“…and those are the seven key differences between Durum Wheat and Hard White Wheat. Next question, please.”
The UFC continued their always entertaining series of Fighter-Fan Q&A sessions last night with Matt Hughes joining announcer Mike Goldberg on stage. As usual, Hughes shoots from the hip and shares his thoughts on everything from GSP’s standing in the sport to the recent testosterone replacement controversy, but one thing he doesn’t feel comfortable talking about is tonight’s fights. The reason? He really hasn’t seen many of the guys compete.
If you’re interested in catching the hour-long video, check it out here. If you learned nothing from your high school reliance on Cliffs Notes and want to continue eeking by on second-hand information, join us after the jump for a recap of the highlights.
– Hughes is at the point in his career where he just wants interesting fights. He thinks the Diego Sanchez fight is one the fans want to see, and he has no concerns about Diego fading in the later rounds. Diego is a guy that comes ready to fight, so he’s excited for the challenge.
– When asked about the Royce fight, Hughes shares that he was frozen for the first twenty seconds once they hit the ground. He had no intention of grappling with the UFC’s first champion, and when they did go down he was worried that Royce was going to slap on some “magical Gracie move” that no one had ever seen. Once he relaxed and composed himself, he felt confident in his game and in control of the fight. He would have been happy to break Royce’s arm and end the fight, but he was expending too much energy and decided to release the hold and look for something else.
– Hughes feels that GSP may have a mental weak spot caused by the loss to Matt Serra. The bout with Nick Diaz will be the first time GSP has fought someone in better shape than he is. Although the Stockton native has a unique style, Georges holds an advantage in every aspect of the fight game. Hughes feels that a mentally prepared GSP also takes out Anderson Silva should that fight ever take place.
– As he’s stated before, Hughes only watches bouts that he has a special interest in, whether it’s a training partner or friend competing or simply an intriguing bout. He was asked numerous times about tonight’s match ups, but almost without fail he said that he wasn’t familiar enough with the fighters to evaluate the bout, even stating that he’d never seen Dominick Cruz fight. The only bouts that he did comment on were the Tito-Bader and Leben-Wanderlei fights. While he didn’t really break them down, his money is on Bader and Leben.
– You could see that Hughes was dying to tell some stories about Tito, even bringing it up on more than one occasion, but in the end he won the internal struggle to remain silent out of respect for Tito’s mindset leading into tonight’s competition. Hughes tends to pull no punches in his tales, so hopefully he’ll share some of these stories down the road.
– Growing up on the farm, his family lived five miles away from the nearest kid, so he and his twin brother Mark had few other places to turn for friendship and competition. Hughes describes the competitive drive against his brother as a sickness: “I want the faster truck, the stronger truck, the better looking wife, the more disciplined kids.”
– In preparation for his fight against Diego Sanchez, Hughes will travel around quite a bit for his training. He will once again pair up with BJ Penn and hopes that BJ’s experience in training for and fighting against Diego will offer him some insight into the bout. Regarding his sale of the “HIT Squad”, he didn’t enjoy the hour long drive to get to the gym and didn’t feel like any of his training partners there threatened him or put him in dangerous situations and that he wouldn’t grow as a fighter if he was always the top dog.
– As one of the older guys in the UFC, he’s totally against testosterone replacement therapy and thinks it’s a real problem in MMA and other sports. Hughes says never put any sort of substance into his body.
– Mike Goldberg has countless quotes that he’d rather we all forget, but there is one that he’s serious about protecting. The long-time UFC announcer revealed that he actually owns the copyright to his post-stoppage yell: “It is ALLLLL over!!!!”