TUF Talks: "The Ultimate Fighter" Season 13 Episode 5
By: Oliver Saenz Posted On: April 28, 2011 at 2:24pm
Hello once again fans and friends and welcome back to another weekly edition of “TUF Talks”. “TUF Talks” is my weekly rundown and recap of the latest episode of the long-running, popular UFC reality TV series “The Ultimate Fighter”. As always, I’ve thrown a heaping helping of commentary in as well. With this episode, TUF Season 13 stretches into its fifth week. With the morale of Team Lesnar dropping by the minute, can Coach Brock Lesnar do anything to salvage his team’s fading chances? Let’s find out by diving right into the latest edition of “TUF Talks”.
Episode five begins in much the same way episode four ended: with Brock Lesnar dejected and Team Lesnar defeated. Lesnar continues to chew out his team, much to the chagrin of Len Bentley. One fighter on Team Lesnar does appear to see the value of tough love, though. Back at the TUF house, Len Bentley continues to rip apart his coach.
With Team Junior dos Santos firmly in control, this week’s fight is revealed: it’ll be Team JDS’s Mike Bowman going up against Team Lesnar’s Clay Harvison.
We then get an interesting segment where it appears that the problems between Junior dos Santos and his assistant coach, Lew Polley, are far from over. Polley continues to rub both me and JDS the wrong way, and “Cigano” seems particularly upset when Polley, who had been brought in solely to try and teach Team JDS good wrestling, begins putting on an impromptu boxing seminar.
Following some more training footage, the show once again focuses on the drama surrounding Chris Cope. We get to see even more footage of Team Lesnar swearing that they don’t trust him and don’t like him, with one fighter even threatening to “murk” him.
The situation seems to have come to a head when someone writes “Chris Cope Double Agent” in the sand. Cope tries to get his team to own up to their suspicions, but few of them seem forthcoming. Cope promises that he’s no double agent, and the situation appears to be resolved… until seconds later, where we’re shown footage of everyone saying they don’t believe Cope and still don’t trust him.
Chris Cope accuses Tony Ferguson of the writing in the sand, and things quickly get very heated. Eventually Cope backs down after Ferguson repeatedly denies writing the message and repeatedly makes some far-from-subtle threats. We then get a decent shocker: it turns out that Team JDS’s Mike Bowman wrote the message, because he thought Cope was a double agent that got in good with Team JDS only so he could spy on them for Team Lesnar. So it appears that Chris Cope is between a rock and a hard place.
After some final pre-fight hype, the fight of the week gets underway.
For the first round, this fight is pretty entertaining. Clay Harvison establishes his presence early and often with smart punches, crisp strikes, and powerful shots. Mike Bowman lands a few good leg kicks but doesn’t offer up much of anything else, and has his takedowns repeatedly blocked. Harvison is unable to land that one beauty of a shot that ends the fight, but he sure tries to and ends up dominating the first round.
Unfortunately, Harvison’s repeated attempts to end the fight in the first results in him getting gassed, which makes the second round much closer. But Bowman still can’t get his takedowns, still can’t land a good clean shot, and Harvison still manages to land some blows. Much of the second is spent with both men grappling against the cage. It’s a close round, but unfortunately, a bit of a boring one. Both teams seem prepared for it to go to sudden death overtime, but Clay Harvison ends up winning a decision.
Team Lesnar has their joyful celebrations cut short by some rather shocking and incredibly unfortunate news: Clay Harvison broke his pinkie finger during the fight, to the point where the bone is sticking through his skin. That’s a compound fracture, and it’s serious enough that just about everyone is predicting that it’ll knock Harvison out of the competition. Meanwhile, Mike Bowman is very upset about his performance, and Coach Junior dos Santos tries and fails to cheer him up.
The episode ends with a preview of next week’s episode, and it looks like a good one: Len Bentley goes down hard in training, the wild card fight is announced, Lew Polley and Junior dos Santos have another confrontation, and we get not one but two fights.
Overall, this was a pretty good episode of TUF. In fact, it felt like one of the more-balanced episodes of the season. None of the drama felt particularly awesome, but it wasn’t the kind of frat-boy drama that always gets so annoying on “The Ultimate Fighter”. Chris Cope’s feelings of alienation and frustration, and how he acted upon those feelings, did make for some good television. And it was pretty interesting to see Team Lesnar avoid complete disintegration for another week.
And thankfully, the fight was somewhat entertaining, the first round especially. The second round… not so much. But when you combine a good first round with a plodding second round, you get something that’s good at best and decent at worst. It wasn’t the best fight of the season, but it wasn’t the worst either. I like where “TUF” is going, and I think things will only get better as we close out the first round of fights.
And what about you, fans and friends? Any thoughts on this week’s episode?
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Comments
Hi, Oliver. I think you’ve been correct to have to judge TUF separately on drama and on combat. After watching this week’s episode I became convinced that they tried very hard to pick the contestants based on mental and social retardation rather than fighting skill and ability.
We know that Brock Lesnar picked his people based mostly on cardio fitness figuring they can learning fighting later while Junior Dos Santos picked them mostly on fighting ability figuring they can get cardio later.
This probably explains why Brock has the higher proportion of jocks (a term I use in a derrogatory fashion to indicate what you call frat people and not to indicate athletic ability). A real fighter would watch other fighters every chance they get and analyze and watch carefully to learn from it. The only person on Brock’s team that seems to understand this is Chris, the one they all hate. A real fighter would also have no aversion to speaking civily to opponents, and again only Chris understands this.
Of the two guys that fought in this week’s show, it was clear before the fight that even the JDS guy was retarded. But then the fight proved it conclusively.
I estimate the two guys that fought were roughly 22 years old. That means that in theory they should have already had 6 or 7 years of various forms of martial arts training. But from the fight it was clear that the JDS guy at best learned a few katas while the Brock guy went in there knowing nothing.
For instance, the Brock guy (Clay) was taught by the Brock striking coach to put his left hand on the face of the opponent and then follow it with a strong right handed punch. That’s literally the first thing I learned on striking, but I also knew it’s a one-time trick and not one to use over and over again. Clay used it as almost every single attack (showing sheer stupidity). Clay’s opponent, if he had been smart, would have done one of two things:
a) block Clay’s left hand with his own left hand pushing it left while stepping in with a powerful right handed punch, potentially knock out power as both of Clay’s hands would have been pushed aside and as Clay was moving forward, or
b) grab Clay’s left hand while Clay was pushing it forward and use it to create an elbow lock and pin.
Back to that attack Clay kept using repeatedly, I remember 29 years ago when I had maybe 2 or 3 years of fencing training but no grown up training yet on open hand techniques, there was a situation where two bullies attacked me, I fought back, they picked up a bat and chased me in the house, and then I grabbed a couple of swords and sent them packing. Following this event a guy down the street who was a boxer came to me and taught me in one session: a) this is how you make a fist, b) this is what you do if you’re attacked by multiple opponents, and c) this is how you throw a hay maker.
What he taught on the hay maker is that it’s a big punch anyone can see coming. So you can’t just throw it cold. He said you’ve got to take your left hand and put it over the face of your opponent to block their vision, and then swing with your right hand with everything you’ve got.
That’s the very first thing I learned, but I also knew it was a one time thing per fight. For some reason Clay learned it for the first time at age 22ish, and he used it over and over again. He’s lucky his opponent had no fighting skills, or Clay would have been taking a mat nap.
But that’s the thing, none of them know anything about fighting. They have cardio but no mental maturity, no desire to learn from everything, no tactical sense and no practical knowledge. They were picked based on immaturity and stupidity.
Sorry for this follow up. I didn’t have time earlier (I was late for work). I’m also concerned that viewers of the show will think that technique they showed Clay is an okay one for fights outside the ring. It’s absolutely okay for once per fight when it’s not expected, but if it’s repeated a person could break Clay’s elbow by making a strong two-handed parry with right hand striking the elbow inward while the left hand strikes the wrist inward.
I remember about 23 years ago I was sparring a guy that was a black belt of something he called “Hopkido” (sorry if I mispelled that). And the guy explained that in his fighting style they use their blocks as attacks, striking hard instead of just blocking. In a case like Clay’s attack where he’s leaving his left arm hanging out there for an extended period of time, he’s just asking for a Hopkido style block to break his arm or seriously damage it. I doubt it would be a legal attack in MMA, but a lot of people think MMA is fighting and might try to use that Clay move in real life.