All I can say is “WOW!” I didn’t see that knockout coming. I thought Rashad had a good game plan of throwing some shots and running, throwing some shots and running; but I just thought that monster right hand of Chuck’s was going to land and put Rashad down. As most of you know, Chuck is a close friend of mine and it wasn’t easy to watch that knockout. Something like that will put you in a bad mood for the rest of the night. I’ve talked to a few people and have heard a couple of comments about Rashad’s showboating; but I like Rashad and that’s just him.
Rich had a good fight, he landed a good liver kick to stop Matt Hamill, so at least one of my buddies got his hand raised. I watched the whole pay-per-view card and to me it was pretty entertaining, there wasn’t really a slow match, I liked them all.
I’ve got a friend named Kevin, from Advanced Armament Corporation, he went and sat about three rows back from the stage and he said he had a great time. Kevin’s helped me out a lot and I helped him get tickets to this UFC, so I was glad to hear that he had a great time.
Last weekend, I flew to Phoenix for LaserLyte. Met up with Aaron and Larry Moore (owners of LaserLyte) and Pat Flanigan to do a signing at the Cabela’s there. Had a good turn out, was busy the whole time I was there and went out that night there in Phoenix to a sports bar to watch the UFC.
Here are the pictures from our gator hunt a couple of weeks ago with Mike Mattley and Knight Rifles. We were on Lake Verret and the other guys in these photos are Danny “Butch” Bernard, Roy Gaudet, and David “Picou” Rousseau:
I hope everybody had a great Labor Day weekend, I know I did. Last week, Mark and I went alligator hunting with Knight Rifles in Louisiana. I’ll talk more about that next weekend when we get the pictures uploaded.
I do have the pictures done from the Dollamur Youth Camp down in Texas from a couple weekends ago.
Also this last weekend over Labor Day, I had a good time with my family. Usually for Labor Day we have a get together down at the pond around our pavilion. Some of the forum members will remember this place, as we had a bonfire out there earlier this year. I was good to catch up with some of the family that I don’t see very often.
Monday, the 1st of September, was opening day of dove season; so Logan, Nate and I went to Shelbyville to the Fredericks’ farm to shoot doves. I left my house at 5 AM, ran around and picked the other two up and got to Shelbyville about ten minutes after 6 AM. I met Mac Frederick a couple years back and he’s very active on the forums and he invited us to come up for the hunt. So we get out to our spot at 6:30 and there’s doves all over the place. We had a great time. One of the great things about the past ten years is that I’ve met some good people. Logan and I shot 20 gauges and Nathan just shot his camera. We have some pictures from yesterday morning up in the FORUMS, you can click the photo below to see more:
Last Wednesday, I went in for my second MRI and also a stress x-ray. It all came back very positive and looks as though I will not need surgery. I still have to go back for my three month check-up to find out more; but as of right now I can do more and start exercising a little bit.
Right now, I’m headed down to Louisiana for an alligator hunt with Knight Rifles. I’ll tell you how that went next week.
I promised this video a couple weeks ago. It’s kind of small and hard to see what’s all going on, so we’ve tried to make it bigger; but that just seemed to make it too fuzzy. Let me know if it’s too difficult to see what’s happening:
The United Way event, on Thursday evening, went really well. We just went through our normal practice and everyone got to be a fly on the wall and observe. So here are some photos from that practice:
Everybody have a happy and safe Labor Day weekend. -matt
I usually don’t do this, but I’m going to break my rule this time. There’s been so much talk about my last blog entry that it’s amazing. Some of it is legitimate thinking, some of it is just from idiots. I never said the GSP fight was boring, the reason I walked out was because I wanted to beat the crowd. I didn’t think Fitch was going to get back in the match and the fight wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. If you want, you can go look at my last blog entry and see that this is basically what I said. So people criticized me for leaving the fight early and said that was disrespectful to GSP, I disagree, I just wanted to get out of there. Some people just need to realize that this is what I do for a living. Now let’s take what you do for a living, go to a conference every month for a few years and see if you want to leave early during one of them. I even had one guy on Yahoo! Sports report that I said that I thought GSP was on steroids. If you go back to my blog and look at what I actually said, I said that I thought that he looked smaller than he has looked before. Never once did I say that GSP was on steroids for this fight. Just goes to show that you can’t trust some of the journalism for the sport out there.
Pat Flanigan came down a couple of weeks ago and we did some shooting at the house and had a good time:
Wednesday I go for my second MRI, so Wednesday afternoon sometime I’ll report on the findings.
This Thursday, we’re having an event out at the gym for the United Way. It will be from 5-8 PM and you can get all the information from this flyer:
I wanted to let everyone know that I signed up to be a part of a internet promotion where every time you search the web on our new branded search engine you can win rare and sometimes exclusive autographed items from Team Hughes.
I signed a bunch of action figures, 8×10’s, books and tee’s and am excited to offer them to you when you simply search the web using my own search engine (powered by Google and Ask)
Most importantly, I am donating a portion of proceeds from this promotion to my favorite charity, The Rancho 3M Christian Orphanage in Mexico.
Telling your friends about the site increases your chances of winning, because every time they win, so will you… If you want to quickly to access the search engine you can also download a toolbar or plug in and search right from your browser.
The Internet Explorer toolbar also features a logo and quick links to my home page, UFC.com, and more. There is no adware or spyware in the toolbar and you can download them in seconds from HERE.
I’d love for you to post a comment letting me know what you win! -matt
Audra and I went up to the UFC in Minneapolis with two other couples: my father-in-law and his wife, Barbara, was one couple; the other couple was Jeff and Tisha. My father-in-law and Barbara have been to many UFCs, but this was the first for Jeff and Tisha. To be honest, I get extremely bored at these UFCs but it was kind of fun having Jeff and Tisha there as I helped them get pictures. Tisha got a picture with Rampage and Dana White. Jeff got his picture with the ringcard girls and Wanderlei. In front of me was Dana White and Lorenzo and some other guys that work for the UFC. They sit right in front of the octagon and they have several TVs in front of them that show exactly what is on Pay Per View. So a couple of times, I got to see Jeff and Tisha’s face on PPV and they also got some texts from their kids saying that they saw them on TV. So that was kind of fun, I went there really to watch one fight, probably not the one you’re expecting. I went there to watch Brock Lesnar. He is so interesting because he is so athletic as well as being so powerful. So that fight went just like I thought it would, Brock took him down whenever he wanted and on the ground he did whatever he wanted. I was also there watching my buddy, Roger, but he didn’t quite look the same. I don’t think him or Kenny fought their best fight on Saturday. Roger looked to have done a few things different and I would say that he needs to go back to what he was doing before.
The last fight of the night was Georges and Fitch. Georges didn’t look as big as he has before and he seemed like he had gotten tired from the first round. Fitch had the game plan of countering Georges and you just can’t do that. You can’t counter a quicker fighter. To be honest, halfway in the third round I got up and walked out of the arena and went to my hotel. The fight wasn’t the most exciting and I wanted to get out of there before everyone else was getting up to leave.
So then Sunday morning I got up and we drove our ten hours back to Hillsboro.
We’re still working on the choke video and that will be up as soon as we get it the way we like it. We also have the video of Mark’s tractor pull from Saturday afternoon (which should be directly below this blog entry) if you’re interested in watching that. -matt
This weekend coming up will be UFC 87 up in Minnesota. Going up there with some friends, I plan on having a good time. I like the fact that I can stay in the Midwest and drive up there. My predictions for the fights are GSP and Lesnar to win. I think they both have a great chance of winning and I think they can go in there and win as easily as they’d like to. But as everyone knows, this is fighting and anything can happen, so there’s always a chance that Fitch or Herring could get their hand raised.
Had some guys from Nashville, Tennessee come up and train with me last week. This group of seven guys work out with each other every day, they keep each other accountable and know that if they skip a practice they aren’t just letting themselves down, they are letting someone else down. So, they decided to come up and let me run them through a two and a half hour workout.
The whole trip was actually a birthday present for one of the guys, Bill, and we’re going to show a video that I sent down to Bill as a birthday surprise, to let him know what to expect when he came down here. You’ll also see his reaction to the video when they played it for him at his local movie theater:
In a couple of days, I will be showing a demonstrational video of how to choke somebody out, so tune back in around Wednesday and you can see another blog entry. -matt
