The MMA Digest

Photo: MacDanzig.blogspot.com 

Mac Danzig gives his thoughts on episode 6 on his TUF 6 blog:

Ben and Dan get matched up and we get right into a training montage that includes footage from a whole load of different training sessions, all spliced together. This is especially apparent, because it shows Blake training with him, and Blake never did get back on the mats after his fight with Richie, because after all, his ACL was completely torn.

Dan’s knee-drop on J-Roc’s baby-makers gets aired. I remember every time Dan would train, somebody would get hurt. The guy was physically and mentally a little bit out of control. J-Roc was convinced that Dan did it to buy time because he was tired. That may be the case, but I think Dan is simply out of control. Kind of like a toddler on high amounts of sugar, just running around with reckless abandon, unaware of other people’s testicles. Unaware of anything at all, really.

This episode doesn’t even begin to show Dan for who he really is. I won’t give away too much of what might be in store for future episodes, but a few examples of his absent-mindedness stand out in my mind. One time, Barrera was finally convinced by someone to do some laundry after about 3 or 4 weeks of simply stealing other people’s clothes and using the homeless man’s “take a swim in the pool with your clothes on” method.

I’m not sure if he had ever done laundry before, but he ended up grabbing a giant wad of dirty clothes, along with various other random items, and tossing them directly into the washer with Paul’s clothes, mid-cycle. When Paul went to check his laundry, it was mixed in with a bunch of still-dirty clothes that weren’t his, and if I remember correctly, plastic zip-lock bags, an unopened energy bar, and loose almonds everywhere. The thing is, you couldn’t even really get that mad at him for it. Like I said, it was kind of like having a young child around the house. (One with ADDHD, anyway) You couldn’t get through to him by getting mad at him. Dan is just Dan. And we liked our crazy toddler of an Ultimate fighter.

Barrera was the only guy in the house who had the freedom of being able to go on monitored runs throughout the neighborhood, simply due to the fact that he was the only one crazy enough to be up at 4 a.m. to do it…

Hughes actually beat up on Barrera like that multiple times during the show. I really think thats just his way of asserting his dominance over someone who has a lot of spunk. Never once did he act that way in training to me. I think he wanted to “break” Dan, so to speak. It’s more of a college wrestling mentality, I think. He really picked on Dan during training, but it was all in good fun, I guess. Dan really sucked up his hand injury too. He may be a nut, but he’s not a complainer, that’s for sure. That thing had to hurt, broken or not.

The incident with his wife and the phone call happened on private terms, so this is the first time anything from that was seen by us. All crazy screaming by Dan’s wife aside, it has to be hard to get a call like that. This happened within days of Paul’s family tragedy, and it just made things worse for all of us, thinking about what negative things might be going on at home that we have no control over. Barrera is a trooper for dealing with that the way he did. I’m not going to judge his wife too much by that call, because keep in mind, she is fairly young, and the stresses of all the responsibilities he left for her to take care of while he was gone probably drove her crazy (as if being married to Dan Barrera wasn’t hard enough) … (lol) All joking aside, that was a hard thing to go through and I felt for Dan being in that position.

The fight: A lot of people don’t understand how hard it is for a seasoned veteran to get in the ring and do exactly what the coach wants them to, let alone someone with no professional fights like Dan. They listed him as having 1 fight, but as far as I know, that was a Pankration match on mats in a high school gym with no strikes to the head. In my opinion, that’s not an MMA fight. Dan has an amateur boxing and wrestling background. Considering his lack of experience, I thought he did really well. He fought a very awkward fighter and even though he had a brain-fart or two during the match, he showed heart, which goes a long way. Ben Saunders has alot of potential as a fighter. That body-type along with his athleticism could make for a really excellent fighter in the future.

At one point, Dan stands above Ben and delivers nonsensical slaps to Saunder’s ankles instead of letting him up like we were all screaming to him to do. It was frustrating from a coaching standpoint, but it’s harder than you’d think to do the right thing in there all the time. Who knows, he may have been buying time since he himself was tired. I personally thought there should have been another round, as did most other people who saw the fight, including Dana. Whenever you have people with point-karate backgrounds judging MMA, something is wrong, and you hardcore fans know exactly who I’m talking about.