The Blog is Back!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.