Welcome back everybody. Just wanted to start out by saying how much I’ve enjoyed doing this so far, and that I appreciate all the positive feedback; I’m glad everyone is enjoying this blogs.
This week kicks off where we left off last week, with the announcement of the wild card fight between Chuck and Javier, and then Len making a point of going to talk to Dana.
All season I’ve been saying the guys from Team Lesnar have been more talk than action, and this shows it again. No one went into the room with Dana last week and really made a case for the wild card spot, but now that he didn’t get it, Len is there asking for a fight with Ryan on the Finale and whatnot.
I think it was a case where Len went into the meeting with Dana assuming that he was a shoo-in for that wild card. In his mind, he was the best fighter there, nobody fought as well as he did; he was just real high on himself and that came back to bite him.
Some of it goes back to not having to fight to get into the house I think. When you combine that with people who think they’re better than what they really are and they’re taking this opportunity for granted, that’s when you run into these kind of situations.
There were people there who were genuinely very thankful for the opportunity, and really would have done whatever was necessary no matter what was thrown at them to get a shot at the contract. Then there were those people who just went in there with the attitude that they deserved this.
Even Dana mentioned that guys felt they deserved to be on the finale; no. Every opportunity is just that, an opportunity, it’s a gift and you need to treat it like that.
After the wild card announcement, it was hard to be around Len, I’ll be honest. They only showed a little clip of his complaining; in reality, he was running around telling everyone that he thought he was winning that fight between him and Ryan, that he thought he deserved the wild card. We all heard about it over and over again, but his attitude was getting more and more sour.
We actually had to remind him that somebody could still get hurt in the competition, that Dana White watches the show, and that he knows who has a good attitude and who doesn’t, so if you’re on camera with a bad attitude, you’re hurting your chances of getting on the finale. Do everything you can to make the best of your stay as possible and enhance your chances of getting back into the UFC.
But we heard about it 24/7, non-stop. When Team Lesnar got tired of hearing about it, he’d come to Team dos Santos, and vice versa.
Javier was great in training, but always had a disconnect when the fight started. You could almost say he was the teacher’s pet. He was always working out hard when the coaches were watching, he was always buddy-buddy with the coaches because he speaks Spanish and they could understand most of it. I don’t know if that caused him to relax too much, but he was always doing and saying the right things in practice.
I think Brock handle things well, explaining things to Len. I still believe that being in Len’s shoes, you’d have wanted your coach to vouch for you a little more, but I think a lot of that comes from Len’s assumption that he was a shoe-in. I think he could have done more in training to convince his own coach that he wanted it.
What they didn’t show is that during training, Len was walking around with a knee brace or on crutches the whole time. To be seen with a knee brace and crutches the whole time isn’t going to do a lot for you. Brock probably saw a little bit of that as weakness.
We started seeing the real Chuck before this fight, and it was a lot more enjoyable. He wasn’t as cocky; he was more about the business of winning fights. I actually told him, “When you first came in here, I wasn’t a big fan because all you did was talk about yourself. But since that fight and your second chance, you’ve changed a little bit.” He was a lot more pleasant to be around.
Someone who wasn’t pleasant for me to be around, though, was Chris.
Chris is an alright guy, a good enough guy, but he just seemed to have that way about him where he wanted a lot of attention and he’d do anything to get it, and they showed it. Throughout the day, all over the house, for whatever reason, he would just scream and make a bunch of noise.
What they didn’t show is that Team Lesnar would always go to practice first in the morning, and then Team dos Santos would go after. So they always had to come downstairs to go to practice, and my room was underneath those stairs. So every morning, for three weeks, Chris would come down those stairs and scream at the top of his lungs, and it was just disrespectful.
He knew we were sleeping. I thought surely he’d stop at some point, but every morning, he did it. He knew he was wrong; I think we all saw that he knew he was wrong. He just needed someone to confront him, and that morning, I just couldn’t take it anymore.
I tried to be as polite as possible while getting my point across, but I was very upset. I know we’ve got kids watching this show, so I just tried to get my point across without being vulgar or cursing, but I definitely wanted to kill him, I’m not going to lie.
With the coaches challenge, we all tried to coach Junior through the steps. He didn’t even understand the instructions when Dana was giving them to the coaches, so we walked him through it before they took off. Junior being the athlete that he is, though, he shined.
Sharing the money with everyone, even the guys on Team Lesnar is one of thos things from the Brazilian culture; everyone is family. He saw the guys put their heads down that they didn’t get any money, so he decided to give them a hundred bucks; I thought that was pretty cool. He also made the point that Brock gets nothing because he lost too, which was good.
What can I say about the fight? Javier just goes in there and wants to do is own thing. That’s what we were worried about going in; he doesn’t follow instruction.
We thought that he would have learned from the first fight, but he went out there and did his own thing again. The game plan was to stand and bang, keep the fight off the cage, and Javier did the exact opposite. There’s not too many times where you do the exact opposite of the game plan where you’re going to win. It was very frustrating to watch.
As far as Ramsey versus Clay, I thought that was a great match-up for Ramsey. Everybody knows he wants to take the fight to the ground, and I think Clay is an easy person to do that with.
Myself against Chris, I felt he was a good opponent where I’m going to get to do what I want; keep it on the feet a little while and show Dana that, take it to the ground if I needed to, so I think it’s a great matchup.
Make sure to check me out, back in action again next week.
Take care,
Shamar
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