BOOMER TALE: A WEEK IN HILLSBORO - Matt-Hughes.com Official Forums

Boomer · #1 11-18-2009, 09:01 PM

HAIL HAIL FORUM OF FORUMS BOOMERS GOT A TALE TO TELL!!

I’m back at work fresh off from two weeks of vacation from my stint in yonder land and it’s too bad life can’t be like those two weeks all the time. This might be a long Tale so I’m sure some of you just might skim through (cough Michelle) but after a week with the Country Sage I’ve got some good stories that I know you guys will enjoy and these tales have somewhat turned into an online journal for me that you all get to add your two cents worth.

To start I give Nate a call the Sunday before I left to make sure that he wasn’t going to be out every night I was there and I would get to see him some. He told me that it had been raining 4 weeks solid and that the entire crop was still in the ground and if it was sunny outside he’d be in the fields working with Mark. I told him of course I understood but hoped I could see him some because I was going to bring the Sun with me!

I started off Monday morning on my 12.5 hour drive to Illinois. Those of you I talked with in PMs and e-mails and Txt when I was in Afghanistan know that I was really hoping that I would get to see Fall in full force because its my favorite time of the year. Well I did. Driving though Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois I saw just about every color the good lord has made to go on trees. Plus .. again I was in my new Camaro with the Sunroof open and windows down, so that made it more enjoyable. I got asked about my car at both of the toll booths in West Virginia and when I stopped at a McDonalds I was getting back in my car and had about 5 teenage guys come up around the car in Kentucky . At first I didn’t know what was up so I had my rape whistle out,

but then I saw they were looking at the car so I rolled down the windows and one of the guys immediately popped his head in …

“Spin the tires! Spin the tires!” He exclaimed.

His head was half way in the car looking around and then noticed it was an automatic. The look of disgust shamed me a little ….

“Man .. its an auto … why the heck did you do that buddy?”

“Well partner, honestly I’m really not a hot rod guy … I just really like the look and feel of old cars so when I saw this I just had to have it. I travel a bunch too, so this is just more practical.”

At this time he is looking at me with one eye brow raised and I’m thinking I just talked about practicality to a teenager as I sit in a sports car.

“Well Mr you can still spin the tires with an auto .. want me to show you how?”

Honestly I gave this a second thought …. But the 34 year old in me caught up with the 18 year old thoughts that were creeping up and I politely declined and was off on my way.

Matt gave me a ring to see my ETA cause I was staying with them and I told him I’d probably be in round 7:30. Traffic around Louisville put me a little behind schedule but I was pulling up into the drive round 8:15.

Matt answers the door and says, “If you take your shoes off you’ll make my wife happy.” So plop .. off they come and I follow Matt into the Kitchen. Audra was in there with another gentleman and makes some introductions. They were just wrapping up some talk on a house they might be interested in. Once he left we shuffled some cars around so I’m not blocking Matt as he gets up at zero dark thirty to go hunting and Matt asks me if I want to go out and about because the all were going to turn in. I was actually pretty worn out from the trip so I said if they didn’t mind that I would just turn in too. Little Hanna, who is one the most alert and articulate three year olds I have ever met, was in the living room playing and Matt introduces me and calls out to Joey in the back room, “Joey Come out and meet Boomer, do you remember Boomer?”

Joey, “Yeah I remember him, he’s the one from the hunting show?”

matt says back, “No that’s not him.”

I chuckle. I can only image the amount of people that are in and out of matt’s life and how often matt’s family gets introduce to someone in relation to his work or hobbies. matt walks me down to the basement, Hanna close to follow who insists on turning on all the light switches along the way. He brings me a pillow and some blankets and asks if I want to take a shower. I say yes and he smiles and says, “That will make Audra happy. Also if you wanna throw those close in the wash upstairs.”

“Sure thing.” Audra is pregnant and totally understood the whole germ thing. It’s something that matt likes to give Audra a hard time about but it’s something that has to be considered and not ignored for sure. I take a shower and head downstairs with Hanna closely following behind talking to me like I had known her her entire life. I loved it. . Once we got down stairs we played with her kitchen set a little and when it was time for her to go to bed the test of wills began. Spirited and strong willed Hanna is …. Haha. She led me upstairs to where the washer was and I dropped my clothes in, then she followed me back down stairs and tucked me in and told me a bedtime story. The contrast of this with me living in a tent surrounded by concrete and machine gun towers is something to boggle the mind but I tell you I slept better that night than I have in a loooong time.

The next morning I wake up and knew that Matt was going to go out hunting and I didn’t hear him up stairs. I wasn’t sure how comfortable the rest of his family would be with me without him there so I turn on the TV in the basement and low and behold … and old timey western was on. I get lost in the old flick and really wasn’t sure what time it was because my cell phone had died and I had left the charger in my car. After the show I head on upstairs and Audra is in the den and says hello and that there are cinnamon rolls on the counter. I sit down next to Hanna and Audra comes in and asks what I would like to drink and I ask for some water. We start chatting a bit, Hanna also in the conversation and Joey at the counter with us and Matt walks in and smiles.

“Man Boomer, it’s like this was your family or something .. everyone up eating breakfast all gathered around you.” I laugh and continue to stuff my face with cinnamon rolls as they just go about there normal morning routine and treat me like I had just always been there and been apart of it. Hanna also has renamed me. It seems Boomer was a bit too plan for her, so now I am affectionately called BoomTown.

I go with matt to take Hanna to pre-school and I have to say God bless small town America. Walking in I saw like three or four really pretty gals carrying baby carriages that looked like they just stepped out of a cover shot from Vogue. matt was talking to one of them and she said she just had that baby like last week!!! My jaw dropped. Normally I’m pretty aware in situations like that, in that being in church work for a bit you really have to watch yourself and learn to see past outward appearances of people. You couldn’t honestly be there for someone who might need your help sometime in life if you allow your thoughts to just go wild and unchecked … so its very rare that you ever see me do a double take at anyone, let alone at a pre-school with moms which most likely are married. On the way out I simply ask matt, “Why haven’t I moved here yet??” and he laughs and informs me that a few of them are single!

Once we get back matt asks if I had plans for lunch and I said no but was going to go try and get together with Nate this morning. I did in fact bring the sun with me so I knew he’d probably be busy with Mark. I drive over to Nate’s new place and smile when I see my old buddy coming out the front door. He takes me in and shows me around .. and then (as most of you probably have guessed) its time to go to Wal-Mart. New movies came out and Nate had to have first grabs at them. We jump in the Camero and head to the next town over. Wal-mart still didn’t have the movies Nater wanted and we were about to head back to Hillsboro when Nate gets a call from Mark. Mark asks if Nate could go pick up some batteries and cable at two different stories in Litchfield. Nate says, “I’m in Litchfield with Boomer now!” So it worked out. We pick up the batteries and the cables and start the drive back to Hillsboro. matt calls right as we start back and asks about lunch. I tell him where we are at and make plans for me to meet them in town to follow them to lunch after we drop off the parts to Mark on the farm.

Nate and I drop Mark off his parts and I get to chat with him for a second or two and of course get my traditional bear hug that makes me taste my liver but love it all the same. From the first time I met Mark he picks me up (like my 205 lbs is a pillow) and squeezes till I’m red for a proper hello and goodbye. Mark says that he is rolling with some guys in Litchfield that night and asks if I want to go. I had already made plans to head to the Gym in Granite City with Matt. He said that’s too bad and I agree but said I would have hated to take him to school with my sick jits skills in front of all his buddies. He laughed the “yeah right” laugh and said “Well that’s the point.” Nate and I get back in the car and I ask Nate if he wants to head over to lunch with matt and he says that he needs to get out there and help Mark and asks if I could just drop him off so he could get his car.

I eat lunch with matt and Audra and a friend of theirs and Hanna is there just as alive as ever. Earlier on matt had told me he had to go to Ohio to finish a deer hunt show for Texas Trophy Hunters. He had to leave the show early last week and needed to get back soon to get it done. I didn’t answer right away because I had also planned on going to see Mac and my grandparents while in Illinois and as much as I wanted to just say to Matt yea lets go .. I wanted to check with everyone I needed to see in this week. I called Mac and because of the rain, he was busy at work playing catch up pouring crete and the grandparents would work out better if I came over the weekend.

So, I told matt I’d go with him and we had made plans to leave the next day, but first we had the trip to the gym at 3:00 that day. (Tuesday) We drove up to the gym and as soon as we walked in the office I saw Robbie and Todd. Robbie and matt started talking and Todd was on the phone. matt asks Robbie if he remembers me and Robbie responds of course and we say our hellos. I look out the office door and see Marc Fiore I walk out to say hey and he shoots a smile my way. We talk a bit and he asks if I have some free time this weekend for a cookout at his house. I tell him our plans of driving to Ohio and not sure and he says that if I have any free time just to call him up. A week was not long enough!!

I watch the practice and am amazed at how many fighters are in the class. I mean really from a business aspect it is amazing. Many of us were at the gym opening in FEB 08 and for it to be so packed in such a short amount of time is just amazing. They opened up with their traditional dodge ball game and then went right into class with Kyle showing a jits move to work on. matt and Robbie both were right there in the mix training right with everyone else. My interest in matt as a fighter has led to my interest for MMA in general so I snoop at different parts of the industry because, again, how I’m wired I just gotta understand how things work. I was thinking as I was watching Matt and Robbie roll with everyday folks that there are Professional MMA fighters, not even close to matt and Robbie’s caliber charging 2 to 3K to roll with them. Just once. And here they are jumping in there giving these folks knowledge and training that it would be hard to put a price on anyway .. but just for the cost of their membership. I know that that is not always possible with matt and Robbie, but I got to see it that day. Good stuff.

On the way back matt tells me we are going to take off tonight for Ohio, which I am fine with and need to stop by the farm to pick up his dads car for the ride up. It was a smooth ride in that machine, even without the XM radio.

We leave after the kids go to bed and Matt starts off driving. I tell Matt that I love driving and we can go the whole 6 hours if he wants and he laughs and says we’ll see, but would probably just get a hotel. On the drive up Matt says, “Ok I want to hear the Boomer story. From your first memory on.”

I give a few seconds though as to where to start and what actually to say. Connecting the events and decision you’ve made to make you who you are is not something that is always an easy talk. So how did I get to be the guy on his forum mostly posting in foreign countries? How deep would I get, or how much should I really tell. Finally I just shrugged all that off and just started talking. I think I talked for an hour and a half (yes .. poor Matt) as he drove the first leg of the trip, Matt stopping me every once in awhile to ask me to clarify some point in my story that a had rushed through. When I got all the way up to the point in my life that I became an MMA fan, (UFC 52) I enjoyed telling him about that the most. I mean, matt really was the reason I got into MMA as a whole and if he wouldn’t have gotten kicked in the junk, and if the ref would have stopped the fight for matt to recover and if everything would have gone right .. I would have never looked matt up and probably would have never really followed MMA past that point. It was matt overcoming that injustice and winning the way he did that caused me to look into who this guy was. If you would have told me then that I would be staying in his basement or riding with him to a hunt five years later I would have told you you were on crack. But here I was.

We pulled over to get some gas and it was my turn to drive. I wanted Matt to sleep because he wanted to get up really early tomorrow to get to the hunt and kill out so he could get back to his family and I really think I probably exhausted him with all my chatter. He looked something like

. I drove for about four hours and then Matt woke up and said we should probably get a hotel at the next stop. We pulled over and got a hotel and crashed until the next morning.

Once we woke up, we turned the TV on and started watching JAWS. I had forgotten much about that movie and ended up watching the entire show. I only really jumped once. There is a part where a diver was checking out a boat that had been mauled by the shark and he is by a hole in the bottom of the boat and a head rolls out. As first it looked like the shark and I thought the man was going to get chomped and jumped up …

After JAWS we get in the car and head the rest of the way. At one point I was trying to look up the phone number for the place we were going on my IPHONE and I get the website up and Im trying to read the number on the site but its really small. My nose is touching the IPHONE as I’m trying to read the number. I tell Matt I can’t really read it because of how small it is and he holds his hand out and I give him the phone. In two seconds he wipes his fingers across the screen and BAM!! Its big enough to read.

Matt got a laugh out of my expression because I was amazed at that and asked him how he did that??? He said, “Are you serious? You don’t know?” I told him I just got it and didn’t know. He showed me and I felt really stupid. The country sage strikes again …

Boy this has turned out really long. I still have the Hunt in Ohio, Picking up the restored truck and it breaking down on me in the highway, Traveling to Macs and my bow injury, The deer search for the largest deer matt had ever shot, the ride with Mark in the combine and the cookout watching the Fedor fight …… but it is LATE and I gotta get to work tomorrow. I’ll have to have a part two.