TUF 13 Fighter Blog: Shamar Bailey Talks Episode 5

Here we go with another installment of my Ultimate Fighter blog. I really do appreciate you guys taking the time to come back each week; its been fun putting these things together, and I hope you’re enjoying them.

We picked up this week where we left off last week – with Brock giving his guys a lecture about leaving it all in the cage, how serious an opportunity this is for them, and that he’s looking for the three guys on his team who haven’t fought to “wow” him when they get into the cage.

Like I said last week, there are two way to take that kind of situation; you can either let it get you down and take everything personally or you can listen to what is being said, take it as constructive criticism and go out there and improve.

I think Brock did a better job of explaining himself and making his point more clearly this time, and he seems to be warming up to being a coach a little more too. This is the first episode where he really seems invested in being there, not just counting the hours until he can leave.

The tension between Lew and Junior has been a recurring theme throughout this season, and we get more of it after the fight announcement. For me, it was hard to get a gauge on the situation with the coaches because everything that Lew would say seemed to make sense; everything all the coaches said made sense, and in my mind, they didn’t contradict each other.

I think we started to realize that there was a power struggle; Lew was getting left out of some of the practice plans. The coaches would have these little meetings, and Lew would be left out; he wouldn’t even know they were at these meetings.

Again, I think the confusion came from the beginning, when Junior wasn’t confident with his English and his ability to communicate with us. Lew stepped up to help him out, became his voice at time, and once he realized that we could understand him, I think Junior took Lew’s efforts the wrong way.

I don’t think Lew meant anything wrong by it – I thought he was doing a good job myself – but I think it just boiled down to what Lew’s idea of helping out was and what Junior’s idea of helping out was. There was definitely a little bit of strife there, for sure.

We could definitely hear Brock’s team bickering back and forth that night, especially what went on between Tony and Chris, and we definitely knew something was going on with that team.

Mick couldn’t have picked a better time to write in the sand; we knew that they didn’t really like Chris, but we didn’t know that they were thinking he was a double agent at the time. Mick wrote it and things just escalated from there.

I’m not sure why they picked out me and Ryan as the guys who might have written it. The only thing I can come up with is that we were the two guys who were the least social with their team at that time; I think they thought we had a little bit of a chip on our shoulders or a little bit of an attitude.

Really, I didn’t choose to socialize with anyone from their team because at that point, we still didn’t know who we were fighting next, so I think that’s the only reason they singled us out.

We knew this was going to be a tough fight for Mick before he walked out to the cage. What you guys didn’t see is that in his warm-up, he had a picture of his daughter with him, and he just put too much pressure on himself. He started crying in the warm-ups, then he’d get himself together, and then he’d start crying again before getting his composure back.

I was a little concerned that he was just putting too much pressure on himself to win this fight for his daughter, and I think it showed in the fight. All those emotions in the warm-up were evident in how flat he was during the fight. Mick is capable of a lot more than he showed in that fight, for sure.

As for Clay’s injury, we didn’t know about it until after the fight like everyone else. He came back to the house with a cast on. Everybody was making a big deal about it, but to me it was one of those things you should try to cover up.

I wrestled in college, and we’ve all dislocated fingers and whatnot; those are the types of things you can cover up without your opponent catching wind of it. I thought he’d be able to keep fighting, but apparently the doctors thought differently.

As for next week, you can expect some more drama between Lew and Junior. We’re definitely going to find out just how much stress there was between the coaches next week.

See you then.

Shamar