Anthony Ferguson is back at SBNation.com with another blog recapping his perspective on The Ultimate Fighter 13 Team Lesnar vs Team Dos Santos reality show. Ferguson is one of 14 young fighters competing for a chance to be the next “Ultimate Fighter”. He is on Team Lesnar who lost the opening fight last week when Nordin Asrih lost a decision to Shamar Bailey.
This week Team Dos Santos picked Javier Torres to face Team Lesnar’s Chris Cope. Here’s Ferguson talking about the fight:
Fight selection time came and because Shamar Bailey won his first fight, Team dos Santos was able to pick the next fight. They put their Javier Torres against our Chris Cope. At the staredown Michael Bowman said Cope’s hands were shaking because he was afraid. I don’t think that’s true. When the fighters do those pose offs, they have to do them for a really long time. It’s not five seconds. Cope might’ve been nervous about fighting, but not about fighting Torres. I think his arms were tired from being up there for so long.
Back to Chris. Before his fight with Javier you saw him training upstairs doing defensive drills and other stuff. I even helped out a little with that. But he was doing so much of it and was practicing for so long we wondered if he was hanging out with the other team like a double agent. Maybe we were a little too paranoid.
Chris talked about being a part-time fighter and training when he could. All that is true, but what people may not realize is that he had excellent cardio. We knew he could go the distance. He lacked some other stuff, maybe more refined technical skills, but he wasn’t going to get tired. Javier had good conditioning too, but you could tell Chris’ was better.
We, as a team, also didn’t think the match-up with Chris against Javier was that much of a mismatch. Javier had good judo and some other skills, but he wasn’t head and shoulders above Chris. Not by a long shot. Both guys were way more evenly matched than Team dos Santos ever realized.
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The mood in the ‘locker room’ after Chris won was awesome. We were all amped up. We were just so excited to get control. The aura in the room was amazing, definitely a lot better than the last time when we had that loss. Brock Lesnar gave his ‘any given sunday’ speech. The other coaches also talked to us and gave us feedback, not just that day but throughout the show, but coach Lesnar was the one who did most of the mentoring. After the speech we went back to the house, ate good food and enjoyed the rest of the night together.
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