else that I've written about before, but it is kind of funny in an "oh my god, I can't believe that really happened to somebody" kind of way.
To start off, I am far from a religious person. Some of the coolest people that I've met are religious, but then again, so are some of the biggest slime balls I've ever met. I do however believe pretty strongly in the idea of Karma. Not in a Hippy, sarong wearing, yoga practicing kind of way, but more like a "if you do good things for people you will be a happier person and people will be more inclined to help you if you're ever in need" kind of way. I don't believe that there is some actual sentient, cosmic being that decides who gets what dished out to them based on what they've done previously, but I do remember the first time that something happened that really made me think that karma will get 'ya if you deserve it.

PART I
For those of you who don't know, I used to teach flying trapeze. Yep. Flying Trapeze. Like in the circus. Don't believe me? Check out the vid at the top right. That's me, trying to throw a double backflip to my catcher, and good friend, Adam. As you can see, I missed.
To make a long story short, I used to go to a summer camp where flying trapeze was one of the activities. I loved the trapeze and caught on pretty quick. Eventually I ended up working at the camp, teaching trapeze. After my first year of University I got a job as a summer camp counselor in Pennsylvania. I was hired to teach wrestling and football. They also had a trapeze at the camp but that wasn't initially on my contract. When word leaked out hat I had actually worked on a trapeze rig for a few years my job immediately changed to full time trapeze staff. I worked at the camp for a long time, eventually taking over the trapeze program when my boss moved to Europe.

This is a picture of me catching my friend Jay with no safety lines. As you can imagine, having trust in your catcher is pretty important.

In my first year I worked, with 6 other staff, under a great trapeze director and an assistant trapeze director who was not so great. The assistant director had some experience, but was careless and sloppy. When you are launching kids off of a 32 foot platform attached to a few safety lines carelessness is not a good quality. When campers "fly" on the trapeze, they are always hooked into safety lines. Staff and instructors use the safety lines to practice new tricks and only take them off when they can consistently "catch" the trick. The person running the safety lines is extremely important. They can control part of the swing and prevent nasty falls. The tricky part is keeping the lines tight enough to prevent whiplash, but not too tight that it slows the swing. The assistant director had a nasty habit of letting the lines run with too much slack. This can be dangerous if the flyer suddenly falls. When the flyer catches up to the slack in the lines there is a huge whiplash effect. The assistant director had been told plenty of times to keep the lines tighter. He knew what he had to do, but he was a slack-ass and was only paying half attention, half of the time.
On one particular camp day I was working with the assistant director to fly some kids. The assistant director was on the safety lines and I was the "catcher"; the guy who hangs from his knees and catches the flyer by the wrists after they've done their trick and before they fall to their doom in the pit of alligators, rusty nails and used needles that lay underneath. Ok, it was a safety net, but I've still seen some nasty injuries from falling into it incorrectly. Regardless, I was catching and he was puling lines. As one kid swung towards me I felt one of the lines slap me in the face. That should never happen and meant that the lines were way too loose. I let him know that the lines were too loose. He didn't seem to pay much attention.
The next kid flew towards me on the first swing. Normally this swing is used to gauge whether the timing is good or bad and the catcher can adjust their swing accordingly. The catcher and flyer then swing away from each other before the final swing back towards each other for the "catch". You can look at the video to get an idea of what I'm talking about. On this particular occasion though, when the kid swung towards me the safety lines were so loose that they looped around my back. Then we swung away from each other. Fast. The nylon and polyester safety rope (think climbing rope) ripped across my back so hard and so fast that some of the rope melted. Melted right into my back, in fact.
I didn't know it yet, but I had a burn on my back that went from my left hip diagonally up to my right shoulder and was an inch and a half wide. All I knew was that I was as much pain as I could ever remember being in. My brain was trying to sort out the furious rage and excruciating pain that I was feeling at the same time and figure out which was more important. I dropped down to the net and rolled to the ground with full intentions of administering a savage beating to the guy who was responsible. As I stormed towards him I could feel the eyes of all of the kids on me. They knew something was up and wanted to see what I was going to do. I caved. When I was five steps from the guy, I turned around and headed straight for the infirmary, which was luckily very close to where the trapeze was.
I couldn't see it yet, but I knew the burn was bad when the nurse took less than half of a second to declare that I had to go to the hospital immediately. I spent the next two hours on my stomach on a hospital bed while a doctor used a scalpel to remove melted pieces of nylon from my back. Most of my back had been frozen, which was good, but made walking afterwards tricky. With a huge burn on my back the next weeks weren't much fun. You move and twist your back when you do just about anything, so having a huge scar across your entire back makes things difficult. Sleeping was the worst. I couldn't sleep on my back. Sleeping on my stomach was fine until I budged one inch and the scar cracked and split, waking me up. I didn't sleep much for a while.
The worst part of all of the whole thing was that it was caused by someones gross incompetence and that he had been told over and over to fix the mistake he was making. The guy tried to apologize to me once. I made it abundantly clear that his best option was to stay as far away from me as possible, for as long as possible. I wasn't a fighter yet but had wrestled all my life and this guy liked to wear tights more than I did. I was pretty sure I could smash him into a new universe if I had to.

Part II:
While I was relegated to office work and other non-physical tasks around camp the assistant trapeze director, let's call him Nathan, because that's his name, continued to fumble his way around the trapeze rig. For a little while.
The main structure of a trapeze rig is 8 aluminum uprights that are about 32 feet high. Lots of gear is rigged to the top of these. When something needs to be fixed you have to climb up to the top to do it. When you're finished you simply slide down to the ground, like the fireman you always wished you were. Sometimes the uprights have to be adjusted a couple of inches to make everything line up properly. To move the uprights you insert a small metal crossbar through two holes near the bottom. You can then grab either side of the crossbar and use it to lift the upright and move it. The rule is that you must always take the crossbar out after moving the upright. Always.
If you've always wanted to be a detective instead of a fireman you might be able to see where this is going.
On one particular day, less than a week after I got back from the hospital, Nathan had been adjusting the uprights and climbing to the top to fix some rigging issues. On his way down, Nathan forgot that he had not removed the metal crossbar from the upright... as every other half brained staff member could tell you. Nathan liked to show off a little. He liked to slide to the bottom as fast as he could...
I'd like to say he remembered about the crossbar in time, but he didn't, and it would be a lie anyways. He hit that sucker at full speed. As luck or fate would have it I had just swung by the trapeze to see what was going on. When he hit the ground he popped up and immediately pulled out the waistband on his shorts to check the damage. I've got to hand it to the guy, he was pretty calm. He just said, "I have to go see the nurse." Like mine, Nathan's stop at the infirmary was brief before being whisked to the hospital.
Nathan had split himself in one of the most sensitive areas you could imagine. At the hospital he needed to have one of the marbles put back in the marble sack before being stitched up. Seven stitches in the burlap is not my idea of a good time, but I didn't feel particularly bad. His carelessness and incompetence had caused me a great deal of pain, and eventually did the same thing to him. I'm not a hateful person, but that's called poetic justice as far as I'm concerned. Nate didn't do a whole lot of work on the trapeze rig for the rest of the summer and it became a safer place to be around.
I guess if this was an Aesop's fable the moral of story would be "Don't be an arrogant show off or you'll get stitches in your jewel case." Or something like that.

Special Shout Outs: To all members of the Sault Wrestling Club who will be traveling to the provincial Championships soon. I hate the term good luck; real athletes want to win because of their skill and preparation, not luck. Instead I will say 'wrestle hard". Fight for every inch of mat space and every position. Fight to the whistle each and every time and make the ref peel you off of your opponent. Take the breaks off and go for it.

Just a Shorty

2010-01-27T06:40:00.000-08:00

Even tough guys aren't immune to Konglish
Just a quick note today...
After a slow week last week (I took a few days off to heal my body after the Sambo championships) I've been back at it hard this week. I think I'll be travelling to a jiu jitsu tournament in a few weeks so I'm trying to get as much mat time as possible.

Yesterday "Nuna", the club manager, gave me a bunch of patches to wear on my gi. I guess I've finally made the cut and can now represent the club with their logo on my back. One of my other teammates actually asked me a little while ago why I didn't have any Machado Jiu Jitsu or Daegu MMA patches on my gi. I told him that he would know better that me since I don't speak Korean and had no idea how to get some. The best part about the patches though is the "Konglish" phrase on one of them. It's a pretty typical English translation from Korea. Check it out.

I can see what they're getting at, but I think they were after something like "Those who desire victory must be willing to pay the price."

I'll be heading out of Daegu again for another tournament on Feb. 7th. After not competing for so long it's nice to get two tournaments in a month. They are calling this tournament the National Championships, but it's really only the National Championships for jiu jitsu clubs that are affiliated with Machado Jiu Jitsu. From what I hear, the quality of competition is quite high, as I would imagine. In the gi tournament There are two divisions for white belt (basic and advanced), the blue belts get their own division and purple, brown and black belts all compete together. In No-Gi there are beginner, intermediate and advanced divisions. I'll be competing in the advanced white belt (gi) category and making a big jump to the advanced division in no gi. Even in the white belt division I'm sure to have some trouble. It's possible that I wouldn't even win my weight class if there was a white belt tournament just for Daegu MMA members. There's a few guys around my weight who give me tons of trouble everyday in training.

Something Awesome about Korea:

The city bus system. I know I've talked about transit here before but the bus system here puts most North American bus systems to shame. The buses run every ten minutes, but that's not even the best part. Every bus has 3 identifying numbers. Each number corresponds to a part of town. For example: I live in Siji. Siji is #9 on the bus routes. That means I can get on the 459, 938, 129, 396 or any bus that has the #9 anywhere in it's number. You don;t have to know the bus route or schedules at all. It's so easy it's almost ridiculous.

Something not so Awesome about Korea:

Sidewalks made of marble and smooth stone. When it rains the sidewalks are mega slippery. You know those slippery shoes that curlers wear on one foot to glide down the ice? Try wearing two of them and then getting to work on an ice rink. That's what it's like when it rains here. It's extra dangerous when you are stepping from a surface with good grip to the smooth stone. You're lucky if your lead foot doesn't go shooting ahead of you and split you in half for your troubles.

Life hurts, but it's worth it.

2010-01-18T03:14:00.000-08:00

Today my whole life hurts. It hurts to smile. It hurts open and close my eyes. It hurts to walk and talk. I hurt my foot and I hurt my hand. I do not like green eggs and ham.
Saturday evening I left for Seoul to compete in the East Asian Sambo Championships. My first Sambo experience as well as my first time traveling and competing with my Daegu MMA teammates was a wild one. I'll give you the tournament highlights and fill in the blanks later. Just getting to the tournament to weigh in was as eventful as any single day I've had since I've been here.
There was a total of 12 fighters from Daegu MMA competing in all; five guys and one girl from our club (the main Daegu MMA site) and a few from the three other satellite clubs. On arrival at the tournament one of my teammates told me that I should let the weigh in official know that I was going to weigh in for Sport Sambo and Combat Sambo at the same time. This was news to me as I didn`t know I was competing in Combat Sambo and I knew none of the other guys from my gym were. Combat Sambo is pretty much MMA. It allows full contact striking as well as takedowns and submissions. You wear headgear, shinpads and 4 oz. MMA gloves. You can win by knocking your opponent out, Submitting him or winning by points earned on takedowns and by gaining dominant position. I wasn`t particularly prepared for this. I had spent the last 2 weeks working mostly on takedowns and, thinking that I was only competing in sport Sambo. I hadn't done any standing sparring in at least that long. At the same time, I didn't want to miss an opportunity to test my skill sin a live situation. I was already registered, weighed in and paid for so I figured, what the heck, let's giv'er.
The Sport Sambo tournament was first and Hyon Gul and I were in the same weight class. Luckily for us we were on opposite sides of the draw. Here's how the tournament went for me.

Match #1: I ran up against a pretty solid wrestler right off the bat. We had a few good scrambles before I was able to take him down with a double. Once on the ground I realized that his groundskills were pretty basic. I passed to full mount quickly, he rolled to try and escape and I caught him with an armbar over the top. It was nice to get the tournament started with a submission "W". At some point in this match I got headbutted really hard. I actually spit out a piece of my lip the size of my index fingernail and three times as thick. The inside of my mouth looks like somebody put a wire brush in my mouth and then hit me in the face with a brick.

MFight (a Korean MMA website and magazine) was at the tournament taking pictures. They snagged this one of my armbar in the first round. The guy in the sport coat is Jae Hoon, the owner and head coach at Daegu MMA. Bo Kue is the guy on the far right.

Match #2: This match was against a guy with a solid gi stand up game, he was either a Sambo player or a Judoka. I was able to chip away and get a few takedowns here and there. I threatened with a few solid submission attempts that earned me advantage points but wasn't able to finish. At one point I locked up a calf lock. I heard the referee say something and I let go, thinking that the calf lock might be an illegal technique (It's tough to understand the rules fully when you don't speak the language). It turns out that he was simply awarding me an advantage point for a strong submission attempt. I was well ahead on points near the end of the match when he threw me to my back for 4 points. That made the score 6-4 for me; much closer than I feel the fight actually was. I threw him to his back right at the buzzer for some insurance points, even though the score clock still read 6-4.

Match #3: This was probably the easiest match of the day for me. I was able to take him down repeatedly and pass guard to earn position points. I won by technical superiority (score 12-0) at about the two and a half minute mark.

While I had been fighting my way through my side of the draw Hyon Gul had been absolutely dominating his side. In his first three matches he had won with three flying armbars for a TOTAL match time of under 40 seconds. That put us in the final against each other in a major clash of styles; his fast and dynamic submission vs. my game of takedowns and control.

Match #4: I was able to score several takedowns throughout the match. Every time I took him down it was a mad scramble to avoid his submission attempts that came rapid fire, one after the other. I was so worried about the submissions that Hyon Gul was able to score some sweeps and land in dominant positions to earn points. This is pretty much how the match went. Takedown, submission attempt, mad scramble, sweep, mad scramble, stand up, repeat. With 20 seconds left on the clock I scored a 1 point takedown for the lead and was immediately swept into side mount where Hyon Gul earned 4 points. Final score 13-10 for Hyon Gul. I was happy to not get submitted but not happy with the result. There were some definite tactical errors that I made more than once during the match that might have made a difference. Then again, that's why Hyon Gul is the National Jiu Jitsu Champ.

Here`s a pic that captures our match pretty well; me taking Hyon Gul down and him pivoting for an armbar before we even hit the mat.

Un Sik won his weight class as did Yeung Sai who was throwing people like wet noodles. Bo Kue placed 3rd and some of the guys from the other Daegu MMA clubs medalled as well. Daegu won the team title. Not bad considering we were one of the only three non Sambo clubs in attendance. Un Sik spent a good part of his day talking to reporters, signing autographs and posing for pictures with people. It turns out he only has about 3 months of mandatory army service left and people are pretty excited for his return to MMA.

Un Sik after submitting the Korean Sambo champ in the final.

After the Sport Sambo tournament wrapped up there was a short break to weigh in the new competitors arriving for the Combat Sambo tournament. I used this time to take a much needed nap. After my nap I felt pretty good. I got my hands taped up, warmed up and watched the first few matches of the tournament. There were a few guys who were in the Sport Sambo tournament but most of the competitors were there just for Combat Sambo. In the first few fights I had seen a lot of fighters engage in toe to toe "I'll punch you, then you punch me" battles that seemed like pretty poor strategy. My plan was to engage on the feet but not get into any slug-fests. Having not trained my standup much lately I figured the key would definitely be the ground game.

Combat Sambo
Match #1: This wasn't a match at all since the guy I was supposed to fight was off searching for his arm after getting armbarred by Hyon Kul in Sport Sambo. I think the arm is on Hyon Kul's trophy case with a bunch of other ones. I took the medical forfeit rather gladly since I had already had 4 matches on the day and many of my opponents were coming in fresh for Combat Sambo.

Match #2: This match went as well as I could have hoped. I controlled the standup, landing the better combinations and using my jab to maintain distance. I used the striking to set up some takedowns and won on points by a score of 12-0.

Match #3: Despite the final score, this was definitely the toughest of my Combat Sambo fights. My opponent was the Japanese Combat Champion. He tagged me a lot on the feet. I looked and felt a little slow. I wasn't moving my feet at all and ate some decent shots. For everyone who has ever wanted to see me get punched in the face repeatedly, just fast forward to the 2:26 mark of the 3rd video to have your wishes fulfilled. I was able to score points on takedowns and some guard passes, but even on the ground he was much more dangerous than my other opponents. Anytime I was behind him he threatened with kimuras and knee bars and was fairly active from the bottom looking for knee bars, ankle locks and triangles. I eventually won the match 12-0 on points.

Match #4: This match was a little slow. The guy that I fought squeaked his way into the championship match with a last second arm-bar victory after getting dominated for most of his semi-final. I took him down early for a decent lead and then kept the rest of the fight mostly on the feet to avoid his submission attempts. Towards the last two minutes of the match it became clear that he couldn't get anything going so he started swinging for the fences, trying to knock me out. The last minute was pretty much me throwing jabs and avoiding haymakers. A late takedown sealed the deal and the championship. Final score 8-0.

It was a tough, tough day. I can't remember having 7 matches in one day for years. By the end of the day I had bled from every hole in my head, including a new few ones courtesy of my opponents. My entire body aches everywhere but it was worth every ounce of discomfort. I can't ever remember getting much satisfaction out of doing something that didn't require gritting your teeth and doing something hat was difficult. This was one of those very satisfying days.

I'm just a wrestler who's trying to learn Jiu-Jitsu but my coach took me to a Judo practice because I have a Sambo tournmanent coming up. Capiche?

2010-01-12T08:01:00.000-08:00

I'm finally going to get to compete in Korea. Not in MMA, not in Jiu Jitsu, but in the sport of Sambo. Sambo is a Russian martial art closely related to Judo, Jiu Jitsu and Wrestling. I actually think my skills are a little more suited to Sambo competition than Jiu Jitsu. Sambo emphasizes takedowns and, like wrestling if noting is happening on the ground the referee will stand you back up to fight from the feet. If you throw your opponent off of his feet onto his back you win automatically, like in Judo. You can also submit your opponent for the win, but there are no chokes allowed. Sambo practitioners are well known for their leg locks. In Sambo you wear a Gi top with some shorty-shorts, half way between a wrestling and Jiu Jitsu/Judo uniform. Here's a Sambo highlight of a guy who is apparently one of the best Samboists of all time.

Only 5 guys from the club going to the tournament in Seoul; me, Po Ku, Hyon Gul, Un Sik and Yeong Sai. These guys are pretty much the studs of the club so I feel like I'm in pretty good company. When I showed up to Jiu Jitsu tonight Jae Hoon told me "No Jiu Jitsu. Tournament team, Judo training." It took me a while to figure out that we were actually driving across town to a Judo club to work on our takedowns in the Gi with the Judo guys. They probably told me yesterday. Then again, they probably told me in Korean. Funny that we drove all the way across town when there's a Judo club across the street. Martial Arts politics rears it's head again; across the street.. not friends. Across town... friends.

Doing Judo again was pretty cool. Judo is a takedown based sport like wrestling, but the gi changes things a lot. Being a lot more comfortable in the Gi these days made the transition a lot easier than the first time I tried it back when I was in University in Thunder Bay. I dare to say that I held my own with the black belts and even scored some decent throws. I think the Judo guys were a bit surprised as they were expecting a bunch of Jiu Jitsu players. Yeong Sai is also a very good Ssirum (Korean wrestling) wrestler and he was chucking guys around as well. Ssirum is a very traditional sport, dating back to at least 65 BC. In Korea the big national tournaments are still a pretty big deal and are televised. All of the Ssirum dudes I've met are tough customers and can throw like crazy. I'd like to find a place to give it a try. Check it out.

Anywho, I'll bring my camera and try to get lots of pictures and video of the tournament. If I get thrown or armbarred, you will see noting.

My Life is so Cold.

2010-01-10T06:41:00.000-08:00

S.. S..S.. So C.. C.. Cold
I've been back to regular training for a little while now. While it's great being back, the conditions at the club are not ideal for training right now. The club is extremely cold. People who are not training are usually wearing coats and tuques and you can see your breath when training. The temperature makes it really hard to get warmed up and loosened out. If you do manage to get a good sweat on it takes about one minute of rest for your body to cool down and your muscles tighten up. This is the kind of environment that leads to injuries pretty easily. I'm doing my best to stay warm (I wear tights and long sleeves under my gi) but it sure isn't easy.

It's possible to keep most of your body relatively warm if you keep moving but it's your feet that are the problem. Everything in Korea is heated with floor heat but because Daegu MMA has mats from wall to wall they can't heat that way. The heated floors would soften the mats and make them useless and dangerous in a hurry. Instead of floor heat we've got a big space heater that is about five feet tall and four feet wide. You'd think it would keep the place warm, but not so. There's a radius of about 4 feet around the heater that is warm and the rest of the place is freezing. The mats are so cold that after training last night I had to walk to the subway extra slow because I felt like my feet were going to shatter. I think it's time to break out the wrestling shoes. The only cool (pun intended) thing about the situation is that after a sparring session everyone is steaming and it looks pretty rad.

I`ve been battling a cold the last week or so too. It`s pretty much done with now but let me tell ya, when your sinuses are congested getting caught in a triangle choke is one of the worst feelings imaginable. I felt like my head was going to explode like a a green snot bomb.

Speaking of freezing, the heat and water in our apartment stopped working on Friday and still isn`t fixed. This has been one of the oldest winters that people in Daegu can remember. Korea is a lot warmer than Canada but my life here is freezing, I can never get warm. I think I`ll be spending a lot more time at the jimjilbang this week.

Seoul and The DMZ
Lisa`s family came for a visit over the holidays which was great. We spent some time in Daegu, Seoul and went to the DMZ. The DMZ was awesome. Learned a lot of history and got to see some interesting things. Our tour guides were American airborn infantry and they were pretty awesome. It`s pretty crazy to stand on the border of two countries that are still at war and have soldiers from the other side watch you with binoculars. Here`s few pictures.

In this picture you can see one of our guides and behind him are South Korean soldiers keeping an eye on the North Korean`s. You can see the North Koreans shoveling snow in the background.

If you look closely enough in this picture you can see the North Korean guard looking at us with his binoculars. Intense.

This is a cargo train that got caught in a crossfire during the war. It has over 1200 bullet holes in it and never reached it`s destination, obviously. It was stopped on what ended up being the border between North and South Korea and had a memorial built around it.

Things I love about Korea...
History at your fingertips. Korea has a bunch of UNESCO world heritage sites and all kinds of historic temples and artifacts that are easy to get to. The history and culture of Korea is very interesting and very accessible to anyone who`s even moderately motivated to check things out.

Things I hate about Korea...
The Anti English Spectrum. This is a real beauty of an organization who`s goal is to rid Korea of all foreigners. They like to send press releases to the Korean media with fantastically researched claims. Here`s a few gems from the spectrum. The vast majority of foreigners in Korea are HIV positive. Most foreign men are sexual predators with a particular interest in underage girls. I know, I know, I was as surprised to learn it as you. The worst part about it is the Korean media is not real big on fact checking and often runs with these stories.

Misc...
I`ve been contacted to write a column for TopMMANews.com. They are the biggest Canadian MMA site on the web. My next article should be up within the next two days.

2009-12-30T19:33:00.000-08:00

High Standards or Sandbaggers?

I want to start off by saying that the jiu jitsu standards at Daegu MMA are extremely high. I've rolled with some really tough dudes back at home. I've rolled with belts of all colours including black and brown. I've been successful in grappling tournaments. I trained with the National no-gi champ right before I left for Korea and didn't feel the least bit out of my element. Things are different here. Every blue belt in the place will choke me out quick if I'm not right on my game. There are white belts who give me heaps of trouble. Purple belts? Forget about it. When I'm at my best and they're at their worst I can keep it pretty even... in no-gi at least.

To put hings in perspective, there's an American guy here who had a blue belt from his club in the states. After a few weeks at Daegu MMA he started wearing a white belt again. One of the purple belts here won the Korean Abu Dhabi Trials against black and brown belts. As I said, standards are high. The Jiu Jitsu curriculum here is centered around competition. Sport Jiu Jitsu takes precedence over self defense techniques, although there is obviously lots of overlap. It takes a long, long time to advance your belt ranking here. There are people who have been white belts for years and train almost everyday.

One of the good things about Jiu Jitsu is that a Jiu Jitsu blackbelt still symbolizes years of study nd true mastery of the sport. Jiu Jitsu rankings haven't been corroded by the money making McDojo's who hand out belts for cash like many other of the traditional martial arts. The Jiu Jitsu community polices itself constantly and is absolutely ruthless with those who fake or embelish their credentials or Jiu Jitsu lineage. Daegu MMA seems to hold true to that ideal. A blue belt from this club really means something.

The flip side of the coin is that some of the competitors here probably could move up in ranking but haven't taken their belt test. Having to move into the blue/purple belt division in competition is a major deterent for some people. At home, people would probably call this sandbagging; competing in a division that you probably should have moved out of so that you can still win. The Koreans definitely don't look at this as a negative thing the way it's looked at at home. The common belief is that it keeps the standards for progrssign throught the belts high. This is true, but at the same time I think it might hold some promising grapplers back a little bit by keeping them from stepping up to tougher competition.

I waffle back-and-forth about whether or not these very high standards hurt or help in the long run. In the end, I usually settle on the fact that regardless of belt ranking I get to roll every day with a lot of tough dudes and will be much better for it.

Me and one of my homies, Po Kue. He is a 90 kg stud and one of my favourite training partners.

Notice the blood on me and not Po Kue.

New Vision Quest Movie?!?!

I've posted the dramatic conclusion to "Vision Quest". Louden Swain's showdown with Shute is pretty awesome, but I wonder what it would look like in an updated version. We may just get a chance to find out. Rumour has it the guy who plays the werewolf in the Twilight movies wants to play the role of Louden Swain. Check it out.

Korean hospitals and a mutinous body

2009-12-16T23:20:00.000-08:00

Hold it right there...
Well, that didn't last long. I'm not fighting in Japan next month. I accepted the fight on Thursday and pulled out yesterday (wednesday). Monday afternoon at work I noticed my ankle was getting a little sore. By the time the end of the day rolled around I could barely walk and my ankle was swollen to the point I didn't want to take my shoe off because I didn't think I'd be able to put it back on. There's a hospital on the short walk to my house, which was a good thing because I'm not sure I would have made it all the way home. I might have had to knock some kid off his bike, or at least get him to double ride me home.
I have no idea what caused my ankle to swell up. I trained hard on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. My ankle was fine until Monday afternoon and I did nothing in between except go to an indoor water spa with some co-workers (don't laugh, it was awesome).
On the positive side I was extremely impressed with my first Korean hospital experience. I got signed in, triaged, assessed by a nurse and a doctor and X-rayed in a span of about 25 minutes. There was nothing broken but they couldn't really tell me anything more than that. They gave me an injection of who knows what (it felt like liquid gold), a prescription for some pain meds and put me in a half cast. The cast was pretty cool. It was a flexible piece of plastic and gauze that they injected with some sort of warm plaster. the warm plaster molded to my leg and cooled and hardened to the shape of my foot. The plaster is wrapped with bandages to keep it in place and they gave me a walking boot to wear with it. Unfortunately I don't think the cast formed to my leg as well as it was supposed to. Sometimes it doesn't keep my foot from moving around and it's a pain to walk around with. I keep trying to wear it around but I find taping up my ankle does just as good a job.

I guess for the next few weeks I'll be standing in front of a punching bag working on turning my hips and shoulders and keeping my chin down. I'll also have some time to do some strength work in the weight room, which I'm a little glad about. I know that the "silver lining" expression is cliched but there's always something you can do, and if I don't do something I'll go crazy.

It feels like my body is conspiring against me to keep me from competing in Asia. Jiu Jitsu tournament? Sublexed shoulder. MMMA fight? Mysterious ankle explosion. I think I'm going to have to keep my body in the dark about these things from now on. Then again, some people say my body should always be kept in the dark anyways.

After slouching around for a few days and being generally grumpy about not fighting I've cheered up a bit. First of all, tomorrow is my birthday. E-mail me and I'll send you the account # where you can deposit my gift. Secondly, one of my 6 year old students wrote this in her weekend diary. Click on the picture to enlarge and read it.

If that doesn't make you laugh you've obviously had a successful senseofhumourectomy.

It's the thought that counts:

When it looked like I was going to fight in January I was looking for some sponsors to help cover the cost of travel an accommodations since the fight organizations doesn't do that for it's fighters. ARMBAR Athletics stepped up right away and offered to pay a good chunk of the expense. I'm extremely grateful that a small company would do that, especially for a fighter that is just getting going in his career. ARMBAR Athletics sells MMA gear and fashion and has a lot of the big names in their store. If you're in the market for something I hope you'll support them... their support for me is greatly appreciated. If you buy something from them, tell them I sent ya!

KOTC and Fighting in Japan.

2009-12-13T19:59:00.000-08:00

The last few days have been filled with all kinds of MMA related news for me. I've been keeping in touch with the boys from Ho Shin Sool about their fights at King of the Cage: Title Defense, I watched UFC 107 and had some exciting MMA news of my own.

Ho Shin Sool MMA Rips it up at "King of the Cage: Title Defense:

Dominant.
What else is there to say?
Ho Shin Sool fighters went 5-0 at King of the Cage for the second time this year. Two KO's, one submission and two unanimous decisions. That's good fishing. Ray, Adrian, Jeff, Trevor and Dalton all came to fight and showed why we're the first and best MMA club in the area. Big props to Jeff for ending his pro-debut in under 30 seconds. Here's a highlight video of the event featuring most of the Ho Shin Sool crew. You can also read some good newspaper articles about the fights here and here.

Watch live streaming video from soonews at livestream.com

Who's Fighting in Japan? I am.

I've accepted a fight in Japan for January 9th. I was a little apprehensive about taking the fight because there are lots of things I still don't know about the fight and some things I probably won't find out until I get there. When you're dealing with two language barriers (Japanese to Korean and Korean to English) it's tough to get accurate info. Here's what I do know.

The fight will be at 70 kgs. This is a weight class higher than I normally fight at but weigh ins are the same day and I know that most Japanese fighters don't really cut weight.
I will fly from Busan to Tokyo with 4 other Korean fighters on Friday January 8th, fight on January 9th just outside of Tokyo and fly home on Sunday the 10th.
The rules of the fight are slightly modified. Full MMA rules on the feet, full ground and pound on the ground but no submissions. I'm not sure if this is good for me or not. On one hand being able to take someone down without worrying about submissions is awesome, on the other hand my submission game is a lot more dangerous now than it was three months ago.
The organization does not pay travel. It's really expensive to fly to and stay in Japan, especially Tokyo. Luckily I've had a few sponsors step up and it looks like I'll be able to swing the cost of travel. More about that later.

Other than that I'm pretty much flying blind. I don't know much about the guy I'm fighting, but the owner of Daegu MMA seems convinced that this is a fight I should win. I don't know who will be cornering me. I'm not sure if anyone from the club will be going. I know there is a fighter from another Daegu MMA location that is also fighting. Maybe we will corner each other. Maybe I'll put some feelers out to see if there are any mutual acquaintances in the fight scene in Japan that would be up for it. I don't know the name of the organization I'm fighting for; it might be an organization I know or it might be a fly-by-night one time promoter tat will never be heard from again. I don't know how big of an event this is. I'm prepared for the venue to be a local gym with 30 people watching and I'm also prepared to walk into a big venue with a few thousand spectators.

There were a number of legitimate reasons for me to not take this fight. Wrong weight class, lots of unknowns, bad money etc.. but in the end one of the main reasons I came here was to fight and fighting in Japan is an opportunity that a lot of fighters would kill to have. I don't want to leave Korea and say, "man, I wish I would have fought in Japan while I was here."

So, as they say, Game On.

2009-12-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

Soooooooooooooooo... my computer died. That was a while ago. I have tonnes of pics and vids on there that I want to put up on the blog. Apparently there's an evil computer genius that lives near us that can hopefully recover those files. Lesson learned; always back up your files. When I say lesson learned I mean, that's what you should do, not necessarily what I'll do from now on.

The MMA Lowdown

I skipped the Jiu Jitsu tournament this past weekend. I hurt my shoulder a little while ago and hadn't done any real sparring in almost two weeks. I've had a lot of time to work on some technical things that I've been thinking about so it wasn't a total waste of time. I sparred for the first time on Saturday and every day this week and it feels okay... just a little limited in my range of motion. Daegu MMA won the team title at the tournament again.

Daegu MMA has undergone a bit of a facelift. There are huge new banners that pull down from the ceiling everywhere with pictures of team members in action and accolades that have been collected by the team in the last few years. Some of the pictures that are on the banners are pretty cool. For example, there's a picture of Jae Hoon (the owner) holding pads for Lyoto Machida. When I asked him about it he said "Yesh. Lyota Masheeda. Vely good balanceuh." That's it. After training with one of the best fighters in the world all he can say is that he has good balance. Hilarious.

On Monday night we were treated to a seminar by the first Korean born Ju Jitsu blackbelt. The seminar was good, but focused on how to use the gi against your opponent. There was some pretty interesting stuff, but there's no real application beyond sport jiu jitsu... unless of course you get into a fight with a guy wearing pajamas that have double reinforced collars and sleeve cuffs. With that being said, I am really starting to appreciate the intricacies of working in the gi, even if a lot of it doesn't translate to MMA very well.

I've been training at a new kickboxing gym in my area for the last few weeks. The guy who runs the gym is pretty young and has fought in some big events. He has held multiple belts, including one world championship belt at 81 kg. I don't know how legit the world title is, but all of the guys at Daegu MMA say he's good, which goes a long way in my books. Because the gym is brand new there aren't a lot of people who train there yet. There are some classes that run on a schedule but I've been lucky to work mostly one on one with the owner. When I go to the club right after work he's usually the only one there, watching TV or playing video games. I warm up on my own and hit the bag until he decides that I'm ready or until he can't bear to watch my brutal technique anymore. That's when he puts the pads on and works me through 20 - 30 minutes of technical and conditioning padwork. His English is about as good as my Korean, which is to say embarrassing. Luckily we both speak the universal language of dirty beatdowns. When I'm done on the pads I always have to do between 400 and 600 roundhouses on the heavy bag. Then it's "fwee time-uh". It's awesome having someone of his caliber to work with one on one and I think he appreciates having someone around who is willing to work his but of and do whatever he says.

KOTC in Sault Ste. Marie
On Saturday night 5 fighters from Ho Shin Sool will fight at King of the Cage: Title Defense. This will be the first time that anyone from HSS has fought without me being there. I was the first HSS fighter to step in the cage, I've fought as the only HSS fighter on a card and I've traveled to support other fighters when they were the only HSS fighters on a card. I'm extremely proud of what we've been able to accomplish with Jim leading the way and I couldn't be happier with the group of guys that train at HSS. The last time KOTC was in the area our team went 5-0. While no one can guarantee that it will happen again I can tell you that every fighter is well prepared and will leave everything they have in the cage that night. Adrian said it pretty well in his athlete profile on the Catalyst Fitness website.

"...when you step into the cage you stand alone but you hold a piece of each of those people. Every time they have ever pushed you, tried to break you, punished you they make you stronger. They stand beside you because “I” don’t fight on the 12th “We” fight. It’s a family, never before have I belonged to a family as completely as to this one and nobody attacks this family. I hope you all read this and know I love all of you like brothers.
Lastly, I cannot guarantee you a win. It’s a fight and anything can happen, I can however guarantee that everything I have gets laid out for everyone to see and would bet my life that my teammates do the same. In return I ask one thing when a Ho Shin Sool fighter’s name gets called you leave everything you have inside that building. Don’t save it for the next guy, you always have another gear and I want you drop it into fifth. Make the floor vibrate, make the other man tentative to come out, put fear in his heart and fill ours. That’s it that’s all I ask, come 12 – 12 bring the noise."

Give you chills? It did for me. If you need another reason to go see the fights it shouldn't hurt that Tony Hervey who holds the 145 lb. KOTC World Title will be defending his belt. Hervey just lost a very close 5 round decision to Takanori Gomi, long considered one of the best fighters in the world, in Japan. Some people are calling that fight the fight of the year. Do yourself a favour and look it up, it's one of the most entertaining fights I've seen in a long time. Check out the commercial for KOTC: Title Defense at the top right of my page.

I'm not going to say god luck to the fighters because I believe when you're skilled, well trained, in shape and focused luck doesn't play a roll. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. The preparation has been done, the opportunity will come along Saturday night. Do what you do guys, I can't wait to hear about it.

Ultimate Frisbee
I'm surprised that I haven't mentioned this before. For the past 10 weeks I've been playing in an Ultimate Frisbee league in Daegu. The league runs on Sundays and there are three or four games every day. Getting out and running hard every Sunday is great but the best part is that most players show up for the whole day and just hang out. The expat community here is pretty small so everybody knows each other somehow and it's fun to have everyone in the same place.

There are some really good players in the league and lots of first timers and can't throw or catchers. Some people take it pretty seriously and some show up in their bar clothes from the night before. The games are competitive (my team played 9 games and 7 of them were decided by two points or less) but they also serve beer on the field. Here's a few pics of the Sunday afternoon action.

Most of the Daegu Hurricanes... best team in the league

The man known simply as B-Vance stretching for the disc.

Me trying to knock down the disc. For arguments sake let's assume I was successful.

Things that are awesome in Korea: Heated Floors.
Koreans are way ahead of North America when it comes to Radiant heat flooring. Every building or house is heated this way. It makes sense in a culture where people sit on the floor a lot. It's awesome in the morning when you step out of bed ad your feet are on a toasty warm surface. It's also awesome if you think ahead far enough to throw your clothes on the floor at night. When you wake up your underwear is like it just came out of the dryer. EVERY DAY!
Things that suck in Korea: Bathrooms that have no heat at all.
Things in Korea aren't insulated very well and the bathroom which is always against an exterior wall has no heat source. Bathroom tiles on a December morning are pretty much the worst thing you could ever step on. Sitting on a plastic toilet seat in those temperatures creates a whole different world

2009-11-23T05:04:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've posted but hopefully today's post will make you laugh and smile enough to make up for the lack of regular updates.

Korean Signs and Translations
It seems like Korean's have been brainwashed into believing that the English language will be the salvation of the country and that to be successful you must understand the language. There is a strong, depreciating belief in Korea that the English language is somehow better and a symbolizes class and intelligence. Because of this belief Korean stores and clothing labels love to put English words or translations on their signs and products. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) a lot of the signs and t shirts with English on them are written by people with a poor grasp of the language. This is strange considering how many English speaking westerners live in Korea. The hilarious result of the gibberish, konglish and poor translation can be seen below. These pictures are only a fraction of what you see on a weekly basis. These are just the pictures I took when I saw a good sign and happened to have my camera on me. Enjoy.
I'll post more as I see them.

On the right hand side of the page I've also added a couple of videos. The first is a fantastic vid that really highlights all of the emotional aspects of MMA.
The second is one of the best speeches (for my money) in any movie. Just when Louden is starting to think his quest is hopeless his long time buddy and one of his mentors reminds him of why it's important, even if it's just "six lousy minutes on the mat".

Typical translation on the package of a Halloween costume.

Everything you need, including raping?

Ive been in this store. It's more like 'Shop and... Meh'

Makes sense since this is how Koreans usually speak English.

Does this mean I can buy ice cream instead of a ring? Nice.

Korea is actually pretty progressive in terms of environmental issues, despite this sign.

This bathroom is only for girls who really, really have to go.

Daegu, Daegu, FIGHTING!

2009-11-10T07:39:00.000-08:00

Daegu MMA in Action
The last week has been pretty empty inside Daegu MMA. There have still been lots of people training but the studs have either been away fighting or helping to corner the fighters. The intensity of training has been a little lower this week, but to be honest, I feel like my body needed the rest. I feel refreshed and ready to get back at it full tilt.

Un Sik "The Tornado" Song won his kickboxing fight at "W" by second round KO. He scored two knockdowns before putting his guy away for good. Un Sik's fight was the main event, getting top billing over a fighter who has competed in K1. It sounds like he was all over his opponent from start to finish. After watching him train and spar (and getting punched around by him a lot) I'm glad to know that his Kickboxing is as good as I thought.

Un Sik re-aranging some facial features

Across the sea, Heung Gull lost a very tough split decision to Akihiko Mori in Tokyo, Japan. I haven't talked to him yet but it sounds like he dominated the first round with striking and almost finished the fight from the bottom when he got taken down at the end of the round. The second round was a toss up and in the third Heung Gull got taken down and couldn't get anything going from the bottom. He didn't take any real damage but he was down there for the whole round. Sounds like the fight could have gone either way, but I wish I could have seen it since the only info I have is second hand from some biased sources. As mainly a Jiu Jitsu practitioner, Heung Gull has different ideas about cutting weight than I do.   His Jiu Jitsu competition weight is 62 kg. while the fight against Mori was at 70 kg. I was worried that a weight disadvantage might hurt him in the later rounds if the fight went long... I don't know if this was the case or not but I personally wouldn't fight at 70 kg and I'm a bit bigger than Heung Gull. The cool thing is that I think Heung Gull fights for fun. He is first and foremost a Jiu Jitsu player and is now busy preparing for the Asian Abhu Dhabi trials, having already won the Korean trials.

The best thing about Un Sik and Heung Gull is that neither guy missed a single day of training after their fights. They were both right back at it the day they got back to Daegu. Tough dudes.

Competition on the Horizon
There's a little more than three weeks until I compete in my first Jiu Jitsu tournament in Korea. I don't know if it's a big tournament or a small one, if the divisions are separated by belt or if they lump everyone together. I do know that the weight class is 68 kg.   This is pretty much my natural weight right now, so that's where I'll compete.. there's no way I'm cutting to 62 kg. I've picked up the amount of weight training that I've been doing and would like to get back up to a solid 70 kg and cut to 68 for grappling and 66/65 for MMA. There is also the off chance that I might end up fighting an amateur Kickboxing fight at some point. When Jae Hoon (The owner and coach at Daegu MMA) talked to me about fighting he said "Amateur Kickboxing, no probrem". I trust him, but I'd still rather fight MMA where I can take I guy down if need be. And get paid.
Over the next few weeks I'll be doing the regular jiu jitsu classes as well as splitting time with Un Sik and Jae Hoon, working on my kickboxing and Un Sik's wrestling.

Unrelated...
Last week I went into my regular coffee shop, the one I stop in at just about every morning on my way to work. There were some guys there putting in a new, bigger front window. As I was leaving one of the guys was blocking my way. I couldn't help but think "Hey buddy, you make a better window than a door...".   Gold!

Then you really might know what it's like... to fight.

2009-11-05T07:51:00.000-08:00

What is it like to fight? I get asked some variation of this question fairly regularly, usually by people that might have plans to step in the cage themselves or sometimes when I have an upcoming fight. While every fight is different for me and every fighter has different experiences, there are some common threads in what I and other fighters feel in the months, weeks, days, hours and minutes leading up to the fight. I'll do my best to try and explain the mental, physical and psychological rollercoaster that I go through every time I fight. Some people might think that writing this down for others to see is allowing others to see my weaknesses, but I don't see it that way. I'm sure every fighter goes through some version of what I'm writing down.

For me the experience begins when I get an offer for a fight. Usually the offer arrives via my coach Jim, who usually approaches me walking into the gym for a training session. There is usually little time to debate on taking a fight or not. After a few minutes on google doing some preliminary research about the potential opponent a decision is reached. While the fight is still a long ways off at this point, the moment when I accept a fight is emotionally intense. It's the moment when things get "real" in a hurry. Even though you've been training with the intent of fighting, putting a name and face to a person that you know is training to beat you up and putting a date to when it'll happen always triggers an adrenaline dump in my system.

The months and weeks of training leading up to a fight is when the ups and downs of fighting really show. You have good days and you have bad days. A lot goes into preparing for a fight. You need to prepare your body for any conditions it might encounter... a long, drawn out war that will tax your cardiovascular system and muscular endurance or a fast paced fight where you will have to rely on explosiveness, speed and power. Running, intervals, powerlifting and periodized physical training are all part of the prgoram. You have to make sure that your technical skills and timing are sharp. You drill and work out the details in your kickboxing, wrestling and jiu jitsu and work on smooth transitions and combinations of all three. You prep your strategy and game plan. You watch tape of your opponent and work out situations that you can exploit in the fight and how to get to them. You anticipating and train for bad situations and "worst case" scenarios. You prepare "Plan B" in case the original game plan goes out the window the first time you get cracked in the melon.
You have days when you feel like you could knock anybody out on the feet and you have days when rookie grapplers are taking you down and submitting you. This is all normal; It's the nature of physical performance that you can't always be at your best. Even knowing this, the ups and downs of training coupled with he physical abuse that your body takes can make even the friendliest fighter cranky and moody. It becomes hard to keep an even keel through practice. If you push yourself to failure you sometimes feel like you're body isn't ready. If you don't push yourself to failure you feel like you're not working hard enough.

The physical ups and downs are one thing, but I find the mental rollercoaster can be just as bad. In the extended time leading up to a fight I flip flop from thoughts of being invincible to thoughts of being hopelessly overmatched. Going from "This guy is a chump, there is no way he can beat be, I'm a better athlete, I'm in better shape, my skills are better in every area, I have a better game plan, I have the better training partners and coaches." To thoughts like "I'm not ready, I'm not in good enough shape, I can't fight with this ---------- injury, I haven't sparred enough, his jiu jitsu/wrestling/kickboxing is too good, I'm in over my head." and back again is par for the course. These thoughts will flip flop several times before a fight, sometimes in the matter of a day or even hours. A good training session can leave me feeling invincible and a tough session will often have me leaving the gym with shaken confidence. Luckily I've experienced these emotions many times and have come to accept and expect them.

The last week of preparation before fight night is time to taper down the training intensity, let your body heal, fine tune some small technical and strategic details and make sure your weight is on point. This always feels like the longest week; you're used to training and sparring hard and just want to fight. During this week I always feel like I could fight at the drop of a hat. Let's do it, lets' get it over with. You feel like a wild animal that 's been caged and muzzled. Because your training volume is lower, there's more time for crazy thoughts to burrow into your head. You realize the absurdity of what you are about to do and question why you would ever think that it was a good idea. Around this time my internal monologue always sounds something like this: "I'm going to step into a steel cage with a guy who's only goal is to do physical harm to me. Why on earth would I do this? I'm a smart guy, I have a good job, I don't have to do this. I'm never doing this again. This is stupid, this is going to be my last fight." This happens all the time, but again, it's a lot easier to deal with when you know that it's going to happen.

The night of weigh ins is always a fun night for me. All the hard work has been done at this point, the journey is almost over. All there is left to do is step on the scale, flex for the camera and relax until fight time. This is usually the first time that you see your opponent in person, which is always something that makes my heart jump into my throat a little bit. I find the post weigh-in face-off hard to take, but probably not for the reasons you'd think. I'm not generally a mean person and standing in front of someone trying to look mean or tough cracks me up. I can barely keep a smile or laugh in. I usually try to go say hi to my opponent before the weigh ins to make that moment a little less strange. Some opponents are friendly, some aren't. I always have to laugh at some of the fighters who try to "walk tough" at the weigh ins. There's always a few who are posturing and trying to intimidate their opponents. I feel like saying "Guess what guys? Everyone here is a fighter, everyone knows your tough, you can drop the act, we're all going to have a drink together when it's all over."

Some fighters find fight day to be extremely stressful, but not me. In my mind the outcome of the fight has already been determined by the way you've trained for the fight; all there is left to do is go out, implement the game plan and giv'er hell. I don't like to think too much about the fight on fight day; I've already done weeks of visualization and mental preparation, nothing I do at this point is going to change much. Having lots of downtime is when your mind starts to wander and all kinds of thoughts creep into your head. To avoid this, it's good to have things to do and a good group of people to hang out with. On fight day I like to sleep in late, get up and have a big breakfast with all of the team members that are at the event. This is usually followed by a team walk to loosen up the legs a little bit. I'm lucky to have a great group of fighters, trainers ans support guys that travel with us most of the time and make this part of the adventure a lot easier and more fun. Throughout the day I'll probably watch a movie, read the newspaper, wander around the venue and chat with other fighters, spectators or coaches... anything to keep occupied.

I can't speak for every fighter, but for me the emotions really start to get going when the fighters are called to the referee's meeting on fight night. It's hard to keep an even keel when everywhere you go fighters are warming up, hitting pads, grappling and getting themselves psyched up in their own way. Realizing that I'm so close to fight time really gets the juices flowing. I can feel the knot in my stomach start to grow. I tell myself that this is normal, dumping adrenaline and other chemicals into the system is the bodies way of preparing for a dangerous situation. Imagine experiencing every intense emotion you can think of; excitement, hate, fear, anticipation, relief, sadness etc... Now imagine experiencing every one of those emotions on a constant loop with the intensity dial cranked up to 11 out of 10. Sometimes the things I feel don't even make sense. That's what fight night feels like to me.

I try to stay as loose and calm for as long as possible. I listen to some comedy or mellow music that I've loaded onto my Ipod and I find someone to play cards with for a while. I start warming up with some light shadow boxing/wrestling three fights before mine. I gradually pick up the pace until I'm in 5th gear with one fight to go before I step into the tunnel. As I'm in the tunnel I tune down the intensity a half notch and focus on some mental cues and visualization that I've been rehearsing for the last few weeks. When my name gets announced the adrenaline gates open and I step out towards the cage. It sounds cliched, but when I climb into to the cage I feel like my senses are heightened. I feel ultra aware of the physical stimuli that affects me directly. The lights are extra bright. I can feel every grain of the canvas under my feet. I can smell the vinyl of the mats and coated fencing. Then my opponent climbs into the cage and the world closes in on itself, leaving only the cage. My vision actually seems to narrow and I can only see my opponent. I can't hear the crowd anymore, my coaches voices being the only thing getting into my head.

When the bell rings I always have a brief instant of thinking "Holy *%$#, this guy is going to try and punch me!" That passes quickly and all of the training tunes me into the things I need to be aware of. Circle away from his power side, watch his lead leg. square off the cage, move your feet, stay engaged...

When the fight is over the rest of the world opens back up with a rush. I realize how big the venue is, or how loud the crows is, or that I recognize the guys in the front row seats. The relief that I feel when a fight is over is hard to describe. There is nothing like standing up and pumping your fists to the crowd in celebration after pouring every ounce of skill and effort you have onto the cage floor. It's the moment that you realize that all of the mental and physical punishment you put yourself through was worth it and all of the self doubt and questioning of yourself was for nothing. You remember that the fight itself was important because of what you went through to get there.

Some fighters say they aren't scared. I think those guys are lying, stupid or maybe complacent. If I don't get an emotional rush from fighting, fear included, I don't want to do it. The intensity of feelings I get from fighting is something a lot of people won't ever get. I get scared to fight all the time, but I'm not scared of being scared. I don't let it cripple me. I like it. I think that part of the beauty of fighting is that by intentionally putting yourself in harms way you are doing something that goes against some of your deepest instincts. You are stepping far outside the normal range of the human comfort zone and challenging yourself to do something you weren't sure if you could do, and to me that's what it's all about. That and I like to win.

**I posted the video of my first amateur MMA fight in the top right corner of the page. After writing this post it was interesting to watch this fight and think of how far I've come in the physical, mental and technical preparation of fighting. It's also interesting to watch me as I get into the cage and compete... I look fairly calm and collected but I really can't remember being more scared. Having seen dozens of amateur fights in the last few years I think I can honestly say that this fight was better than 99% of them, but I'd still love to run into this guy as a pro.

Interesting note: This fight was at The Palace of Auburn Hills in Detroit in front of about 6000 fans. That's still the biggest crowd I've fought in front of, even 6000 people in a facility that holds 25000 feels a bit empty.

Things Koreans have figured out: Glasses and Optometry.
I might have a hit put out on me by the eyewear industry bigwigs in North America after posting this. If you are buying glasses in North America you are getting ripped off. Today I bought a pair of cool glasses from the local glasses store (they're everywhere here). They cost $10. That's $10 as in TEN. That price included the lenses. I gave them the glasses I was wearing and they matched the prescription and had my new ones finished in 10 minutes. With my purchase I got a coupon for $5 off my next pair. And a complementary gift choice of some socks or a towel. Oh yeah, and 10% of my purchase price gets added to my membership towards another pair of glasses. Did I mention this wasn't a sale? Go back and read that all again and try not to get mad about paying $250 for a pair of glasses and waiting 3 days fro them.

Things Koreans don't have figured out: ATM's
In Korea you can stay out all night. The bars and restaurants don't close as long as there's people in them, and there always is. Make sure to bring a stash of money though... the ATM's here don't work after midnight. This makes it tough to catch a cab home when you've turned your pockets into bunny-ears looking for loose change.

Ho Shin Sool MMA Fighters Gearing up for King of the Cage Dec. 12th

2009-10-29T08:04:00.000-07:00

On July 25th five Ho Shin Sool MMA fighters, including myself, stepped into the cage at King of the Cage: Disputed. Disputed had some match-ups that would settle some regional rivalries and Ho Shin Sool proved again that not only were we the first to bring MMA to our area, but we were, by far, still the best. The night ended 5-0 for HSSMMA with 3 KO's and 2 submissions. Those who had questioned our legitimacy, dedication or talent were left to eat their own bitter words.

Ho Shin Sool Fight Team celebrates going 5-0 at KOTC: Disputed

If you were at Disputed and want more (or if you missed it and are mad about it) you'll get your chance to see the HSS boys in action again on December 12th at King of the Cage: Title Defense. Four HSS fighters will be in action at Title defence, which will take place at Vegas Kiwedin Dreamakers Theatre. If you've never been to a KOTC show, don't miss this one. The atmosphere when HSS fighters get in the cage is something not to be missed. The Sault area is lucky to have a quality promotion like KOTC coming back so don't miss out. Coach Liguori will guide Adrian "So Young He's Almost Sperm" Vilaca, Trevor "The Tremor" Manchester, Ray "Broken Parts" Gowlett and Jeff "The Big Caboose" Elliot into battle. I might have to check the accuracy on those nicknames, but I'm pretty sure I got them all.

Poster boys Jeff Elliot (far left) and Adrian Vilaca (left). Trevor Manchester

and Ray Gowlett didn't make the cut due to aesthetic issues.

Tony Hervey will also be defending his 145 lb KOTC title at Title Defense. Hervey just lost a close 5 round decision to Takanori Gomi, considered one of the best lightweights in the world, at Vale Tudo: Japan.

Tickets are available at Ho Shin Sool Martial Arts and Fitness Center, Brody's Bar ad Grill and Sportscenter Bar and Grill. Brody's and Sportscenter are also HSS sponsors so show them some love!

P.S. Boy have I got a treat for you! Every once in a while I'm going to post a clip from the movie "Vision Quest" on the blog. If you're a wrestler and have never seen this movie I'm calling you out right here and saying that you're not a real wrestler. Boxers have "Rocky", Football has "Rudy", Wrestling has "Vision Quest".

Lost in Daegu, Turkey Day and a Bit of Payback Wrestling Style.

2009-10-22T22:39:00.000-07:00

There's no 'Bed Bath & Beyond' in Korea... But a nice little Saturday nonetheless.

Saturday I got up early and headed out to meet up with a friend. Armed with the most basic Korean language skills, a couple of dollars in my pocket and some directions written in Korean that I copied off the interent I set out for my rendezvous. If you know me and my sense of direction you probably already know I never found the place or the person I was looking for. No matter though, I decided to cash in the silver lining and explore a cool new part of Daegu that I had never seen. I walked through a lot of interesting traditional shops and found the Daegu music district where I priced out a few guitars for a later date. Eventually I stumbled across a subway station which meant I was home free. Good thing too, 'cause I had no phone, was lost and had apparently copied my directions down wrong. I decided to hit the Seomun Market where you can buy just about anything for really cheap. The place is huge and there are different sections for produce, textiles, shoes, clothing, seafood, housewares, hats, bags and all sorts of other stuff. You could easily spend all day there just walking around, checking out the cool foods and vendors (check out the video of the pig "snack bar"). After a while I made my way back to Daegu MMA where I had a good Saturday workout and then hit the neighbourhood Jimjillbang, something I'm glad to say is becoming a Saturday tradition with some of the boys.

Picking up the pace at Daegu MMA
Everyday at Daegu MMA Heung Gull tests the limits of the connective tissue in my arms, neck and legs. I get submitted a lot. Without the gi I'm happy to keep it even, in the gi I have to set smaller goals such as "don't die". Wednesday was different. Heung Gull is fighting a wrestler soon so we've been doing more wrestling. On Wednesday we scrimmaged. Just the two of us. Ten 3 minute sessions. I beat him like he was the bully who picked on me and stole my lunch money in elementary school and we were meeting 10 years later after I grew two feet, hit the weights and figured out that I was good at inflicting pain on people. I tried to steal his soul. Heung Gull is just good enough at wrestling that I can use some of my really good stuff on him. He reacts properly, which allows me to set up and hit some of my best techniques. I threw everything in my repertoire at him and then some. Doubles, singles, high crotch, shoulder throw, front headlock, stepper, hip toss, whizzer, over under, inside leg trip. I hit them all and I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel gooooooooooood. Unfortunately, as every fighter knows, Some days you're the hammer and some days you're the nail. The next day was back to Gi Jiu Jitsu. With Heung Gull I'm more often the nail than the hammer.
Things have been ramping up at Daegu MMA. Un Sik has a kickboxing fight on Halloween night, Heung Gull is fighting in DEEP in November and there is a Jiu Jitsu tournament in early December. There are a lot more guys training a lot harder these days and more sparring partners to choose from. Wednesdays no gi class has had more of an MMA slant to it lately and people have been doing more MMA based drills and conditioning during open mat. It's a good atmosphere.
Heung Gall's opponent in DEEP is Mori Akihiko. Akihiko's record of 7-6 doesn't tell the whole story. He's fought in Sengoku, DEEP, K1 and many other quality promotions in Asia. He's been in the ring with some some very tough hombres. I've been working on the wresting clinch with Heung Gall quite a bit as Akihiko seems to like to bully people into the corner, tie them up and try to drag them down to the ground. From what I've sen I think Heung Gull's Jiu Jitsu and striking are better than Akihiko's. Even if Heung Gull does get taken down, this might not be a bad thing as long as he doesn't end up mounted or in side control. It's an interesting fight, I hope I can make the trip to watch.

Turkey Day & Pumpkin Carving
Being away from home on the holidays is never great, but lucky for us we have some awesome friends that hosted a Canadian Thanksgiving Day to make everyone feel a little more at home. Karen and Brian prepared a full thanksgiving spread and there were contributions from everyone else as well. There were no turkeys to be found anywhere in the city, but it's just as well, they probably wouldn't have fit in the toaster oven like the chickens did. Ovens don't really exist in Korea.
About 15 people took part in the festivities; most were Canadian but there were a few Americans and an Irishman stirred in for flavour.
The same friends, Karen and Brian, also hosted a pumpkin carving night as a low key alternative to our regular Friday night festivities. Unfortunately the pumpkins were carved pretty quickly and what followed was a 4:00 am Noraebang session. Some people should sing. Some people shouldn't. Sometimes Soju convinces people from group 1 that they belong to group 2.

The Contradictions of Korea

Before I left for Korea I had some friends who had been there tell me that I would run into all sorts of things that just didn't make sense. So True.

Example #1:
Being caught behind a Korean girl on the escalator is awkward; they wear skirts that have shorter inseams than some brief-cut underwear I own. Suffice it to say that girls would not be allowed to wear skirts like that in a Disney film. This seems to be perfectly ok with everybody. On the other hand, Koreans find it absolutely SCANDALOUS for a girl to show her shoulders. How dare they!?

Example #2: Blowing red lights is ok. Driving on the sidewalk is ok. Cutting off cyclists and pedestrians is ok. But don't you dare jaywalk, Koreans will yell at you.

The MMA Update

2009-10-16T00:07:00.000-07:00

An Improved Mental State, a Battered Body.

The last two weeks of training have been much improved, despite my body feeling beaten and run down. I have added a few hours to my weekly training but the real difference has been not in the hours I train, but in the intensity and focus that I'm bringing with me to the gym these days. I push myself harder in sparring, I use my time better and squeek out more reps during technique and I use the open mat time to pick the better grapplers brains and work on things from the last class. I spar more on the feet and have added a little lifting back into the equation. I've also become more selfish. I almost always pick the most skilled guys to work with during technique and sparring. It might not help them a whole lot but hey, this is about me.

Everyday day at the club there is an hour and a half jiu jitsu class at 7:00 and another at 9:15 with 45 minutes in between where people relax, eat, work on technique or spar if they want to. I normally stay for one of the classes and the open mat time. Wednesdays is no-gi night so I've been staying from 6:45 to 10:45. The no-gi is much more MMA specific so I've been trying to take advantage a little more. Because of the length of training, I can't maintain the same intensity on Wednesdays as I do the rest of the week. I treat the first class as a technique class. In sparring I sometimes work with younger guys, give up positions and try to work out of them using movement instead of strength or speed. During open mat time I drill technique, stretch and stay warm. When the 9:15 class starts, it's on. I only scrap with the studs. I push myself to failure during conditioning. I yell, I bleed, I tap people out and I fight off chokes and submissions until I'm almost unconscious or broken. My body hurts a lot right now, but I feel like I'm working at a higher level than I have in a long time.

Some of the guys from the club think that I'm bat guano crazy because I bleed so much but keep sparring or training anyways. "Kinchanaieo", meaning "it's ok", has become a verbal staple for me. I say it about 10 times a night. The truth is that I just bleed a lot. One time I got cut by a stiff breeze. I briefly contemplated Brent "stretched out saran wrap skin" Fryia as my professional nickname. When I wrestled in university the trainers were always at matside with gauze, tape and cotton balls ready to go. I know that having thin skin is probably not the best characteristic for an MMA fighter, but it is what it is and the fans love blood right?

I realized recently that I haven't posted anything visual in regards to Daegu MMA. To remedy the situation I took a few videos last night to show you what the place is like. The videos are from after all of the classes for the day are done. Most people have gone home but some have stuck around to roll or work on a few things. A lot of the people in this video have already been at the club for more than four hours.

Cast of Characters: These are a few of the guys I train with every day
Hyung Gull (young gal) is a a purple belt, but that's misleading. I've been told more than once that he should be a brown belt but won't do it here because his master is a brown belt. He plans on going to Japan to get his brown and pursue his black belt. He's an unbelievable athlete. Strong fast, flexible and smart. He recently won the Korean regional qualifier of the ADCC against brown and black belts. In the semi final he faced his teammate, Un Sik and nearly broke his arm clean in half. Un Sik is just back training now after having minor surgery on that arm. Sounds like a jerk move on one of your buddies? Keep in mind Un Sik could have tapped at any point. You can see Hyung Gull in the red shorts in the second video.

Un Sik (oon shik) is an unbelievably skilled fighter. He is 7-0 and had developed quite a following before he entered the military and was forced to put figting on hold. All Korean men have a two year mandatory military service. During this time you can work one other job, but not two. Un Sik has a part time job that pays the bills, meaning if he gets paid to fight, he would face military charges and punishment. Raw deal. Un Sik is also a purple belt, has awesome Muai Thai and is picking up wrestling very quickly. One of the reasons I like him a lot is because he didn't like me right off the bat. While everyone else accepted me right off the bat because I was Mitch's brother Un Sik couldn't have cared less who I was, who I knew or what I had done before. He made me earn it. I like that because I'm the same way at home at Ho Shin Sool... don't tell me how good you are, show me. Un Sik has an amateur Kickboxing fight at the end of this month. You can see Un Sik wrapping up for sparring in the first video.

John is an 18 year old highschool student. That's him pretending to do something and throwing punches at the camera in the second video. he has an English name and speaks the language pretty well because he took several years of English in school. He likes to show off his knowledge of English slang by swearing at inappropriate times which is often hilarious, but only to me. I use him as my translator a lot. He has real sharp standup and is pretty slick on the ground. He likes sparring on the feet with anybody, guys who are better than him, guys he can work over without sweating or guys who give a him a solid challenge. Next year he'll start the first of his two years of military service after which he plans on beginning his fighting career.

"Super Babies" is what some of the older guys call the young kids who train at the club all the time. I think they are genetically engineered to be jiu jitsu machines. They're mostly in middle school and early highschool and spend ALL of their time at the club. They don't train super hard all the time but their skill level is pretty amazing considering how young they are. One of these kids first introduced himself to me as "Young Korean GSP". I thought that was pretty funny until I rolled with him. In the next 5 to 10 years I think you'll be watching one or more of these kids. In the second video you can see the two kids with no shirts on rolling. It might not look like they're rolling real hard but when that video was taken they had already been doing it for four hours. Pretty wild.

There's a bunch of other awesome guys at the club that I roll with on a regular basis, but I'll save them for a later date.

NON MMA
Things Koreans have figured out...
Cell phones. Every cell phone has the same charger and you can charge your phone at any store, restaurant or cafe for 20 cents. You're phone is essentially never dead. There is also one cell phone store for every3 people in Korea. Maybe a bit of an exageration, but not much. Think Starbucks and then multiply by a millionbazillion.

Things Koreans have not figured out.
Clearing your throat discreetly. You know when you wake up in the marning and are feeling really flemmy? And the only way to clear your throat is by making making a sound something like "HRANCHKXXXXXXXXT" and then hocking a loogey that could probably make into the next time zone? You know how you always try to do that secretly with no one around. Koreans don't. It's perfectly okay to do that anywhere in public. Kids, moms, dads, old ladies, small dogs... everyone does it and it's kinda gross.

The Happenings Keep Happening!

2009-10-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

A new approach, a renewed commitment
(edited, click on the pics for high quality, full size versions)

I had an interesting day at jiu-jisu today. When I walked in, the club manager approached me right away and took me by the arm. I figured she was going to hassle me about club fees since I hadn't paid for this month yet (I had the money in my bag). Instead the conversation went like this.
"There is competition in Japan.. you compete?"
"Yeah, sure."
"It is MMA."
"Oh... when and where is it?"
"November 1st, Tokyo"
This puts me an interesting position. I do want to fight while I'm here and what better place than Tokyo, considered by many to be the mecca of MMA? I'm also honoured that Jae Hoon and the rest of the guys would ask me to represent their club as a pro. There are two problems. Number one is that my current visa is a one entry visa only. If I leave Korea I can't come back. I can get an addendum to my visa to allow me to travel, but I'm not sure how long that would take. To fight in Korea I also need a special "entertainers visa"... my current E2 teaching visa doesn't cut it. A few North Americans have been busted on this in the last year and fined heavily. Korea is also in the middle of a crackdown on foreigners working illegally. I'm assuming there is a similar type of visa that would be needed to fight in Japan.
While these are problems, they are probably solvable. The second problem is the big one. I'm not ready. And that's embarrassing. I've been here for almost a month and a half and while I've picked up my training a bit, and my jiu jitsu is much better already, I am not ready to fight and don't think I could be in less than a month. I discussed my concerns about the visa issues and my preparedness with the guys at the gym and thanked them for the opportunity but declined. I told them that I do not want to represent their club unless I am at my best and can represent them the way they should represented.
There is a jiu jitsu tournament on the first weekend of December. I plan to keep upping my training to compete at this tournament. I also decided on the spot that I wouldn't let a lack of preparation keep me from an opportunity like this again. After this tournament I need to be able to fight at just about any time. I've heard lots of stories about fights being offered on very short notice in Japan. Even in the days of Pride many fighters never found out who their opponents were until two weeks before the event. I need to take better care of my body, do some more MMA specific training each weak and start hitting the weights and conditioning a little harder. Don't get me wrong, I'm in good shape, I'm about 5 lbs. leaner than when I left from Canada. It won't take a lot to get to where I need to be, but I need to start now.
P.S. As I'm writing this I'm watching Dream 11 live on cable TV. All of the UFC and K1 events are also free on cable here. So awesome.

Chuseok Weekend

Last week we had Thursday and Friday off for Chuseok, which is usually called Korean Thanksgiving even though that comparison isn't entirely accurate. Wednesday at school we had some Chuseok celebrations. We got to wear Hamboek, traditional Korean clothing, make songpeon, which I like to think of as a Korean pirogi. We got lots of good pics so here's a few.

There sure is nothing wrong with a four day weekend and we took full advantage of it. Thursday Lisa and I climbed Gatbowi Mountain. It's about 2.5 km up and very steep in for the last half. At the top is an amazing Buddhist sculpture that was carved around the year 620. There is a Buddhist village, lots of monks around and a large prayer area at the top of the mountain. We got some awesome video and pictures and were able to buy some beads from the monks. Probably the highlight (or maybe lowlight) of the trip was when we were buying the beads the monk got a text message on his cellphone. I am not kidding. It kinda ruined the effect for me. I think Korea is probably the most wired country in the entire world. ou gt service everywhere; at the top of the highest mountains, deep underground in the subway and anywhere in rural Korea. Grandmas and Grandpas rock their Ipods on the subway and every six year old has a cell phone and can text faster than you can talk.
Friday afternoon a bunch of us left for Incheon, the second biggest city in Korea. We had booked a deep sea fishing excursion and were pretty stoked. This was our plan. We would leave Daegu at 5:00 pm, and get to Incheon around 9:00. Since the fishing people were picking us up around 4:00 am we would not bother with a hotel, and instead carry our gear around downtown while we explored the nightlife. When the shuttle picked us up we would just get on the boat and start fishing, which would go all day until 6:00 pm the next day. What could go wrong right? Believe it or not, nothing did. We had an awesome time all night (the bus ride could be a separate post in itself) and made our connection with no problem. From there things got a little shaky.
Our driver took us to the wharf which in the middle of the night was one of the sketchiest places I've ever seen. The roads where rough, there was garbage blowing across the streets like tumbleweed and stray dogs were wandering all over the place. The place we stopped at looked like it was once a convenience store but was now half covered with a tarp instead of a roof. The lights that were actually working weren't throwing enough light to see anything, but just enough to make the shadows look extra scary. This is when our guide got out and disappeared. He probably only left for a few minutes, but in a place that looked like the set for a bad horror movie, it felt very, very long. We eventually got down to the boat landing where we had to wait about 20 minutes for a boat. While we were waiting I heard "thump, thump" and looked over to see two south Korean soldiers, fully armed and outfitted for taking care of whoever needed taking care of, crouching down after coming over the wharf fence. Two other soldiers quickly followed and the entire unit came out way. These guys had some serious firepower with them, but turned out to be very friendly. They did not want us to take a picture of the door that they were heading towards though... I guess this is the reality of living so close to the border of two countries that are essentially still at war.
Once we got on the boat we had to motor out of the harbour, a trip that took about an hour and a half. This trip was really representative of Korea for me. Amazing natural beauty scarred by major industrial development and waste. We moved through an entire fleet of rusted out tankers and barges and past shore based refineries that blocked the view of the nearby mountains. It looked like something out of 'Waterwold' or some other cheesy, post-apocalyptic movie.
When we busted out the fishing rods I was pretty jacked. They were heavy duty and were spooled with 30 lb test fishing line. We were going to catch some serious fish here. We thought. About five minutes into fishing I caught what looked a lot like a rock bass and was about the same size. I wished the little fella bon voyage and sent him back from whence he came. About 40 minutes later depression set in as I noticed that the Korean guy with us was keeping all of these fish and that's all we'd be catching. Check out the video above to see what I'm talking about. Overall the trip was great, it's just too bad we paid a bunch of money to catch a couple fish that I wouldn't keep at home.

P.S. Does anyone know who this blond girl is? Every time I mention getting some pics for my blog she jumps right in there. Photo stalker I guess.

P.P.S. Shinya Aoki is an absolute wizard! He just scored full mount with a guillotine, added a top side body triangle and transitioned into an armbar to beat Joachim Hansen with 2 seconds left in the fight to win the Dream light weight title. I think he was losing the fight until that point.

Punching, Kicking, Rocking, Relaxing.

2009-09-27T04:39:00.000-07:00

Punching the MMA timecard
A few people have asked how much I've been training and what kind of training I'm doing. To tell the truth I'm only training about 4 times a week right now. I usually go to jiu jitsu three times a week, either 2 days in the gi and one no-gi or vice versa. I usually go a little early or stay a little late to hit the bag or do some lifting/conditioning. On Saturdays I go in to do some light sparring, hit pads and do some rolling. Saturdays is mostly foreigners, most who don't know much, but there's always a few quality guys to work with.
Now that I've been here a month and am pretty well settled in I'll probably start gradually increasing the number of hours I train each week. Looks like our first pay check will be coming this week which means I'll also have some cash to join a gym. The gyms are everywhere here but they are pretty much garbage. And expensive. I've actually never paid for a gym membership in my life so I find paying anywhere from 70 - 100 bucks a month for some treadmills, weider machines from the 80's and a smith machine a bit hard to swallow. The gyms here actually have those belts from the 1960's that wrap around your stomach and shake like crazy to try and "break up the fat cells". Hilarious to watch.

World Class Athletes and Koreans Who Can't Clap
Friday night Lisa and I went to Daegu Stadium to watch the Daegu Pre-World Championships track meet. The stadium is only a 20 minute walk from school so we left right after work and got some street meat on the way there. Korean street meat is awesome, by the way.
The stadium wasn't filled but I bet there were ten thousand people there to watch.
The format of the track meet was cool. They only ran about half of the normal track events and only four field events. There were no heats or prelims. Only world or olympic medalists and placers were invited to this event. Where there was room, the the field was filled out with Korean athletes. Unfortunately most of Korean competitors got dusted. The only exceptions were a women's long jumper and a women's javelin thrower who both grabbed bronze medals.
The crowd was awesome, they knew who all of the big names were and they cheered hard for the foreign competitors and the Koreans, even when they were crossing the finish line dead last.
Koreans are love and are fascinated by anyone with blond hair. Some of the biggest cheers were reserved for a women's pole vaulter from Germany. She definitely wasn't one of the best vaulters competing, but when she was up she always got the biggest cheers. Another interesting thing about Korean spectators is that they just don't know how to do the "slow clap". You know the one where everyone starts off slow and gradually gets faster until some crucial moment in the sport where everyone erupts into general applause. They do it at baseball games before the pitchers delivers a pitch. A few of the long jumpers and pole vaulters were trying to get the crowd involved by starting the slow clap before their jumps. It just wasn't happening and I was getting a kick out of it. Maybe next year they should have a slow clap instructional seminar for spectators before the world championships.
The 100m final was by far the major attraction of the night. Tyson Gay and Atto Bolden were both here and finished one - two. Gay ran a 9.89 and Bolden ran 10.00 on the money.
The picture quality from the track meet is terrible because we forgot to bring a camera and took the pics on our cell phone. The pic here is of the 100m.

Saturday's Alright for Fighting, Jimjilabangs and Rockin' Out
Saturday Mitch took me and Scott, another guy from the club, to our first Jimjilbang, something that goes pretty high on my "list of things Koreans have figured out way better than Canadians". A Jimjilbang is a public sauna/bathhouse. For you Thunder Bayers it's kind of like Kengas Saunas, but way better. You go in, pay five bucks and get issued a locker key and a uniform. The first part is gender specific. You go into the guys or girls section to get washed. The washing/ relaxing area is HUGE. There are about 6 different pools. There's a cold tub (great for healing injuries), a cool tub, a lukewarm tub, a hot tub and what I can only describe as a molten hot magma tub. There's also a big sauna and lots of showers. You can hang out here as long as you want. There were some old dudes sleeping in lounge chairs when we were there (They probably didn't want to go home to their wives, which is pretty comon here but a whole other post altogether). When you've had your fill of the tubs you go put on your uniform and can go into the main area. here you can get a bite to eat from the restaurant, a beer if you so desire or go into any of the hot or cold rooms. The guy at the restaurant was loving that there were some foreigners at the Jimjalbang. He thought we were Russian for some reason (maybe the ears?) and watched us eat very closely. The hot rooms in this section are pretty cool. They have a pretty low ceiling, straw mats, stone ceiling and wooden pillows if you want to take a nap. This area is co-ed and there are lots of people wlking around ad going from one room to another. You can also get a haircut a shave and a massage if you want. The jimjilbang was awesomely relaxing and since it is just down the street from the club there was some talk of making it a Saturday afternoon tradition after training. I dig it.

The Jimjilbang was great, but Saturday had more to offer. The 14th annual Daegu Rock Festival (or something like that) was going on all day. We made our way down at about 11:00 to catch the last 4 or 5 bands. The bands were good, even though we couldn't understand what they were saying. There was every kind of rock band from ska and screamo to straight up rock. It was a nice change from the K pop that is everywhere in Korea. Think overly produced boy bands and from the mid to late 90's and that's pretty close to what you hear here all the time. The crowd wasn't huge but they all seemed to know the words to the songs so I'd have to guess the bands were at least a little well known. The last band of the night even singled us out in the crowd. It was a Korean Emo/Screamo band (not kidding) and the lead singer knew some English. Or he at least knew a few punk rock catch phrases that he heard English bands use like "Lets rock and roll!" and "Everybody SCREAM!!!!!". Regardless, at one point he looked at us and said "You Americans like EMO?!?!" I think that telling the truth and saying "Meh... it's okay, and we're Canadian by the way." would have ruined the vibe so we just put our hands up and and said "YEAHH!"

I Need THIS MUCH [------------------------------] Space!
Since I already told you about something that Koreans have figured out better than North Americans, I'll tell you about something they don't have figured out. Personal Space. If you're waiting in line for something Koreans will squish right up against you. Even if you're the only two people in line. If you are sitting on the subway and it's busy it's pretty normal for someone to stand in front of you, facing you with their crotch right in your face. I don't mean a foot away from your face, I'm talking about if the train stops quickly you're getting a face full of Korean baby maker. I've been violated so bad on the subway I feel like somebody owes me some money or something.

Miscellaneous Miscellania (Miscellanii?)

2009-09-23T07:23:00.000-07:00

Train Time
One of my favourite things to do in Korea is ride the subway. It's 14 stops from my house (about half an hour) to the MMA club. When I get on I put my I pod in and watch everyone come and go. It's interesting to watch all of the different types of people come and go. Businessmen, students, market salespeople, mothers, kids and fashionistas. It's interesting to watch how they interact with and treat each other. I often make up stories in my head about where they're going and what they're doing. I love people watching.
Plugging into my Ipod is also one of the only times that I can tune out the constant noise and clatter of Korea. There are so many people and it is so busy all the time, even at night, that it is always noisy. Being on the train listening to my own music (instead of K-Pop) is by far the most peaceful part of my day.
Ever hear the perfect song at the perfect moment? Today on the subway Soungarden's "superunknown" came through my earphones. In the song the phrase "alone in the superunknown" is repeated dozens of times. There's something so cool about being alone on the subway in a city of milions of people that has a culture and customs that are so unknown to me.

Training Time
None of the guys at Daegu MMA wear a cup when they roll, and, you know, when in Rome... I've been pretty lucky so far but I took a wicked knee shot today. This reminds me of a conversation I had with my old teamate Alex Jeffrey who has also crossed over into jiu jtsu and mma. He said "Don't you find it crazy that we wrestled for ten years with no cup or mouthgaurd?" My reply. "Yeah, but remember how we got sacked just about everyday and always had chipped teeth?"
"Hmm, true."

Square peg?
I recently discovered that in Korea you can force your key into the keyhole upside down in the dark if you try hard enough and are too stubborn to just take a second to turn on the light and actually look at what's going on. I feel like this is probably some kind of metaphor for my life. I'll let you guys try and figure it out.

Hardcore Spectating
It looks like I won't be making the trip to Seoul to watch the K1 Grand Prix finals this weekend. It's a bummer but I won't have been paid by then and just can't afford the trip right now. I do plan on going to Japan to watch some Dream and/or Sengoku MMA events later in the year. Instead of K1 I'll stay in Daegu and watch the pre-world championships track meet. There's a bunch of world champs and olympic medalists here so it should be awesome to watch. If it's on TV we'll be the ones with no shirts on, maple leafs painted on our chests and waving Canadian flags. I sure hope there's some Canadian athletes at the meet.

Which Way To Da Beach?

2009-09-15T20:45:00.000-07:00

International Relations
In the past 2 weeks I've experienced a few cases of really feeling like an outsider. The mother who stopped her car in the middle of a busy intersection and rolled down her window to point us out to her kids takes the cake. Being a "waygukin" sure gives you a new perspective on what it must like to be an immigrant in Canada.
On the whole, though, Korean hospitality has been outstanding. Last week our landlords (a very old Korean couple) invited us up to their place for birthday cake. It was the Ajima's (old lady, basically) birthday. They didn't speak any English but they had lots of family over and one of their daughters spoke English pretty well. Their hospitality was fantastic and could be best compared to an Italian family (eat, eat!) We also made friends with some Korean swimmers at the beach who fed us watermelon, cake, galbi and kept us stocked with makali, a Korean wine. While sitting outside a corner store having a few drinks some friends were talking about how small of a world it really is. As if on cue an older Korean man came up and asked if we knew David. Sure enough, someone did. It turns out the man is a physics professor at a local University and was meeting some of his students for a social drink. In Korea having a couple of drinks outside of the corner store is normal and they have tables set up for this. The professor and his students sat down at our table and hung out all night. Cool guys.

Busan

Pusan was great last weekend. There were eight of us that were going to go but we almost cancelled the trip because of bad weatehr in the morning. When the skies started to clear in the early afternoon on Saturday we got our act together and headed across town to the train station. We took the high speed train (Korea Transit Xpress or KTX). The train only took an hour and was $17 ROUND TRIP. Amazing. We went to two beaches, both of which were fantastic. Both beaches were on the sea of Japan, although that's not what the Koreans call it. We wanted to give surfing a try since this was the prime area to do it, but there was no surf to speak of this weekend. Apparently last weekend had four foot rollers, which might have been a bit much for me anyways. In the end we just layed in the sun, read some books, walked around to check out the shops and got sunburned. We also met some new friends from "Busan Aquatica", an open water swimming club that seemed to do everything at the beach except swim. We invited them to play frisbee with us which was hilarious. Frisbees are not common in Korea and by the end of an hour only a couple of them were starting to get the hang of it.

The Busan nightlife was great. Without getting into too much detail, we checked out a few restaurants, a few open air bars, a few vendors, a casino and, of course, lit off a ton of fireworks. When we finally hit the sack the night time view from our hotel window was awesome. For $30 we got a 5th floor room with a view of the Sea of Japan and the huge lit up bridge that crosses the bay where we were staying.

On Sunday we went to another beach which was a bit better than the first. Right before we left some of us were going to take one last dip to cool off. As we waded into the water I saw a HUGE jellyfish next to Mitch. We ran like OJ circa 1994. Actually we ran like scared little girls, not a heisman trophy winning tailback. Turns out the jellyfish was dead and ones that big don't usually come to shore. it eventually washed up and we snapped some pics before it got torn apart by the surf.

MMA

Training has been going well, except for the fact that a week of no-gi practice gave me a false sense of ability. Without the gi I've been able to use my wrestling, speed and athleticism to be competitive in sparring with most of the best guys at the club. Last night was the first time we were back in the gi for a week. I think the last time I had my ass handed to me that badly was when I scrimmaged with Gia Sissauori (World Champion, Olympic Silver medalist wrestler) in 2004. Most of the time I can feel myself being set up for something but I don't even know what that something is. The best way to describe it is to say that it feels like you're drowning in the gi and all you can do is try and keep your head above water. At one point I notced there was only 1 minute left in the 5 minute session and I set a mental goal to not get tapped for the last minute. I didn't care if I got totally dominated positionally, I just wanted to survive. I didn't make it.

Saturdays there's a "Fight Club" for foreigners at Daegu MMA. It's pretty low key; a bunch of people who want to get a workout in or give boxing or jiu jitsu a try. Most of the people don't know anything about anything as far as MMA goes and but this week I met two East Coast Canadian guys who are pretty good boxers. One of them has fought ten times and has super fast hands. They're cool guys and were happy that there was another guy around who knew something. I'm glad I found those guys, since my Muay Thai gym didn't pan out.

Turns out the Muay Thai gym owner and the owner of Daegu MMA have some bad blood and I wouldn't be allowed to train at both places. It sounds dumb but gets even dumber when you consider the fact that the two gyms teach completely different styles of fighting. They are not in direct competition with each other and don't take business from each other. Although I was disappointed, I wasn't shocked. This is an all too familiar story in the martial arts community. So and so doesn't like so and so which means none of his guys can go to those tournaments etc, etc... This drives me crazy because I don't care about the issues these guys have, my only interest is in getting better and if both places can make me better at different things then I want to train at both clubs.

This mentality seems even crazier coming from a wrestling background. I wrestled at one of the top Universities in Canada. There were teams we didn't get along with. There were teams we hated, but you can be sure that any wrestler anywhere could walk into any other wrestling room in the world, regardless of affiliation, and be welcomed. The idea is that having a good wrestler and another sparring partner in the room is beneficial to everyone else in the room and that you can always learn something from somebody who has a different style. It's the "steel sharpens steel" idea. In the martial arts community there often seems to be resistance to new people coming in with new ideas, a sort of "our way is the best way" mentality that can only take you so far before you have to branch out.

Misc. I forgot to mention that last week we went to Daegu World Cup Stadium to watch a Daegu FC soccer game. The stadium is amazing. They've hosted the world cup (Duh) in 2002 and the 2003 World University Games. Next year they're hosting the World Track and Field Championships. The game was okay I guess, but a 0-0 tie isn't really my cup of tea. The stadium itself is amazing and set right at the bottom of a mountain which gives you a pretty spectacular view.

Next week the K1 kickboxing World Grand Prix Final 16 is in Seoul. I' hoping I'll make it up there for that one. I'm getting pretty broke as I haven,t been paid yet, but I'll try and make it work. There's also a pre-world championship track and field test meet with a lot of Olympic medalists coming up. Cost? $5. I think I can swing that one.

Shout Outs:
My buddy Wade and the rest of the Sault Steelers for wining the National Football championships. Way to go guys.
All of the Canadian wrestlers at the world championships this week. Special shout out to former Thunderwolves teammate and all around killer Katie Patroch.

2009-09-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

Quick style

I recorded a message from my 5 year old kindergarten class; here it is. Yes, that's the whole class, and yes, they might be the cutest kids in the world. from left to right that's Mario, Alice, Sam and Amy. I can't wait to give my first Korean kid an English name. Darth will be a cool kid I'm sure.

Also, last night I went with an acquaintance to a Muay Thai gym in my neighbourhood that has a reputation for developing some great fighters. The owner seemed very happy to have me working out at their gym... until he found out I was also training at Daegu MMA. They hate each other and I was told I'd have to pick one place or the other. Even in Korea it is impossible to avoid martial arts politics. More on this later...

I'm heading to Busan (Pusan) to hit the beach while the temp is still in the high 20's and give surfing a try. Some beverages may also be in order.

Thought for Today:
I know why there are no male kindergarten teachers. You get bagged ALL THE TIME! Kids love to run up to you and hug at all times of the day. Unfortunately their heads are at just the right height that a running hug turns into a running head butt in the cajones. When they run up and hug you from behind their little fists wrap around and bag you just as hard. I don't wear my cup to jiu-jitsu but I may start wearing it to school.

Cauliflower ear is universal and your food will stare back at you.

2009-09-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

currently editing and attaching pictures... stay tuned

The Gastric Revolution

I never thought I'd find myself shopping in the "foreign foods" section of the supermarket. Generally, I'll eat just about anything but I really had no idea what to expect in Korea. I did a little research before we came to Korea, but that just meant I knew what things were called, not what they taste like. So far, I haven't had any problems.

The coolest thing about Siji, the area where we live, is the outdoor markets. Everyday the market is full of local farmers selling all kinds of fresh produce, pastries, dried foods and seafood. There's lots of familiar vegetables and fruits as well as all kinds of things I've never seen before. The markets are also cheap. Yesterday Lisa and I bought 8 green peppers for just under one Canadian dollar. They also have lots of seafood that you don't see in Canada. Eel, octopus and squid are often kept alive in the market along with all kinds of interesting looking fish. They'll hack the heads off and give them to you in a bag on the spot. Sometimes they'll leave the head right on; Koreans don't usually waste any part of the animal. At lunch the other day I realized that the soft, squishy part of the little squid I was eating was the head... eyes and brain fully. At the same meal I realized what I thought was some kind of sprout was staring at me with hundreds of tiny eyes and was actually a huge batch of tiny minnows. Check out the new videos on the side of the page to see some of the cool seafood in the market.

Lisa and I eat the free lunch everyday at school. Our school has a full time cook who makes traditional Korean food. The meals are definitely well balanced. Every day we get some rice, some meat, some vegetables and some soup. The British teachers who were here before us couldn't stomach but we've eaten it everyday so far and haven't had any problems, although Lisa could think of things she'd rather eat than brains and eyes.

It's also really cheap to eat out in Korea. A decent dinner shouldn't cost you more than ten bucks, including beer. The Koran barbeque, called galbi, is great and no matter what you order it's always served with tons of sides, usually different kinds of vegetables, sprouts and kimchee (one of the healthiest foods in the world according to mens health). If you want to eat out and get a taste of home Daegu has Burger King, Macdonalds, The Outback, Pizza Hut, Bennigans, Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robins although everything tastes just a little different and is usually more expensive than Korean food.

A Few Nights on the Town

It sure wouldn't be stretching things to say that our first weekend here was a success. We met up with Mitch and a few other westerners on friday eveing and headed downtown. Our small group quickly grew into a full blown herd as we walked through downtown picking friends and friends of friends as we went. The expat community here is large and everybody knows everyone or knows someone who knows everyone.

Downtown Daegu is awesome, but not what you'd expect from a city of almost 3 million. Instead of wide streets like you find in North American downtowns the streets are wide enough for one car to squeeze through the mass of walking weekenders. The rules of being on the town are a little different too. If you're ever here feel free to take your drink out of whatever bar you were in, walk around the streets with it and then wander into another bar still carrying it. This is perfectly ok. Don't wait for last call to tell you when you should call it a night. There isn't one and being "cut off" is a term that has no Korean translation. Beer is cheap, soju is cheap and dong dong ju is cheap. Liquor is very expensive. The dong dong ju is an rice wine that is served chilled and is quite delicious on a hot Daegu night.

Warning: Do not ignore the warning about the dong dong ju sneaking up on you. I did, and it did. Big time.

While hanging out downtown buying my drink in a bag from the walk through window (yeah, you read that right) one of the workers at the drink in a bag store shoved a roman candle in my hand and lit it. There I was, shooting off fireworks in the middle of a bustling downtown party square. I was a little worried until everyone starting lighting them off. I guess this is why you can buy fireworks just about anywhere in Korea.

The very same night I was coming out of the bathroom at a bar and there were two little Korean guys waiting outise the stall for me. One of them pointed at me and yelled something like "RASW-AHHH!". Great. My first night out and I'm going to get attacked in a bar, have to fight back and probably get deported. I put my hands in the air (the universal sign for "whoah dude, I didn't do anything) and tried to look as harmless as possible. The shortest of the two came at me and grabbed my ear, again saying "Wras-wah!
Ohhhhhhhhh.... "Wrest-ler"
"Ya, ya Wraswah"
Phew. Through some bastardization of sign language I figured out that he was also a wrestler and competed at 55 kg. After coming to an understanding that we were in some way brothers through sport the guy gave me a very animated two thumbs up and left me with "you good guy!", probably the only English he knew.

Jiu Jitsu/MMA

training at Daegu MMA has great. I've had a few gi classes and a few no-go classes so far. I've been getting really good sparring as well as great lots of good technique work and drills that seem to already be making a difference in my game. I've been sparring ("spahh-ing", as they call it) with Yeung Gal, one of the purple belt instructors who competes at 62 kg. He's a super cool guy, speaks decent English and is extremely athletic. In the two short weeks I've been here had some crzay scrambles and have developed a nice friendly rivalry. Yeung Gal's also has a great sense of humour, he likes yelling thinsg in English like "squeej yah ashahole!" just to give me chuckle, knowing I'm the only one who understands. I had to do a double take the first time I heard him say that one.

The competition Jiu Jitsu team were in Seoul last weekend at a tournament. It sounds like just about everyone won their division and the team won the overall championship. There's lots of studs in the room, that's for sure.

The owner of the club also gave me a very nice Daegu MMA/Machado Jiu Jitsu competition shirt as a gift. The shirt is very big but some of the other guys in the club have said that this is a very great sign of respect. The feeling is definitely mutual.

Random Thoughts:

The level of respect at Daegu MMA is great and I'm glad I've been accepted there, but being bowed to by another dude in the shower is a bit unerving. Double that feeling when you're expected to do the same.

The Korean version of frat boy types getting tattoos with oriental writing they don't understand? Every Korean under 30 wearing shirts with English sentences on them that they don't understand and don't make sense. Some of my favourites... "Place take your stare down" and "Revolution cups drink for the coming big time"

I experienced the sharp end of racism for the first time the other day. A couple of drunk businessmen on the subway singled me out to hassle. I was the only white guy on the train and was aparently asking for it. It was a long 15 minutes and gave me a lot of food for thought.

A few people have asked about the schools here... hold on people, don't get your knickers in a
bunch. I'll post about it eventually but the different education systems here are complicated and I feel like I shouldn't go posting my first impressions which are probably wrong.

Stranger in a Strange Land

2009-09-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

Arrival and Accommodations
Well, we've been in Daegu for about five days now. We received a phone call at 2:00 pm on Thursday telling us we had to be at the airport at 4:00 am the next morning to leave for Korea. We knew it might happen and luckily we were already packed and ready to go. Our arrival was surprisingly without incident considering we had to take two planes totaling 17 hours of flying time, a bus from Seoul to Daegu and meet up with someone to drive us to our hotel. Seems easy but is much more difficult when you can't speak the language or read the signs. Our hotel, where we stayed for 3 nights, was something to see. In Korea they are known as "love motels". They're not as dirty as they sound but they do have some interesting "features". Ask me about them sometime. We moved into our permanent apartment yesterday. We were led to believe that we'd likely be staying in a small box suitable to house a toaster oven. The apartment is actually not a bad size (quite big by Korean standards). We have a bathroom, bedroom, lounge room and a combined kitchen/dining room. Living large, some might say.

Korean Traffic

Traffic in Korea is insane. Lots of streets don't have names. This obviously makes giving directions tough. Especially when your cab driver doesn't speak English and you don't speak Korean. Red lights are a suggestion; feel free to blow through, just make sure to honk so everyone knows you're coming. We think that Canadian cabbies are crazy but they don't even play in the same league of crazy as Korean cab drivers. These guys can squeeze a full sized car through an empty toilet paper tube at 90km an hour while watching their favourite Korean game show on the TV installed under their rearview mirror. Close your eyes, it's best that way.

Parking anywhere you can fit your car is fair game. On the sidewalk? Ok. Front end of the car in a parking lot and back end blocking traffic? Not a problem. Parking on a traffic island between east and westbound lanes? Sure. Double parking? Yep, just leave your phone number so the person you blocked in can call you. Parked on the side of the street facing the wrong way and blocking an entrance-way? No problemo.

Motorcycles have a completely separate set of rules, by which I mean they have absolutely no rules. Motorcycle riders can drive in a regular lane with the rest of traffic. If traffic is heavy they just hop up on the sidewalk and weave in and out of the pedestrians. I've already seen one rider riding next to the curb going the opposite way of traffic in his lane. Through parks, over curbs, across lanes.. wherever your bike can take you, you can go.

The subway system in Daegu is good. I live on one extreme side of the city and being on the subway line means I can get to the other side in about half an hour. Keep in mind the city is 2.5 million people... sometimes it takes that long to get from one side of Sault Ste. Marie to the other; population 75 000. The subway also takes me directly from my appartment to Daegu MMA, where I will spend a lot of time training.

Daegu MMA
Going to a new MMA gym or jiu jitsu club can be a little strange. Every club has its' own protocol and rules, much of which are unwritten. Nobody ever wants to be the guy who shows up and looks like he has no clue what's going on. Just as bad is showing up and being the guy who goes too hard and is trying to prove how tough he is. It's a delicate balancing act to show that you are competent but not an ego monster. It often takes months to be fully accepted at a place like this. Luckilly for me, my brother Mitch has been in Daegu for a year and training at Daegu MMA for just as long. Mitch did all the hard work and they obviously love him there. Mitch brought me to the club to meet everyone on one of the first nights we were in town.

When we walked through the doors Mitch got a very warm reception from everyone who was in the gym at the time. The owner of the club came our way, pointed at me and said "Mitchie brother?" My answer was followed by a very large and very unexpected bear hug, which speaks to the reputation that Mitch has built at Daegu MMA. Every person I met asked the same question; "Mitchie brother?" and saying yes was the secret passward into the club. The club has extremely good jiu-jitsu (it is a J.J. Machado affiliate) and good kickboxing. Their weakest point seems to be wrestling which explains why Mitch was so popular and why I was welcomed so quickly. Mitch has been helping some of their fighters, like Un Sik Song, with their wrestling. He also dislocated his elbow recently but assured everyone at the club that his brother would be soon be in Daegu to teach wrestling.

I met and rolled with a lot of really good guys; Yung Gul, Bogu, Superman and John, who has an English name because he went to an English school. I was pretty nervous as my first live scrimmage was with Yung Gul... John pointed towards him and said "you go master". Scary. How hard should I go? %100? Russian drill? Light scrimmage? I decided to hit a quick takedown and then feel things out. The takedown came quick and I heard some "ohhhh"s and quiet murmuring in Korean. We got into a quick scramble which I wrestled my way out of, ending up in top open guard. More murmuring and some "Ahhhhhh"s, this time a little louder. Looking up, I saw that everyone had stopped rolling and was watching us. We had pretty much the whole mat to ourselves. The rest of the 5 minute scrimmage was me trying to pass his guard and defend submissions while he threw all kinds of submission at me. I was barely staying alive to be honest and eventually fell into a well set up triangle. I knew it was coming but couldn't stop it. While the rest of the class finished with conditioning I rolled with Bogu, an 81 kg. competitor. I got tapped a lot. He was big and strong but wasn't using size or strength, he was just good.

I went back to Daegu MMA on my own two days later. It was a Gi class, which was great. I approached the class as if I knew nothing (which in the Gi is pretty much true) and was able to get some good work in Gi fundamentals during the technical portion of the class. We did some hard sparring at the end of class. I was able to handle most of the people in the class as they were all whitebelts. At the end of class I got some good sctrapping in with John and Yung Gul which quickly put me in my place. I think in the two days I've been at the club I've been tapped out 15 times. This tells me I'm in the right place... I'm not sure if I got tapped out 15 times in the last 6 months.

Any of you LU wrestlers remember doing Korean pushups? Well here they just call them pushups. (Ha! Fran would like that joke.) We did 130 of them AFTER 25 minutes of sparring. Talk about bulletproof shoulders.

3... 2... 1... Go!

2009-08-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

Today at 3:00 pm I got a call letting me know that I had to be at the airport at 4:00 am to leave for Korea. We knew we would be leaving on short notice, but man, this is a bit crazy. We didn't even have our Visas issued when they called. Luckily our Visa interviews went well and they were issued immediately afterwards. So that's it, we're off.

Toronto's been fun. I've been able to visit with lots of friends (Josh, Andrew, Andrew, Jess, Alex and Jo), take in a Blue Jays game, go to the Canadian National Exhibition, go to a few parties, visit with Lisa's family and get some solid training in. Training at Extreme Couture was great. Rolling and scrimmaging live with all of the guys there was fun. I got to have a good competitive session with the current National Champion which was great. The last day I was there I met up with Andrew Elliot, a former University wrestling teammate and all around bad-ass. Andrew is actually one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, he's just really good at causing people pain and discomfort and has translated that into success as a wrestler and fighter. He's a physical beast who happens to have some really good skills. Keep an eye on him, I think you may see him on some bigger shows before too long.

I was also able to meet up with Alex Jeffrey, another ex Lakehead Thunderwolves wrestler. Alex and I actually started off as rivals on the highschool and national wrestling scene when we were younger. We both ended up at Lakehead where we were teammates and training partners for 5 years and even roomates for 3 years. We've been through a lot together and have a lot of stories, some of which are even suitable to tell in public. Alex and his wife Joanne just opened Driven Athletics/Crossfit Huronia. Lisa and I stopped by for dinner and a workout. Their gym is awesome and they are both great coaches. If you are in the area (Midland, Huronia, Victoria Harbour) check them out. In addition to crossfit and personal training they offer wrestling, jiu-jitsu and MMA classes.

Early tomorrow (friday) morning Lisa and I will board a plane in Toronto. We'll have a stopover in San Francisco and then it will be on to Seoul. From Seoul we'll be taking a train into Daegu. Provided everything goes according to plan, which we all know is unlikely, we will arrive in Daegu sometime around 11:00 pm on Saturday. We will have ALL DAY Sunday to cure our jet lag, get situated in our new apartment and learn the Korean language before starting work on Monday. As the Koreans say "No probrem."

Parties, Parties, Parties

2009-08-23T19:34:00.000-07:00

Things are rolling along here in Orangeville/Toronto. I went with my friend Josh to Robin Black's party at the Bovine Sex Club. There were some other fighters and musicians there along with training partners and friends from Extreme Couture. The highlight for me was when a girl physically attacked me in the bar. Her friend was chatting up Josh so she was stuck with me. She was throwing out a real "tough chick" vibe and I wasn't buying it. Maybe I shouldn't have told her that I thought everything about the way she presented herself was a disguise and that people who are actually tough don't act that way (case in point, there were a bunch of fighters around and she was the only one acting tough). Maybe I also shouldn't have said that underneath all of her tattoos, spiked piercings and aggressive behaviour she was probably just a fragile, scared little girl. That was probably the part that did it. When she attacked me, I lassoed her real quick and sat her down on a chair while she tried to scratch, bite and knee me in the sweet spot. Like I said, she wasn't as tough as she thought she was... I've beat up way tougher chicks. The best part of the whole thing was that this happened in the middle of a bar and only about 5 people noticed and none of them blinked an eye. She also told me to watch out because her boyfriend "is really into jiu-jitsu". I wish she said "trains UFC" but that's almost as good. Unless her boyfriend is Mark Bocek or something, in which case I guess I'm in big shit. Robin also had the belt out and was having everyone taking pictures wearing it. I felt a little strange about it, like I should only take a picture wearing a belt if I've won it. It's kind of like in wrestling all of the kids who buy Team Canada singlets... You're only supposed to wear one if you've earned it.

Yesterday was also my girlfriend's birthday as well as her grandmother's 80th birthday. The in-laws had a big BBQ/bonfire with lots of family and friends. Meat, sparklers, horseshoes, donkeyballs, drinks... we had it all going on. Also, my girlfriend is better than your girlfriend and her Grandma is one of the raddest 80 year olds around. She was still up drinking after I went to bed. No joke.

I'll be hitting the gym a fair bit over the next few days as there is a grappling tournament in Korea not long after I get there and I'd like to show up in decent shape. I hope to get in some more sessions at Extreme Couture as well as check out my buddy Alex's new gym (Crossfit Huronia/Driven Athletics) in Victoria Harbour. They'll be offering wrestling, jiu-jitsu and MMA, as well as Crossfit and a host of other fitness classes so if you are in the Huronia, Midland, Vic Harbour area check them out.

Fighting Rockstars and Homeless People. On the CBC and in a Tornado. Just a Nice little Thursday.

2009-08-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

Last night I made my way down to Toronto from Sault Ste. Marie. This morning I got up early and went with my girlfriend to the Korean consulate to get our Visa processed. That was the last normal thing that happened.

I was looking to get a workout in so I got dropped off at Extreme Couture knowing that there was a jiu jitsu class I could drop in on. When I got there the gym was pretty empty (it was the middle of the day on a Thursday) so I started wrapping my hands to warm up with some rounds on the heavy bag. As I was getting ready Robin Black walked in. Robin Black is a former Canadian Rock Star turned pro MMA fighter. He had his own show on Much Music. He also just won the 135 lb title in Elite 1 MMA. Lots of people in the MMA community have given him a lot of grief and questioned his motives for competing in the MMA. He has been accused of being an attention seeker and using the sport as a publicity stunt. More on that later. Robin and I got talking for a while, partnered up and hit the bag on alternating rounds and then chatted about various things while we stretched. It turns out we have several mutual acquaintances in the MMA community. Robin was going to run one of the kickboxing classes, but found someone else to run it and instead came to the jiu jitsu class. Class was good. We worked on some techniques that fit into my repertoire pretty well and did a good amount of live rolling. After the class Robin told me to come train the rest of the week when he was in. He also invited me to give him a call the next day and come to a party he was throwing at the Bovine club in T.O. in celebration of his championship win. Rockstar Party. Sweet. Details and pictures to follow.

As for Robin Black the MMA athlete... The guy lives MMA. I obviously don't know the guy well but I think he is in this sport because he loves it. He works at Extreme Couture, he trains multiple times a day, he's in fighting shape and when he talks about the sport you can tell he has a genuine love for it. And the guy is legit. After working out and rolling with him I can honestly say he is for real which is more than can be said for most of the keyboard warriors who've been trashing him and his MMA credibility.

The rest of my day was also pretty interesting. I got interviewed by the CBC about some current issues. The camera man had a mini freak out when I said I was from Sault Ste. Marie because he grew up in the Sault and went to Korah. About 5 minutes later Lisa and I got assaulted by what I'm assuming was a homeless guy. Homeless or not he definitely had some serious and unmedicated mental issues. I'm not sure why he picked us but he came all the way across Dundas square looking directly at us and started to give us hell about being Scottish and Irish (Way off, by the way) and crying foul about what all the white people have done. He went on and on for probably ten full minutes, getting more aggressive and threatening all the time. He challenged me to fight, called me names, questioned my manhood, you know... all the good stuff. I really thought he was going to try and slug me and I was ready to duck a punch and hit him with a nice running double if need be, but it never came to that. Eventually a bystander found a security guard who escorted the obviously troubled fellow off of the premises.
Did I mention that while I was eating dinner the sky turned yellow, then green and opened up like floodgates? Not to worry though, that was just the precursor to several tornadoes touching down in the GTA. No big deal. Seriously... Tornadoes in Toronto.
So ends day one of my travels... We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Ho Shin Sool MMA

2009-08-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'll miss most about home is training at Ho Shin Sool. Before moving back to Sault Ste. Marie I spent 5 years wrestling for Lakehead University, one of the best wrestling teams in the country. Our team was extremely close and trained at a very high level. At the end of 2005 I wrestled in the gold medal match of the National Championships. The next month I graduated, got a job back home and my wrestling career as an athlete was essentially over. It was tough going from training 20 hours a week at an elite level to not having anything to train for at all.
After seeing an online add for a grappling class in town I dragged along Ray, another ex Lakehead wrestler to check it out and act as back up if need be. I was a bit skeptical because most of the martial arts clubs I had been to in the past were very closed minded about people coming in with backgrounds in other styles. I quickly found out that HSS was not like that. They had dedicated grappling classes twice a week and the instructors had a good understanding of what they were teaching. Jim, the owner, is a high ranking black belt in Dahn Moo Do, but was committed to learning the other aspects of martial arts including wrestling, kickboxing and jiu-jitsu. Jim welcomed a couple of has been (or never were?) wrestlers into his club and we began to learn a lot from each other.
Over the next few years things began to evolve quickly. I dragged a few more wrestlers along, and as word got out people began to show up with different backgrounds: boxing, kickboxing, jiu jitsu, etc. Classes began to get much busier. The basement was converted from a yoga studio to a dedicated training area complete with weights, a training cage and extra mat space. Members of our club began competing successfully in Jiu Jitsu and grappling tournaments as well as amateur and Professional MMA.
To paraphrase Jim "We brought MMA to Sault Ste. Marie" We were the first club that had legitimate striking, wrestling and Jiu-jitsu coaches all under one roof. We were the first club in Sault Ste. Marie to compete in MMA and the first club to do so regularly. King of the Cage came to Sault Ste. Marie because they saw one of our fighters compete at another event.
We take pride in the fact that every one of our fighters who enters the cage is well prepared. Having been to numerous small MMA events we have seen plenty of fighters get in the cage who had no business being there. A lot of our members who have never fought are already much better prepared than many of the fighters we've seen at the various MMA events.
I'll miss the HSS family while I'm away for a year but I couldn't think of a better send off than the display that HSS fighters put on a few weeks ago at King of the Cage. Going 5 for 5 with 3 KO's and 2 Submissions left absolutely no doubt who the best club in the area is. Defeating a few fighters from other clubs in the area also drove the point home. (check out the video of Jeff Elliot defeating Owen Martin at the top of the page).
While we had 5 fighters on the King of the Cage event, the evening was a success for the whole team. All of the members of the team were instrumental in our success that night. Many gave up evenings and weekends to hold pads, be sparring partners and help us on the technical aspects of whatever their specialty was. The night of weigh-ins and the event itself it was great having our team around taking care of everything we needed and providing a great atmosphere to prepare in. I heard a quote a little while ago that sums it up perfectly "You're out there all alone, but if it wasn't for them you wouldn't be there at all." Big thanks to Boss, Big John, BJ, TJ, Mark, Scott, Ray, Larlo, Husky and Sean.
Thanks for everything guys, I'll miss ya while I'm gone.

Leaving For Korea

2009-08-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

Going to Korea: Here's what I know...

In less than a week I'll be leaving my house in Sault Ste. Marie and I'll be gone for over a year. A half-hatched plan to take a leave of absence from my job and travel overseas to train for an entire year has somehow panned out despite my lackadaisical attitude towards Korean paperwork and deadlines.
While in Korea I'll be working as an ESL teacher in the city of Daegu and training at Daegu MMA, one of the top MMA teams in Korea. My brother Mitch has been in Daegu training at Daegu MMA for almost a year now which should help relieve the culture shock. It'll be nice to have a guide who has the city pretty much staked out when I get there.

Scary Stuff...

I still have to sell my car, pack up my house and cram everything I need for a year into two duffel bags (plus one carry on) before we leave.

I still don't really know when or where I'm going. My girlfriend and I have secured jobs at an ESL "institute" which is arranging our flights and our housing while in Korea. In less than a week we will be heading to southern Ontario to wait for our final bit of paperwork to clear through the Korean Embassy (a formality, I'm told) at which point we will likely be on the next flight to Los Angeles and then Korea. Here's hoping there's someone waiting for us at the airport.