Demico Rogers TUF 10 Blog Week 1
ATO is proud to have Demico Rogers onboard for this season of The Ultimate Fighter. Demico will be giving his perspective about life in the house and the fights. Please check back each week to see what he has to say.
This is week one. We will post week 2 later this weekend.
INTRO
For those of you who don’t know me, probably quite a few, I am Demico Rogers the “dark horse” from The Ultimate Fighter season 10. I’ll start by telling you a little bit about myself. I was born, raised, and still live in the Seattle area. I have been training in MMA for about 3 years now. I have an amateur MMA record of 4-0 and am making my pro debut on the show. You may wonder how I even made it on the show with no pro fights, and all I can tell you is I trained my butt off for tryouts and gave it 110%. As for my fighting style; I consider my hands good, my wrestling at the college level, and my jiu jitsu is getting better every day. Being chosen for the ultimate fighter is a great opportunity for me. Being a little known amateur I felt I had everything to gain and nothing to loose.
EPISODE 1
For us, the show started when we were all standing there and Dana came out and introduced Kimbo I was not worried too much about him, there was 14 other guys I had to worry about. It was disappointing to not have to fight our way into the house but at the same time that guaranteed us a spot.
The evaluation session was weird because you are going against guys you’ve never trained with before and we were not exactly sure how hard to go. Each of the coaches had their methods of evaluating us, each made sense. Rashad wanted to make sure our fundamentals were there and that we could follow instruction. While Rampage wanted to see us bang and see who hit hard and moved forward. I will admit going into the show I wanted to be on Rashad’s team simply because I felt I matched up better with him stylistically. I was not at all disappointed though when I was Rampages third pick. He is a former world champion, as tough as they come and there isn’t a funnier guy in the UFC. I was happy with our team and we designated Scott Junk as our team captain. He had a ton of experience and is one of the most motivating guys I’ve ever met.
Unfortunately, we had to pick our first two fights before we even got to have a team practice. It would be hard for anyone to pick fight not really knowing anything about anyone and just looking at them. I was happy with Rampage picking Abe to fight John Madsen. I soon found out though, that Abe’s wrestling was suspect and Madsen was a former national champ. I had confidence in Abe and knew as long as he lowered his stance and kept John at the end his jab he would be fine. Well, he didn’t do either. He came out too high and was easily taken down and received lots of damage. Being on bottom he should have attempted more escapes to get back to the feet or create scrambles since Madsen isn’t a high level jits guy. I wasn’t surprised the fight was not stopped for the cut, Abe had Stich in his corner and if the rumors are true, with him in your corner a fighter has NEVER had a fight stopped for a cut. There is not too much else to say about the fight. Abe’ s head wasn’t there (no pun intended) and John executed their game plan perfectly. I trained with Abe for 6 weeks and know he is much better than his performance showed. I hope he gets another shot to show his skills. We are down 1-0 but there are plenty more fights left. Stay tuned.
For those of you in the Seattle Area come watch the show with me Wednesday nights at The Liquid Lime in Kirkland at 8pm. Check me out on facebook, myspace, & Twitter just look me up by name. Thanks for the support.
