Mark Munoz
UFC middleweight Mark Munoz (12-3) is a former training partner of division champ Anderson Silva, and is looking forward to watching his friends bout with Stephan Bonnar this Saturday in the main event of UFC 153.
Despite not training with ‘The Spider’ for awhile, Munoz still considers Silva to be a friend and someone he respects dearly.
Reporter Steve Cofield recently spoke to Munoz about Silva’s future in the UFC as well as the route Bonnar had to take to defeat the middleweight kingpin.
The interview aired during a segment of Thursday’s (Oct 11, 2012) SiriusXM Fight Club show.
“The thing with Anderson (Silva) too is, he is by far the best mixed martial artist to walk the planet, by far….(Jon) Jones is coming up, so Jones can stamp himself in history as well but it’s kind of like Julius Erving and Michael Jordan you know, different eras.”
“With Anderson, he’s at the end and I don’t want to say ‘I want to fight Anderson.’ Because I don’t, I don’t really want to but I want to become a world champion, that’s what I want to become. With Anderson he is such a huge, huge name in Brazil, he’s a huge name here, so he can walk away from this sport and be able to provide for his family, and live a glamorous life, retire and still be involved in this sport.”
“See Anderson is an MMA Muhammad Ali, I mean he floats like a butterfly he stings like a…not a bee but something else. He drops people with just like a potshot, you know it’s crazy. ”
When asked which path to victory Stephan Bonnar might take this Saturday in Rio de Janeiro, Munoz offered this analysis of how ‘The American Psycho’ could do it.
“(Anderson’s) so accurate and dead on at times with his punches, but he has to be able to move his head and be able to close the gap quickly to take advantage of the times that Anderson is just bouncing. (Bonnar’s) got to get his timing down real quick and be able to disrupt his timing and his rhythm and get him against the cage. Kind of, cut him off. He’s got to come out and coral him. He’s got to coral him because Anderson’s going to be moving around looking to take advantage of the times that Stephan is open.”
“He’s got to be able to move his head, cut off the cage, press him against the cage, dirty box him, take him down if he can, keep a good posture, look for ground-and-pound, and that’s how he is going to win the fight. That’s the only way he is going to win. If he decides to strike with Anderson it’s going to be a long, rather a quick night for him.”
A couple of other notes from the SiriusXM Fight Club broadcast, Cofield asked his fellow hosts to guess how heavy Munoz was when he took the fight with Chris Weidman on six weeks notice for the July show.
‘The Filipino Wrecking Machine’ was apparently 60+ pounds over the middleweight limit of 185-lbs, and had to cut down all that weight over the six-weeks in order to make weight for the UFC on FUEL TV 4 bout in San Jose.
They also said that Munoz went into the fight with a broken foot, which could have certainly impeded his performance in the second round knockout loss to Weidman.
So it’s quite possible that fans did not see the best Mark Munoz competing in the HP Pavilion that night, and the next time we do, a much better Munoz may surprise some critics.
Hater’s gonna hate, and fan boys like me will always look for the excuses to support their fighters.