Jon Anik’s silky voice talks us in to episode two of The Ultimate Fighter 15, telling us we’re less than an hour away from tonight’s live fight. We’re about to see what happened this past week in TUFlandia but right now there are two hooded fighters warming up with their backs to the camera in their respective lock rooms.
Could it be? Yes…those two (at present) nameless and faceless fighters will fight each other tonight but we will have to wait and see who they are. Cheesy, but kinda cool. Another new element of this debuting hybrid taped/live TUF format. Also, there’s a fight clock on the bottom right hand of the screen, ticking down.
The 16 winning fighters from last week’s elimination round pull up to the TUF mansion and once again we see a new crop of young fighters enthusiastically explore their new digs with the type of giddiness that can only lead us to believe that they’ve never watched past seasons and thus don’t realize how completely miserable it can be to be locked in that house. Happens every season.
Jon Anik’s silky voice talks us in to episode two of The Ultimate Fighter 15, telling us we’re less than an hour away from tonight’s live fight. We’re about to see what happened this past week in TUFlandia but right now there are two hooded fighters warming up with their backs to the camera in their respective lock rooms.
Could it be? Yes…those two (at present) nameless and faceless fighters will fight each other tonight but we will have to wait and see who they are. Cheesy, but kinda cool. Another new element of this debuting hybrid taped/live TUF format. Also, there’s a fight clock on the bottom right hand of the screen, ticking down.
The 16 winning fighters from last week’s elimination round pull up to the TUF mansion and once again we see a new crop of young fighters enthusiastically explore their new digs with the type of giddiness that can only lead us to believe that they’ve never watched past seasons and thus don’t realize how completely miserable it can be to be locked in that house. Happens every season.
Michael Chiesa has a more legit reason to be excited as he reveals that he’s “kinda homeless right now,” and so is just happy to have a place to stay. Whoah, some perspective there. Chiesa better go piss in someone’s fruit basket or something real soon or he won’t fit into the TUF lifestyle.
Team selection time now for coaches Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber. UFC Prez Dana White gets to the coin toss. Faber wins it and chooses to select the first matchup as opposed to choosing the first fighter.
Cruz chooses Whitethletic Justin Lawrence, the Blackhouse gym member that tore up James Krause last week with a TKO. Faber chooses Serra/Longo Al Iaqunita with the second pick. Cruz chooses 8 second sensation Sam Sicilia next.
Faber grabs Pride veteran/ringer Cristiana Marcello next. Cruz goes with Myles Jury. Faber goes for fellow Abercrombie & Fitch model look-alike Daron Cruickshank. Cruz chooses Mike Rio next.
Faber, on the recommendation of Joe Lauzon, chooses Joe Proctor. Cruz selects James Vick next. Faber tries out his “long hair don’t care” catchphrase for the second week in a row and chooses Michael Chiesa. Cruz take Vincent Pichel next. Faber grabs John Cofer.
Cruz then chooses Chris Tickle, who I’m sure has never used childhood teasing of his name as fighting fuel. Cruz starts the mind fucking early in taking Tickle. Remember, in episode 1, Tickle said that he wanted to be on Faber’s team. Cruz says he thinks he “threw a wrench in Faber’s plan.” Tickle me Chris has an attitude. He is pissed to be picked 13th and tells Faber that its “his loss, brother.” You tell ‘em.
Faber chooses Andy Ogle next. Cruz chooses the anti-Tickle, Jeremy Larsen, who says, “I’m just happy to be here. Doesn’t bother me at all.” Faber chooses Chris Saunders as his final pick.
Team Faber’s first training session takes place Saturday, 9am. Faber asks how many of his fighters have a wrestling base, as he does, and encourages them to have a purpose in mind with each practice. Cofer, Saunders and Ogle all have early praise for their team’s unity and for Faber.
Two hours later, Team Cruz fills the gym as their coach uses the time to observe them since, he says, he only had one round to view them before. Cruz sets up style stations with his assistant coaches leading to see how good the fighters are in each area.
At first Cruz was all like, “Tickle dissed me by saying he wanted Faber but I’m cool with it,” but soon his real feelings become clear as he pairs Tickle me Chris with his number one pick, Lawrence, to “see what he is about.” Lawrence manhandles Tickle.
Cruz is high on his team saying that they are going to “suck things up like a sponge.” Let’s all just pretend he said, “soak.”
Fight selection/Faber confrontation time. Things move fast, here. It’s 2pm on Saturday and both teams sit down on mini-bleachers in the training center. Faber and Cruz sit about a foot and a half apart.
Faber, like a boss, turns and tells Cruz, “My dad called and says you’re a bold-faced liar now.” Yeah, that statement doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on its own, but stay with Faber, he’s got a point.
Apparently, Faber’s dad has called Faber to tell him that in a recent UFC Magazine* interview, Cruz said that his parents gave Faber a gym. The proud Team Alpha Male leader does not like the invoking of his family into the rivalry by Cruz. “Gave you [a gym]? I never said they gave you a gym,” Cruz protests. “I mentioned that you may have had help with a gym from your parents.”
Faber closes with, “Stay away from the family issue, dude.”
Faber announces that he’s selected his team member Daron Cruickshank to take on James Vick. Faber calls it a “guaranteed win,” for his team. Cruz compares Vick’s body type to his own.
On Sunday afternoon Team Faber’s Michael Chiesa is pulled out of practice for a phone call. It’s his mom. She tells him that his father died the night before. Chiesa explains that his father had been battling a type of cancer called acute myeloid leukemia. Chiesa says he owes everything to his dad and that his dad made him promise that if he were to die while on TUF, that he wouldn’t leave. Back at the house, Chiesa shares the horrible news with his friend and training partner back home, Sam Sicilia.
Sicilia points out that Chiesa’s dad got to see his son get on national television and win a fight. Chiesa meets with Dana White the next day, who tells him that he will be allowed to fly home for a day to visit and be with his family. That’s good to hear.
Tuesday, back in the training center, James Vick prepares for his fight. And don’t get it twisted, just because he may look a tad lanky and goofy, the kid says he grew up poor, fast, hard and serious. Cruz is training Vick to keep a fast pace and says the strategy is to keep the fight on the feet against Cruickshank.
BJJ master Lloyd Irvin gets his hands on Vick, encourages him to “embrace the war,” and also shows him a pretty dope looking far side, arm-in choke on a turtle up opponent.
Cruickshank is in the gym with Team Faber next. “Some people are born a fighter and some people are raised a fighter. I would say, I’m both,” Cruickshank says, ending the nature vs. nurture debate forever.
Faber has Cruickshank work on defending specific submissions that they think Vick will go for with his long frame – and looky here, they work on a bunch of arm-in submissions. Cruickshank is confident, to say the least, calling Vick “one dimensional…he thinks he’s a boxer,” he says. “I’m 10-2. I’m a blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do. What’s he done?”
And if there’s anything we’ve learned from MMA is that if you have a Tae Kwon Do blackbelt, you are unbeatable. Well, at least words never come back to bite anyone in the be-hind…
Chiesa comes back to the house, saying he got the closure he needed back home. His dad toughed it out to stay alive long enough to watch his son fight on episode 1, then went downhill. No joke, thank God that this season is live.
Weigh in time. Cruickshank weighs in at 155.5 and Vick at 154. The cocky Cruickshank smiles at Vick but Vick ain’t having that shit and he keeps his hands up and game face on.
Fight time! A fight fan can get used to this – because the fights are live, we get to watch the coaches give their last-minute pep talk to their fighters, live. Cruz tells Vick, “You know you belong here,” because it doesn’t seem like anyone else does. Faber tells Cruickshank to keep things moving in there.
Anik tells us that the winners of this season get a contract with the UFC and a year long sponsorship deal with TapOut. Why didn’t anyone think of that before? Great idea.
Round 1
Big height difference between Cruickshank and his 6’3 opponent, Vick. Lot of feeling out between the two. Thirty seconds in, the only two strikes that have been thrown are from Cruickshank; a lead left kick to the body and a lead left leg kick. Cruickshank puts together a punch combo, the ending uppercut lands. Spinning back kick from Cruickshank.
Vick’s corner is calling out combos, which, to this point, he isn’t throwing. Vick is stalking Cruickshank, but not throwing much, until he tries a whiffing super man punch. Another spinning back kick from Cruickshank but then he decides to go away from what was working for him and shoots in for a takedown.
Vick throws the right knee counter and it lands flush, knocking out Cruishank cold. Team Cruz goes nuts for the underdog, made good.
A country boy can survive. James Vick gets the surprised KO win over Daron Cruishank. Photo courtesy of UFC.com
Anik in the Octagon to interview Vick who starts off his comments with a “yes sir,” and ends it with a “I’m happy and everything’s going good.” Nothing like a Southern twang to make the underdog persona complete.
Anik asks Cruickshank “what happened there at the end of the fight.” Jon, I love ya, and I suppose you have to ask, but I guess you didn’t see Daron out on his back about, um…10 seconds ago with referee Herb Dean speaking soothing words into his ear. Unsurprisingly, Cruickshank responds, “I don’t remember too much so, I’m going to have to watch it.”
Cruickshank has a chance to get back in to competition if another fighter gets injured, but humbly says he’s just looking to get his teammates ready for their fights during the rest of his time on TUF.
Next week’s matchup time!
Team Cruz has the hammer and chooses Justin Lawrence but wait…he doesn’t choose who his fighter is going to fight! Nuts. Does anyone remember a coach giving up matchup control, even half, before like this?
Cruz has something up his sleeve and is looking to sabotage the “Alpha Male,” somehow…but how? Faber is shocked and has trouble coming up with a selection.
So, he turns it over to his team. “Who’s ready to scrap now, guys?”
Big. Fucking. Mistake. No one on Faber’s team raises their hand. Wow. Big balloon deflating moment. Biggest hand raising, or lack there of, shocker since season 5 when BJ Penn asked fighters to raise their hands if they wanted nothing to do with opposing coach Pulver.
Faber turns it back over to Cruz, who knows exactly who he wants Lawrence to face, and chooses Cristiano Marcello. This is going to be a hell of a fight.
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
You wake up in the middle of the night to find two men with guns in your house — men who obviously arrived there with a plan, and one which may or may not involve leaving living witnesses to their crime — and right then your whole world has been altered in ways you can’t fully comprehend just yet.
“To this day, I’m still paranoid,” said MMA trainer Lloyd Irvin, who, along with his wife and young son, as well as UFC light heavyweight Brandon Vera, lived this nightmare just a little over three years ago. “It changed our whole lives, how we think about life, about our families, about security and how we stay safe — everything.”
For Vera, it also changed the way he thinks about his MMA career, and not necessarily in any way that’s helpful for a man who makes his living fighting other men inside a cage on Saturday nights. Lately, he’s begun to realize that what happened in Irvin’s house that night didn’t truly end there, and maybe it has more to do with what’s happened to him ever since than he originally allowed himself to believe.
The story, which is now practically a part of MMA lore, goes like this: Lloyd Irvin woke up in the pre-dawn hours of October 4, 2008 to find that two armed men had broken into his suburban Maryland home and were standing over him as he slept. They instructed him to get up and join them as they rounded up the home’s other occupants, which included Irvin’s wife and son, who was then just four years old, as well as Vera, who was staying with Irvin while he did his pre-fight training camp at Irvin’s gym.
While one of the men held Vera and Irvin’s family at gunpoint, the other led Irvin into a back bedroom. That’s when Irvin saw his opening and took it, grabbing for the gun, ejecting the ammunition clip, and wrestling the weapon away from the gunman. Disarmed, the man shouted out a warning to his accomplice and they both fled the house, leaving Irvin, his family, and Vera all unharmed, but badly shaken.
“My son is still traumatized to this day,” said Irvin, who added that both he and his family sought professional psychiatric help after the incident. “We just got him back sleeping in his own room about four or five months ago. About two years ago we got him back in his room for about 30 days, and then one incident where these deer set off the alarm outside the house, after that it went downhill again.”
For Vera, the damage was slightly more subtle. He and Irvin flew to England for the fight with Jardine as scheduled, and he tried his best to carry on as if nothing had happened. He lost the fight via split decision, but that was only the beginning.
“I remember after that fight, going in to train would suck,” Vera said. “I’d be looking at the clock, waiting to leave. Sometimes I didn’t want to go two or three-a-days. I’d be arguing with my coaches or slacking off. I honestly think that it had to do with that home invasion.”
It wasn’t just that he was emotionally traumatized, Vera said, though of course he was. But it was more that, once he realized how easily and suddenly his life could have ended, spending hours in a gym every day didn’t seem like such a good use of his time.
“After that, I don’t think MMA was number one in my life anymore,” said Vera. “After that home invasion, I was like, hey, I could have been dead today, and there’s still so much I want to do. There’s so much I want to experience, so much I want to do with my wife. MMA just wasn’t the number one priority in my life anymore. Without me knowing, my life rearranged itself.”
In theory, this isn’t such a bad revelation. If this were a movie script, it might be just the kind of catalyst that forces the main character to examine his priorities and put the right things first in life. He starts leaving the office early to take long walks in the park. He calls his mother. Everything works out in the end.
In real life, it didn’t happen that way for Vera. Instead of reveling in the impermanence of life, he grew paranoid. As Irvin put it, “[Vera] got really into guns and security and stuff.”
Not that Irvin was exactly ready to give himself over to the worst impulses of his fellow man, either.
“I did some really crazy stuff at the house for home protection,” he said. That included not only a security system that would present a challenge to the Mission: Impossible team, but also a permit to carry a concealed handgun, which isn’t easy to get in Maryland. “For a while I had a protection company follow my wife around,” Irvin added. “It was crazy times.”
As Vera put it, what bothered him most was that he’d left himself so vulnerable, and he never wanted to make the same mistake again.
“They were professionals,” he said. “It was this feeling that I’d been caught out there, no weapon in my hand, no dogs, no gun. I just got caught slipping.”
But as Vera grew more concerned with his own safety and struggled to put his new list of priorities in perspective, his career inside the cage suffered. He won two straight after the Jardine loss, then dropped fights to Randy Couture and Jon Jones before being dominated by Thiago Silva and getting cut by the UFC following his third loss in a row.
As Vera explained, that’s when he knew he’d lost “it.”
“People keep asking me what it is,” he said. “But if you’ve never lost it, there’s no way I can explain what it is.”
Following his dismissal from the UFC, Vera embarked on a road trip across the U.S., teaching seminars at gyms along the way, he said. He drove 8,500 miles in all, and “somewhere along those 8,500 miles is where I found it again.”
“Watching an 11-year-old kid take an adult seminar and do better than the adults because he was so serious and so hungry to learn, it made me happy again,” he said. “It brought me back to that place.”
Vera was also aided by some delayed, though no less satisfying justice. Police arrested a suspect in the home invasion case that they believed was linked to multiple murders in similar situations — a man the local police chief deemed a “serial killer” — who will now spend the rest of his life in prison following sentencing, Irvin said.
On one hand, it shook Vera to know that, had his longtime coach not disarmed the man, they would almost certainly have been killed that night. On the other, Vera said, “I think maybe it was something in my life that I couldn’t get past until those guys got caught.”
Vera got a reprieve in his professional life as well when, nearly three months after the loss to Silva, the Nevada State Athletic Commission revealed that Silva had submitted a sample for testing that was “inconsistent with human urine.” Silva would later cop to steroid use and Vera’s loss would be changed to a no contest. The UFC would also opt to give him another chance in light of this information, welcoming him back to face Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 in Las Vegas this Saturday night.
“It’s not a new chapter; it’s a whole new book,” said Vera. “The path I was on before, I don’t know where I was going or where I got lost. Somewhere I made a left when I should have made a right. I don’t know, but I lost it, and now I’ve found it.”
The change is apparent to Irvin, too, who has had Vera back in his gym in Maryland for a full training camp for the first time since the home invasion incident in 2008. Vera never came out and told him that he’d been hesitant to return because of what happened that night in his house, Irvin said, “but I had a good sense of that. I personally didn’t really want to be in my own house sometimes because of it, so I understood.”
Now Vera is not only back training with him, Irvin said, but he’s actually doing the work because he wants to, rather than simply going through the motions because he has to.
“He’s in the gym 40 minutes or an hour before his training time is supposed to start. He’s putting the time in and enjoying it more,” said Irvin. “It used to be that if he had a bad training day or a bad day in the gym he’d just keep going forward or whatever. Now he’ll text you at midnight asking, ‘The half-guard sweep didn’t work, is my hand in the wrong position?'”
If there was anybody who could understand Vera’s lack of motivation after the home invasion, it was Irvin. The same trauma had touched his life, and still lurks there somewhere under the surface, he said.
“The reality that we could have been dead right then, it makes you think all sorts of things about life and what it means and what you haven’t done yet. When we were being held hostage…you ever see the movies where a guy will go through this montage of his whole life and everything he’s done? That really happened in my mind.”
Now that Vera has worked through some of his issues and is back to training like the man he used to be in the gym, Irvin is “one hundred percent” confident of victory against Marshall, he said.
“If Brandon follows the game plan and does what he’s supposed to do, Eliot’s going to know in the first round, this is wrong, that something’s not right, because this is not where he’s supposed to be. Then he’ll be forced to do some things that we’re anticipating, and Brandon will get the victory. I have no doubt in my mind about that.”
For Vera, the weight of the expectations on him is something that he feels, but insists he isn’t laboring under. This return to the UFC could easily be a one-shot deal, more of an audition for his old spot rather than a guaranteed second chance.
“I’m supposed to win this fight,” he said. “I’m supposed to go in here and hurt Eliot bad. It’s different. It’s not added pressure, it’s just that this is what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. It feels weird. I don’t feel nervous anymore. I just feel like I’m supposed to go in here and whoop his ass.”
Now, just a shade over three years since the incident that made him re-organize his entire life, Vera insists that he’s back to doing the sport because he wants to, and not because he has to.
It’s fitting then that he prepared for this return alongside the man who probably saved his life that night, and who knows all too well what he’s struggled with ever since.
“Brandon’s been with me for a long time, since before he got to the UFC and before everybody knew who he was,” said Irvin. “He’s not just a fighter to me, he’s like a son and a student, and I love him. I just look forward to seeing him rise back up to the top.”
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
You wake up in the middle of the night to find two men with guns in your house — men who obviously arrived there with a plan, and one which may or may not involve leaving living witnesses to their crime — and right then your whole world has been altered in ways you can’t fully comprehend just yet.
“To this day, I’m still paranoid,” said MMA trainer Lloyd Irvin, who, along with his wife and young son, as well as UFC light heavyweight Brandon Vera, lived this nightmare just a little over three years ago. “It changed our whole lives, how we think about life, about our families, about security and how we stay safe — everything.”
For Vera, it also changed the way he thinks about his MMA career, and not necessarily in any way that’s helpful for a man who makes his living fighting other men inside a cage on Saturday nights. Lately, he’s begun to realize that what happened in Irvin’s house that night didn’t truly end there, and maybe it has more to do with what’s happened to him ever since than he originally allowed himself to believe.
The story, which is now practically a part of MMA lore, goes like this: Lloyd Irvin woke up in the pre-dawn hours of October 4, 2008 to find that two armed men had broken into his suburban Maryland home and were standing over him as he slept. They instructed him to get up and join them as they rounded up the home’s other occupants, which included Irvin’s wife and son, who was then just four years old, as well as Vera, who was staying with Irvin while he did his pre-fight training camp at Irvin’s gym.
While one of the men held Vera and Irvin’s family at gunpoint, the other led Irvin into a back bedroom. That’s when Irvin saw his opening and took it, grabbing for the gun, ejecting the ammunition clip, and wrestling the weapon away from the gunman. Disarmed, the man shouted out a warning to his accomplice and they both fled the house, leaving Irvin, his family, and Vera all unharmed, but badly shaken.
“My son is still traumatized to this day,” said Irvin, who added that both he and his family sought professional psychiatric help after the incident. “We just got him back sleeping in his own room about four or five months ago. About two years ago we got him back in his room for about 30 days, and then one incident where these deer set off the alarm outside the house, after that it went downhill again.”
For Vera, the damage was slightly more subtle. He and Irvin flew to England for the fight with Jardine as scheduled, and he tried his best to carry on as if nothing had happened. He lost the fight via split decision, but that was only the beginning.
“I remember after that fight, going in to train would suck,” Vera said. “I’d be looking at the clock, waiting to leave. Sometimes I didn’t want to go two or three-a-days. I’d be arguing with my coaches or slacking off. I honestly think that it had to do with that home invasion.”
It wasn’t just that he was emotionally traumatized, Vera said, though of course he was. But it was more that, once he realized how easily and suddenly his life could have ended, spending hours in a gym every day didn’t seem like such a good use of his time.
“After that, I don’t think MMA was number one in my life anymore,” said Vera. “After that home invasion, I was like, hey, I could have been dead today, and there’s still so much I want to do. There’s so much I want to experience, so much I want to do with my wife. MMA just wasn’t the number one priority in my life anymore. Without me knowing, my life rearranged itself.”
In theory, this isn’t such a bad revelation. If this were a movie script, it might be just the kind of catalyst that forces the main character to examine his priorities and put the right things first in life. He starts leaving the office early to take long walks in the park. He calls his mother. Everything works out in the end.
In real life, it didn’t happen that way for Vera. Instead of reveling in the impermanence of life, he grew paranoid. As Irvin put it, “[Vera] got really into guns and security and stuff.”
Not that Irvin was exactly ready to give himself over to the worst impulses of his fellow man, either.
“I did some really crazy stuff at the house for home protection,” he said. That included not only a security system that would present a challenge to the Mission: Impossible team, but also a permit to carry a concealed handgun, which isn’t easy to get in Maryland. “For a while I had a protection company follow my wife around,” Irvin added. “It was crazy times.”
As Vera put it, what bothered him most was that he’d left himself so vulnerable, and he never wanted to make the same mistake again.
“They were professionals,” he said. “It was this feeling that I’d been caught out there, no weapon in my hand, no dogs, no gun. I just got caught slipping.”
But as Vera grew more concerned with his own safety and struggled to put his new list of priorities in perspective, his career inside the cage suffered. He won two straight after the Jardine loss, then dropped fights to Randy Couture and Jon Jones before being dominated by Thiago Silva and getting cut by the UFC following his third loss in a row.
As Vera explained, that’s when he knew he’d lost “it.”
“People keep asking me what it is,” he said. “But if you’ve never lost it, there’s no way I can explain what it is.”
Following his dismissal from the UFC, Vera embarked on a road trip across the U.S., teaching seminars at gyms along the way, he said. He drove 8,500 miles in all, and “somewhere along those 8,500 miles is where I found it again.”
“Watching an 11-year-old kid take an adult seminar and do better than the adults because he was so serious and so hungry to learn, it made me happy again,” he said. “It brought me back to that place.”
Vera was also aided by some delayed, though no less satisfying justice. Police arrested a suspect in the home invasion case that they believed was linked to multiple murders in similar situations — a man the local police chief deemed a “serial killer” — who will now spend the rest of his life in prison following sentencing, Irvin said.
On one hand, it shook Vera to know that, had his longtime coach not disarmed the man, they would almost certainly have been killed that night. On the other, Vera said, “I think maybe it was something in my life that I couldn’t get past until those guys got caught.”
Vera got a reprieve in his professional life as well when, nearly three months after the loss to Silva, the Nevada State Athletic Commission revealed that Silva had submitted a sample for testing that was “inconsistent with human urine.” Silva would later cop to steroid use and Vera’s loss would be changed to a no contest. The UFC would also opt to give him another chance in light of this information, welcoming him back to face Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 in Las Vegas this Saturday night.
“It’s not a new chapter; it’s a whole new book,” said Vera. “The path I was on before, I don’t know where I was going or where I got lost. Somewhere I made a left when I should have made a right. I don’t know, but I lost it, and now I’ve found it.”
The change is apparent to Irvin, too, who has had Vera back in his gym in Maryland for a full training camp for the first time since the home invasion incident in 2008. Vera never came out and told him that he’d been hesitant to return because of what happened that night in his house, Irvin said, “but I had a good sense of that. I personally didn’t really want to be in my own house sometimes because of it, so I understood.”
Now Vera is not only back training with him, Irvin said, but he’s actually doing the work because he wants to, rather than simply going through the motions because he has to.
“He’s in the gym 40 minutes or an hour before his training time is supposed to start. He’s putting the time in and enjoying it more,” said Irvin. “It used to be that if he had a bad training day or a bad day in the gym he’d just keep going forward or whatever. Now he’ll text you at midnight asking, ‘The half-guard sweep didn’t work, is my hand in the wrong position?'”
If there was anybody who could understand Vera’s lack of motivation after the home invasion, it was Irvin. The same trauma had touched his life, and still lurks there somewhere under the surface, he said.
“The reality that we could have been dead right then, it makes you think all sorts of things about life and what it means and what you haven’t done yet. When we were being held hostage…you ever see the movies where a guy will go through this montage of his whole life and everything he’s done? That really happened in my mind.”
Now that Vera has worked through some of his issues and is back to training like the man he used to be in the gym, Irvin is “one hundred percent” confident of victory against Marshall, he said.
“If Brandon follows the game plan and does what he’s supposed to do, Eliot’s going to know in the first round, this is wrong, that something’s not right, because this is not where he’s supposed to be. Then he’ll be forced to do some things that we’re anticipating, and Brandon will get the victory. I have no doubt in my mind about that.”
For Vera, the weight of the expectations on him is something that he feels, but insists he isn’t laboring under. This return to the UFC could easily be a one-shot deal, more of an audition for his old spot rather than a guaranteed second chance.
“I’m supposed to win this fight,” he said. “I’m supposed to go in here and hurt Eliot bad. It’s different. It’s not added pressure, it’s just that this is what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. It feels weird. I don’t feel nervous anymore. I just feel like I’m supposed to go in here and whoop his ass.”
Now, just a shade over three years since the incident that made him re-organize his entire life, Vera insists that he’s back to doing the sport because he wants to, and not because he has to.
It’s fitting then that he prepared for this return alongside the man who probably saved his life that night, and who knows all too well what he’s struggled with ever since.
“Brandon’s been with me for a long time, since before he got to the UFC and before everybody knew who he was,” said Irvin. “He’s not just a fighter to me, he’s like a son and a student, and I love him. I just look forward to seeing him rise back up to the top.”
Filed under: Fighting, NewsIn October 2008, just days before he was scheduled to leave his suburban Maryland home to accompany his most famous student, Brandon Vera, to a UFC event in England, jiu-jitsu and MMA instructor Lloyd Irvin found himself in a…
In October 2008, just days before he was scheduled to leave his suburban Maryland home to accompany his most famous student, Brandon Vera, to a UFC event in England, jiu-jitsu and MMA instructor Lloyd Irvin found himself in a fight of his own. But this one was for his life.
In the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 4, Irvin woke up on his couch at 4:30 am to find two gunmen standing over him. Taking bold action when the opportunity arose, Irvin disarmed one of the perpetrators, forcing them both to flee. No one was hurt in the attempted home invasion, but now the case has taken a chilling twist.
According to Washington D.C. news outlets including WUSA-9, police now believe that one of the men involved in Irvin’s home invasion attempt is a suspected serial killer.
(Video courtesy WUSA9 News)
When Lloyd Irvin successfully disarmed a gun-toting home invader back in October 2008, he may have dodged a much bigger bullet than being robbed, as was assumed to be the reason behind the break in at his Maryland home.
Acc…
(Video courtesy WUSA9 News)
When Lloyd Irvin successfully disarmed a gun-toting home invader back in October 2008, he may have dodged a much bigger bullet than being robbed, as was assumed to be the reason behind the break in at his Maryland home.
According to a report by news channel WUSA9, one of the suspects in the case has been labeled as a possible serial killer by Prince George’s County Police Chief, Robert Hylton.
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.