Richard Hubbard
Editor's Note: Nokaut.com contributor Richard Hubbard is LIVE on the scene in Las Vegas for UFC 100 and will be providing an in-depth look at the event from a fan's perspective throughout the weekend including coverage of the UFC Fan Expo, Weigh-Ins and the fight card itself. Enjoy the first installment today and be sure to check back throughout the weekend for more updates from Richard!
Sixteen years ago, while visiting a friend of mine at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, I ran into a guy at a party. We got talking about, of all things, the martial arts. We both had backgrounds in Karate and Wrestling, and had each done a bit of kickboxing and freestyle full contact fighting as well. Many beers later, he casually mentioned to me that he knew someone who was going to “This underground, anything goes, bare-knuckle fighting event in Denver tomorrow night.” For two, 19 year old martial art aficionados with way too much time on their hands and an unlimited supply of alcohol and other illicit recreational substances, the only reasonable response to this particular piece of datum was easy to arrive at: Road Trip.
At the end of the eight hour drive to Denver, I would face a harsh, but amazing reality: Nothing that I had previously encountered in my brief existence in the martial arts world had prepared me for what I would witness that night. We were young, naïve college kids amongst a crowd composed largely of grown men whose daily relationship to violence could aptly be described as intimate (and when I say violence, I don’t mean the sanctioned, organized, sports-oriented violence of the modern MMA cage, but the dark, lethal kind of violence born of desperation and pathology). To say that I was terrified would be a massive understatement.
However, once the fights began, something shifted inside of me. I immediately realized that although I had been training in the martial arts for many years, I actually knew nothing about the true application of the arts that I had studied. Knowing a bit about grappling, Royce Gracie’s performances against Ken Shamrock and Gerard Gordeau (we all just laughed at Art Jimmerson) not only shocked me, but also made me acutely aware that I was in the presence of something extraordinarily important. There are certain events in life within which you are completely immersed in something larger than yourself; a living, organic process that you do not completely understand, but which you realize at a very visceral level you are going to emerge from fundamentally altered. UFC 1, like the birth of my children many years later, was such an event for me.
Over the next ten years, I followed not only the UFC, but the dynamics of human conflict in general and the various, emerging forms of MMA in particular in the way that most young men follow porn (not that never watched porn, mind you…it’s just that was more capable of, and more interested in, speaking in depth about the evolution of Ground and Pound and the merging of the forms of submission grappling with western wrestling than I was the latest starlet Du Jour.)
Fast forward 16 years later, and here we are at UFC 100, an event billed as the greatest card in UFC history, and for which the accoutrements for fans are almost as impressive as the card itself: a huge Fan Expo, and Training and Development Sessions with some of the top names in the business. For the bargain basement price of $100 per 2 hour session, fans are treated to seminars taught by the likes of Wanderlei Silva, Urijah Faber, and Rumina Sato, to name just a few. To anyone who is serious about their MMA, this is the sort of opportunity that is just too good to pass by: After all, who WOULDN’T pony up a measly $100 for two hours of Muay Thai with Marc DeLaGrotte or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with Eddie Bravo?!?
I have been involved in the martial arts in one way or the other, as a fan or practitioner, for most of my life. I have trained in everything from Kenpo Karate and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to modern police-style defensive tactics and RBSD. In addition to working for local MMA promotions, I also travel the country training with many different teachers and packing my tool box full of as many usable ideas and techniques that I can. It is in this spirit that I am headed to UFC 100 not only to view the fights, interview the fighters, and spend an obscene amount of money on outrageously priced brand name gear: I am also going so that I can throw on my rash guard, get down on the mat, an dig my hands and my mind into some of the nitty-gritty details of the strategy, tactics, and techniques utilized by some of the best in the business.
So, fight fans, be sure to stay tuned in and check back regularly for my updates. As the weekend progresses, I will be giving you the play by play of everything going on at the event and bringing you the observations and analysis of a fan navigating his way through the trenches of one of the greatest MMA events in history.
WEB SHOP
