Straight from the Shark's Mouth

Sean Sherk has been obstreperous in denying the steroid allegations that have plagued him since this summer, but I'm not wholly convinced that he's innocent. In fact, I'm not at all convinced.

In an interview before his UFC 73 fight with Hermes Franca, Sherk spoke about overcoming a shoulder injury that kept him sidelined for nearly a year:

"There was a lot of pressure I put on myself to get back sooner. I don’t like sitting on the sidelines. I’m a fighter. I don’t want to be the guy sitting on the couch watching all these other guys fight on TV and I’m eating potato chips. I want to get in there. I want to fight and defend my belt. I want to make some money. I want to train. I’m not used to sitting on the sidelines watching my training partners’ train, which I had to do unfortunately for eight-nine weeks. So I put a lot of pressure on myself to get back in there, get back in the gym and I spent a lot of time rehabbing. I was actually back on the mat 10 weeks after the surgery, which blew my physical therapist away."

Is it me, or doesn't this seem to be more like an excuse for taking steroids, rather than a flat-out denial? Sherk needed money; he needed to get out on the mat. I understand that. What I don't understand is exactly how he dealt with that pressure, and how, coincidentally, he tested positive for steroids.

Hermes Franca, who admitted to using banned substances, made an eerily similar statement after testing positive.

Am I crazy, or just a blatant BJ Penn fan?

The Worst Farts in MMA?

The following is an excerpt from the latest installment of a four-part series on IFL welterweight champ and Long Island native Jay Hieron:

"We had a lot of good times in the IFL, (Mike) Pyle and I. At one of the events we were at, the commission guys were watching us wrap our hands and everyone just started farting. Mike has the worst farts ever. Anyone who knows him knows that that is true. He should be in the Guiness Book of World Records for stinkiest farts. I’d bet my next purse that no one has worse farts. Bas had a towel over his face the whole time. It stank in that locker room. It got so bad at one point the commission guys had to leave the room. We were wrapping our hands with nobody watching. We could have put brass knuckles in our gloves. Of course we didn’t, we just wrapped our hands up right and went out and did our business."

That's amazing.

Arlovski and Patrycja Split; Game On

According to my man Andrei Arlovski's MySpace page, he and the lovely Patrycja are no longer. Both list themselves as "Single," and both seem to have taken down pictures of one another.

Come to think of it, she is my type...

Happy Birthday, Andrei Arlovski!!!

The big guy turns 29 today, and in tribute of one of my absolute favorites of all time, I'm wearing my Arlovski Team Pitbull t-shirt. No, I'm not kidding.

It's been an action-packed past twelve months for the former champ. He earned a decision win over the highly touted Fabricio Werdum, appeared on The Jerry Springer show, launched a series of signature LCD televisions, and left his fans (both of us) wondering where the hell he's been.

Speaking of which, it looks like Arlovski will return to the UFC cage next month at UFC 82 when he will face Jake O'Brien...as part of the undercard.

Happy Birthday, champ.

An Inside Look at Matt Hughes' "Made in America": Part III

In the closing chapters, Hughes devotes a few lines (and nothing more) to his fights with Frank Trigg, BJ Penn, and Georges St-Pierre. If you’ve seen the fights, you can skip right over these pages. He also talks about doing The Ultimate Fighter, not wanting to fight his good buddy Rich Franklin, getting married, and beating up Royce Gracie. Again, if you’re up on your MMA, you’ve seen and heard it all before.

Hughes finds God and renews his faith as a Christian in the chapter appropriately named “The Sublime and the Ridiculous.” Hughes walks us through his listless spiritual quest and recreates for the reader the evolution of his faith. The conversations with Brian, a buddy from church, were not only self-serving, but also extremely predictable and at times laughable. It was as if he were writing a parable he’d later pass along.

Hughes talks about his admiration for Randy Couture, and how for a long time he wanted nothing to do with Randy after his divorce. Somehow, perhaps through the grace of God, Hughes mustered up the strength to not only say hello to Randy Couture, but to tell him that he’s ready to be Randy’s friend again. Hughes wrote: “I didn’t have to support divorce to support Randy Couture.” How very Christian of him.

As I sailed through the final pages of the book, I noticed that there’d been no mention of Hughes’ bad blood with Matt Serra. Hughes revisits the Serra-GSP fight, after which Hughes and Sean Sherk were captured on camera slapping each other on the back and laughing like schoolgirls. He describes that and nothing more. Serra’s well-articulated disdain for Hughes as a person has been almost contagious throughout the MMA world, and I expected Hughes to at least address his foul-mouthed, East-Coast antagonist, this time in print. Nope.

I’d also been hoping to read about Hughes’ departure from Miletich Fighting Systems. No such luck. In fairness, this book was probably finished by the time he left and took Robbie Lawler with him, so I’ll give him a pass. Then again, based on his cursory treatment of just about everything else in this book, I don’t see why he couldn’t have slipped in a little something.

Ultimately, Made in America falls short. The superficial recollections of boys being boys and the shallow account of Hughes’ championship journey left me unsatisfied. My biggest gripe is that there’s no real emotion in the book, especially when it comes to being a professional fighter. The stories involving Hughes and his wife, I thought, were told with such little regard that you wonder whether he had a smirk on his face when he wrote them.

I don’t know if I’ll ever really root for Matt Hughes in a fight. I don’t know that I want to. I don't think he's a bad guy; I think he's a brutal competitor who’s always looking to get dominant position on you. And it doesn’t really matter who you are.

An Inside Look at Matt Hughes' "Made in America": Part II

In Part I of my look into Made in America, I talked about Chapters 1-4, which covered Hughes’ childhood and adolescence and culminated with Hughes wetting his beak in the world of MMA. For Part II, I’ll go through those chapters (5-10) in which Matt decides to train full-time with Miletich, and eventually becomes UFC welterweight champion.

After grounding-and-pounding his way through regional promotions, Matt Hughes caught the eye of Pat Miletich and Monte Cox, who subsequently became his manager. The rest, as they say, is history.

Hughes was invited to take on Akihiro Gono in Japan, and looking back on his visit to the Far East, Hughes writes: “I would have killed for just one country breakfast.” Gold.

While competing in the Abu Dhabi Combat Club, Hughes, who was mistakenly put in the 205-lb. weight class, was matched up against fellow Miletich product Jeremy Horn. There was a $1,500 prize for quickest submission and another $1,500 for best throw, so Hughes and Horn devised a plan that would leave them $3,000 richer: Hughes would land a big throw early on and would then quickly choke Horn out. Unfortunately, one of Renzo Gracie’s guys walked right into a choke from Renzo himself, so Horn and Hughes only ended up splitting the $1,500 for best throw. I hope the sheik isn’t reading this.

In the finals, Hughes lost in overtime on points to a certain yellow-headed light heavyweight known as Tito Ortiz. Hughes definitely dislikes Tito. In describing Frank Trigg later on in the book, Hughes writes: “He’s just an idiot. On a scale of one to ten, he’s a Tito.”

Tim Sylvia’s name pops up for the first time, as Hughes remembers being at Ultimate Fitness in Bettendorf, IA, and seeing “the biggest doofus in my life try to enter the fight room…I had seen puppies that were less needy and excitable.” And so it begins…

Hughes later insinuated that Dennis Hallman, who twice submitted Hughes, took steroids. I’d been waiting for some Matt Hughes mudslinging, and he pulled a Jose Canseco with this one.

If there’s one thing that everyone who reads this book can agree it on, it’s that Matt Hughes loved the ladies. The following excerpt is Matt’s recollection of first seeing Brandy, a Bettendorf hard-body he later knocked up:

“I gave her the elevator eyes – checking her out from top to bottom and then back up from bottom to top. From the stomach up, she was really put together well. The boobs were fake, but not in an obvious way, and she had long, straight brown hair down to the middle of her back. She had a great complexion - not tan, but not as pasty white as me. She did have a little bit of hips on her, but here she was doing something about it.”

Matt also became amorous with Audra, Matt’s future wife and the younger sister of a close childhood friend. Matt affectionately recalled Audra as a child plopping down next to him on her family’s couch, and the next thing you know, it’s 2001 and Matt and Audra are in an on-and-off-again engagement. Luckily, they reunited once and for all when Audra asked Matt to take care of her after she got breast implants. And I quote:

“As we moved together on my bed, her stitches ripped a little bit and her blood drizzled across my chest. I lived in a world where people were bound by blood, rolling in practice rooms and cages. It was the first time I’d had that kind of bond on bedsheets. We were together again and it felt wonderful.”

According to Matt, this was the first time he’d seen her naked. I shit you not.

Remember on TUF 5 when Hughes taunted Georges St-Pierre when all the guys went out to the restaurant? He pulled the same stunt with Hayato “Mach” Sakurai before UFC 36. “I was on him the entire week like white rice on sushi,” Hughes recalls. “The Michael Jordan of Japan was still just the Mach Sakurai of America…I really feel like he shouldn’t have been against me. It really wasn’t a challenge.” Wow.

Best of all was Hughes’ recollection of Pat Miletich recounting for him the now infamous Tito
Ortiz-Lee Murray street fight in London after UFC 38. Long story short, a brawl breaks out, Lee and Tito square off, Lee connects with a five-punch combo that knocks Tito OUT and then stomps down Tito’s head a few times with his boots. Anyone who's read Sherdog forum posts has surely heard this one before.

Overall, Hughes comes across as a smug bully in this part of the book, which just about any half-interested MMA biographer could have written. Hughes offers no special insight and reiterated a lot of what long-time MMA fans already know. After 185 (or so) pages, there’s been virtually no talk of God or religious devotion, but I'm sure it's coming.

Stay tuned for Part III…

An Inside Look at Matt Hughes' "Made in America": Part I

I zipped through about 200 pages yesterday in Made in America, Matt Hughes' new autobiography. Overall, the book is easy to read and pretty entertaining. In this post, I'll discuss the chapters (1-4) leading up to Hughes' foray into the MMA world.

Chapter One is "This Is Farm Life." Not just a clever name. The book kicks off with (surprise, surprise) the birth of Matt and his twin brother Mark and a Rockwellian description of life in 1970's Hillsboro, IL: friendly, simple people who wear blue jeans, work hard, and sleep with their front doors unlocked. You've heard it all before.

Matt briefly explores the dichotomy of his childhood in rural Illinois; there was the endless fun he and Mark enjoyed on and around the family farm, but there was also the family's hardship after the Federal Land Bank Association set the price for farm land. As a result, the Hughes' farm went from 1,500 acres to about 700 acres, and Hughes' father felt the pressure to keep his family and his farm afloat during these tough times.

I enjoyed reading about Matt and Mark as little kids. Naturally, the fraternal twins were very close and very competitive, but from what I've gathered, it was Matt who took competitiveness to another level. The first chapter, for example, ends with the following: "I was so bad at athletics in junior high that my brother Mark beat me." Here comes the dickhead we've been waiting to read about...

In high school, Mark made the varsity wrestling squad and lettered as a freshman. "He can't be the number one wrestler in the family," Matt thought. Matt then challenged for a varsity spot, won, and the guy he beat then moved down in weight, beat Mark, and bumped him off the varsity squad. To Matt's credit, though, he looks back on this moment with regret. Or so he says...

Matt's relationship with Mark can be summed up aptly with the following line: "That's who I root for right before and right after I punch him in the face." Take that as you will.

Did you know that Matt Hughes drove an '84 Camaro in high school? That's more of a Matt Serra car than a Matt Hughes car, no? Hughes was given the car as a gift from his maternal grandfather whose paper route Matt and Mark took over as teenagers.

If you're one of those people who vehemently dislikes Matt Hughes, read what he writes about his dad. It explains a lot.

Oh, and by the way, Mark Hughes is the man! He's a physically stronger version of Matt and has a much worse temper. The stories of Mark Hughes beating some ass were particularly entertaining.

I also got a kick out of the chapter where the Hughes boys go to college. We meet Marc Fiore (the TUF 6 Team Serra coach), a wrestling teammate who reached college without knowing how to read or write. In one heartwarming account, Matt recalls the time he, Mark, and Fiore went to visit the Hughes' Uncle Jack to help with some work around the farm. Matt and Mark taught Fiore how to properly cut off a pig's balls, and then chased him down while throwing pig testicles and dead piglets at Fiore's face. Thank God I grew up in the suburbs.

We also first hear about Frank Trigg, who's not-so-affectionately described as "the kind of guy who's mysteriously tan at Christmastime," in the same chapter. Trigg beat Mark in a wrestling match and went on to become a National Champion, but Matt wrote: "It's just too bad he never really made anything of himself." I laughed.

In college, the Hughes brothers (and Fiore) were definitely meathead pranksters. My favorite story is when Matt and Mark go to a fraternity party and have no luck picking up the ladies. Confused and bored, they fall back on Plan B: fight. Mark rummages through the frat house for food and pisses off a fraternity brother. Matt is confronted, pretends he's drunk, and then promptly lifts the fraternity brother off the ground and slams him through the window. The lights are somehow turned off amidst the ruckus, so Matt and Mark run outside and then take turns blasting frat brothers in the face as soon as they step out the door.

After college, a wrestler whom Matt knew asked Matt to help him prepare for an MMA fight. Impressed with Matt's wrestling prowess and raw athleticism, the friend got Matt booked in a couple of small shows in Chicago. After one early fight, the referee told Hughes, "I can make a champion out of you." That referee was Pat Miletich.

Stay tuned for An Inside Look at Matt Hughes' Made in America: Part II.