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:

-matt

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.


Go to: www.searchwithmatthughes.com

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

9 August 2008 - Mark pulls his 830 John Deere during the Butler Homecoming tractor pull for a distance of 225 feet, 6 inches:

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.

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

Robbie had a fight Saturday night on CBS. I was unable to be there live due to prior commitments, but I watched it on TV and Robbie looked great. Really the first round he tried to figure out what his opponent was going to do, and the second round was like Robbie knew everything was going to happen before it did. One of the best things Robbie did was when he had a chance to end the fight he did. Congrats to Robbie Lawler and the HIT Squad gym.

I had to go to Maine to do a prior commitment, but I had a great time I met some good people. Missy and Nate treated me great and the people in the area were very nice. It’s good to go places and hear ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’ and an occasional ‘yes sir/no sir.’ Maine is far away from the South but definitely has a touch of southern hospitality.

Finally, I wanted to say thanks to Jeremy Schoemaker and David Dellanave and everyone else at Shoemoney. These guys host my website, as well as the HIT Squad website, and they do a lot to keep the site safe from hackers and just making sure that it stays online 24-hours a day. On top of all that, they also run their own MMA website, Fighters.com, so be sure to check that out for all the latest MMA news.

-matt

I had a couple more things for the blog this week, but I wanted yesterday to be all about Hanna. The first is a flyer for the upcoming Martial Arts Expo:

The second item is an email I received that I really liked:

-matt

Hanna is 2 years old today! So don’t forget to wish her a happy birthday in the forums HERE. -matt

Went to the doctor yesterday, he performed quite a few tests on my knee. With the results of the tests on my knee and from what I have told him, he definitely thinks the MCL and the PCL is rebuilding itself. The next time I go back up there, in a month to a month and a half, I will get an MRI and that way he can get a picture of the knee and he can see better what’s going on. So right now, I’m going to work out lightly, try and build up my quadricep as much as I can. Do nothing with the hamstring really, from what he said and he says possibly being able to fight in 6-7 months.

Got a new gun safe, I think it’s great, it comes from Invincible Gun Safes. The one thing I like about this safe is it is all made in America. So check it out and see what you think.

Everything on this table only fills half of this safe:

Creating the knobs for the safe (Window Media Player):

-matt