Hi everyone thanks for checking back for the recap of week 4. This is kind of an important one since I fought on this episode. I appreciate all of your support and hope you enjoy the blog.

In the beginning some of the guys recapped Roy and Kimbo’s fight and gave their thoughts on it. I already told you all last week what I thought about it. As you can see everyone was kind of on the same page with me.

Team Rashad had a team meeting and decided on the rest of their first round picks. Looking back at the show now I think they made pretty good decisions. We knew that Matt Mitrione did not want to fight Marcus. They have had beef since before the show stemming back to tryouts where Marcus caught Matt talking about him. So I think that he snitched so that the coaches would change up the match ups. The show didn’t really go in depth about how pissed off Team Rashad was that he gave up important details about their game plan. That day was the beginning of some unwise decisions for the self proclaimed “Meat Head”.

Time for the fight picks. Since Matt was so kind to tell us, I had a pretty good idea I was going to be picked next against Brendan. On paper it seemed like a good match up. I knew he had great boxing and jiu-jitsu and I was not sure about his wrestling. At the time did not realize the other advantages he also had. For instance he was there on a team with some of his coaches and training partners from home. He also had coaches that showed up on time and helped him prepare to go out and fight but ill get into that later.

The game plan against Brendan was pretty simple. First, mix it up with the hands but don’t get into danger and then when he thinks it is going to be a stand up war go for the takedown. I was confident I could execute the plan but I was also pretty nervous, not only was this the biggest fight of my life against one of their toughest guy but it was also my first pro fight. I tried my best to put that in the back of my head so I could go out and execute.

Before I left for the show my coach told me to have faith in my stand up. If you recall earlier in this episode Rashad talks about sharpening the fighters existing style and skills, not trying to change them completely because time was too short. Rampage had a different idea. He wanted to teach us all a style known as the cover and roll, which I felt was effective for certain fighters. However, only training this style for a week and a half made it difficult to want to stay standing with a striker of Brendan’s caliber.

On the day of the fight, as I am sure you all saw, when I arrived to the training center my whole coaching team was leaving to go get something to eat. I didn’t think much of it and figured they would be right back. Apparently I was wrong. Since they were not there to warm me up I just tried to stay calm and get into a mental zone. They finally got there about 10 minutes before the fight started. On the show when the coaches are walking in you see an older guy wrapping my hands, Junk went out and found someone because we knew we were going to have to go out soon and thought it was going to have to be without the coaches. Tiki ended up wrapping my hands and I hit pads for a minute or two and had to go out. As a fighter on fight day you have to block out all distractions, so until I actually watched the show I kind of forgot that it all went down like that. When I walked out to fight I was not thinking “man I wish they were here earlier to warm me up” I just knew I had a job to do.

When the fight started I felt like everything was going well on the feet until my brain decided to take a shot but my body didn’t. Fortunately, I was able to recover before Brendan capitalized on the bad shot. Later in the stand up exchange I actually changed levels, took a good shot and was able to take Brendan down. Once I had Brendan on the ground I wanted to work him over into the corner where I could pin him and start landing hands and elbows. When I got him into the corner he did a good job of grabbing and pivoting off the cage which made it so I was unable to pin him properly. I felt like I was landing decent shots from the top but not enough to do serious damage. Brendan had his guard open looking for submissions and left me a pass through the middle to side control. Once in side control I felt confident that he would not be able to get me off and I continued to land short elbows. Then came my biggest mistake of the whole fight. I attempted to mount by putting my knee on his stomach without enough pressure and left way too much space. I was going for speed versus technique. Brendan saw the space and was able to escape. I went for a desperation shot to bring him back down to the ground but he caught me in a front head lock and rolled into an anaconda choke. I thought I would be ok but clearly was not, the choke was tight and it was either tap or go to sleep.

After the fight I don’t remember Rampage and the coaches not coming in the cage. All I could think about was how I let me teammates down. I came out flat, my stand up was off, my shots were slow, and I gassed far to quickly. I don’t know if it had to do with not having the proper warm up, not enough experience, or something else but either way I didn’t get the job done. I always try to look at the positives and given my experience I felt I held my own against an undefeated pro fighter. Brendan and I actually became pretty good friends after the fight and he helped me understand what it takes to be a professional in this sport. I am still pretty new to this and I feel like with the right team and the right training I will succeed as a pro fighter. Let cheer Brendan on through the rest of the competition because if he beat me he must be good J.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me thus far. I appreciate you all and will continue working hard. As history of TUF has shown it is not always about where you place on the show as much as it is what you do with the opportunity after. Check out my blog each week for my input on the show. 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.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Demico Rogers TUF 10 Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.