Honour and Heartbreak

It was an amazing journey to represent SA. Unfortunately, I went down to France's Nicolas Ott.

The road to Vegas was paved with levels of training and commitment I had never reached before. There were zero degrees Celsius runs in the morning and a 45 day fat-cut to make weight.

I am learning. I will be back.

Win 6: AFL 21

AFL 21, hosted on the South Coast, was sold out and showcased the best of South Africa's MMA. Read more about Fight 6 here.

3 More Fights, 3 More Wins

Details, videos and pictures of my fights can be viewed by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page.

Thank You

Publicly, I want to thank my sensei, Guy Sheehan, for all the effort he has put into me as a fighter, as well as a person. I also want to thank Wendy Stuart for being there all the time and taking care of everything that I would've surely forgotten.

Post Re-visited- MMA: My Mate's Autism (Tuesday, June 21, 2011)

I published this post on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 and I'm Revisting it to reflect on my friend's progress.

The Original post below:
MMA: My Mate's Autism
I sometimes help Guy out with the junior MMA class. One child in this class has asperger syndrome, a type of autism. Children with asperger syndrome typically have trouble with social situations and communication. He started training with the junior class about a month and a half ago with the idea of getting some exercise. However the therapeutic benefit for him has been phenomenal. Before he started MMA he refused to hug people, especially ladies. According to him, "Ladies can't be trusted". He started hugging Wendy, who also helps guy with training. He now hugs a few select people and this morning he made my day by giving me a kind of handshake-hug. Asperger syndrome kids supposedly don't have a good sense of humour, but I laugh with him quite a bit- He makes funny remarks during training while cheering his friends on. He has a good heart and as my friends would say "He's a good ou"

Wow,
He is a different person to everyone who meets him for the first time; He is himself from the start. When I first met him I could only get a conversation of a few sentences from him. Now we can chat for 5-10 minutes easily. We talk about training and complain about schoolwork. I introduced him to a friend of mine (a girl) and I wasn't sure quite what to expect. He gave her a strong handshake and introduced himself. My friend asked him a question about training, and so it began- an enthusiastic 5 minute conversation between the two of them during which I was invisible.

Training
I'll be back at conditioning on Monday night but I can't spar or roll for another two weeks so Tuesday training for me will probably be a lot of bag work.

MMA-Elites Site

Check out www.mma-elite-sa.com
The Elites have a great website and they've uploaded pics from EAC 01.
There are some useful links to other MMA sites too.

Back With a Win!

Sorry for the inactivity on this blog over the past few weeks. I was training for my fight in EAC 01 (Elite Amateur Cage Fighting Championships) and didn’t want my opponent to know how my training was going.

I fought Deon Lottering from MMA Elite. He has a good few extra centimetres more reach than me and carries less muscle. He went through a gruelling training camp to prepare for the fight. Deon’s strategy seemed to be to use his lightning jabs, adapt to whatever I tried, and to outlast me. The latter was a bad call; Deon had upped his fitness, but so had I.

EAC 01 ran smoothly and the match-ups were really good, resulting in lots of really tough fights. I was number 3 on the card, and fighting out of the red corner.

The first round went really quickly. I rushed Deon from the start and landed a few good kicks. I tried to chase him backwards but he stood his ground, so I dumped him. I got a few good take-downs but wasn’t landing many clean punches.

In round 2 I got a few more take-downs, and he got warned repeatedly for holding the cage. Towards the end of the round I was pushing him back with some good combos but I opened up early by throwing big hooks. Deon slipped under a huge right and landed a massive cross that knocked me to one knee. I bounced back up and hit back, but he’d really rocked me.

We were both tired, but I wasn’t letting it show. In the last round we threw some punches and then I moved in for a takedown and managed to get into position for ground and pound, which is what I did. He was too tired to try buck me off, and I started to smash his face. I wanted to go for an arm-bar, but thought it would be a bit risky. I would land 4 or 5 punches and then he’d throw one in retaliation. I was really tired but kept going and after I’d landed about 15 punches the ref stopped the fight.

I won by TKO in the last round!

A visit to the hospital the following day showed that I’d fractured my foot, probably from kicking him on the hip bone.