Well, last night we had the Strikeforce event and as most of you know, Robbie lost from a guillotine choke. We knew that was Jake’s bread and butter and the gameplan was definitely not to let him get ahold of Robbie’s neck. In the opening of the round, Jake went for a takedown and then even a reshot and put a lot of effort into trying to take Robbie down. Robbie defended it all well and when he broke apart from him, Robbie felt confident. With all the effort Jake put into the takedown, Robbie knew that would have been hard on Jake mentally. Then the next time they got together Robbie even thought that he felt Jake breathing heavy. All that had a lot to do with why Robbie felt so confident clinching with him. That was another reason why Robbie was pressing. We (Matt Pena and I) didn’t want Robbie pressing the fight, it’s just so easy to take somebody down and strike with somebody if they are trying to come into you. But Robbie felt confident and wanted to press a little bit. It was one of those things where Robbie just felt like he could put his glove on Jake and end the fight. When the fight was over, Robbie knew he had made a few small mistakes and in this game you CAN’T make a big mistake or put two or three small mistakes together. This was a catch-weight fight, so Jake will go back down and Robbie will go back up and to be honest, I really don’t think this changes much for Robbie down the road. The Arlovski fight sure didn’t go the way I thought it would, but this is a game of big hitters. And Arlovski’s style of throwing those front kicks doesn’t match up well with a big hitter. All in all, I think it was a good card. I talked to a few of the fans, they said that the production quality and pre-fight hype was nothing like a UFC event.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about some people from my hometown (a small farming community) betting against me, well here is one of those guys that has bet against me twice. Here is a guy I’m going to call “Shorty”, standing to the right of Patrick Flanigan. This is the second time “Shorty” has bet against me and actually I would have called him a good friend. A couple of months before my fight he bet Patrick $100 that I was going to lose. We went there to get Pat’s money as I’m one of those guys that, if I bet, I always pay and, as some of the people on the forums know, if I win a bet I also expect to be paid.

Pat’s in town, later on this week we’re going to go up to Utah to visit Browning/Winchester and let Pat film a few commercials and he’s also going to try and break two of his world records. I’m going out just to try and help out, I think Pat’s sport is a lot like mine in that it’s just as much mental as it is physical. When I heard Pat talk about how it was going to be hard to break these world records, this was the first thing I told him, “There are two types of people in this world, those that think they can and those that think they can’t. You know what, they’re both right.” Spending a lot of my time in the gym, one of the first things I figured out a long time ago is that your body will do so much more than your mind will let it. All these world records are Pat’s already, so that right there is something huge he has to overcome. You can find a lot of motivation to go out and break someone else’s world record, breaking your own is just not quite the same. But as Pat knows he need to keep pushing himself and if he doesn’t break it somebody else down the road will. Pat and I both know that being at the top is sometimes a hard place to find motivation.

We had a great time on vacation, but glad to be home. Check in with you guys next week. -matt

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Matt's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.