BTG 180 - Getting Dirty

Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. We had a UFC fight night. I believe it was number 277 or 278. I lost track. Brandon Moreno versus Laneir Kavanaaugh. We also had a real or I I forget the acronym, but a real American Federation of Wrestling or something to that effect. Number six, which had some interesting matchups. We'll start off with the UFC. I didn't really, like I told you guys, I wasn't too interested in that card. I watched the last three fights. you the the main event like I said it was Kavanaaugh with Brandon Moreno. Kavanagh was the upandcomer. Brandon Moreno is trying to get back into the title picture. Kavanaaugh was unranked prior to this fight. They both had dropped one fight before. Kavanaaugh had got knocked out in his previous fight whereas I think uh Mareno just lost uh the decision or he might have had a TKO too. So they were either way they were both coming back from an L trying to get that W. They both look pretty sharp but Kavanaaugh had to appear to be the much more effective striker on his feet already after one round. Moreno has a big black eye. He's got bruising everywhere. And the biggest damage is on his lead calf is completely jacked up. He's got a big welt on it. It's all red. And Kavanaaugh was relentless on those leg kicks and mixing up the hands throughout the fight. He used utilize the same strategy pretty much. Moreno was winging big shots, trying to land a big hook uh and looking for takedowns. He wasn't able to secure any takedowns. He got a few clinches towards the end of the fight, like round four and five, he was just pinning Kavanaaugh against the cage and kneing him in the legs, which may have won those rounds just by time, but he wasn't going to win the fight that way. So, I'm not sure as the commentators were speculating like maybe he's doing this just to buy some time because he's tired. He's so hurt that he can't afford to take any more calf kicks. It's impressive he finished the fight as it was because you could tell the leg was really messed up and Kavanaaugh didn't let off. But Kavanaaugh ends up winning the decision. Good performance for him, especially after coming uh back from a KO loss. that can be tricky for a young fighter. That was the first, I think, loss of his career. At least the first KO loss of his career. So, uh, good for him for coming back. Uh, good takedown defense, good uh, obviously good striking. Uh, so it'll be interesting to see how he develops as a fighter. Tough for Brandon. Uh, that's a it's a hard spot. He's gota look back and think, what am I doing? You know, because clearly I'm not moving in the right direction in my career. He's there's two L's in a low in a row now. He's sliding away from being able to regain that title. And mind you, he's a young dude. They He's 32, so he has a lot of experience at a young age. And sometimes that can age you more than than anything because this sport depending on the type of fights you're getting into can wear on you a lot just physically. Even though you might be young by age, you're old by fight standards. Guys who get into a lot of wars and stuff that will cost you later in your career. Um, but we will have to see what happens with Moreno. We also had a fight with Bobby Green and he was Oh man, Mexican fighter. Just slipped my name. Uh, slipped my my memory. But Bobby Green now is 39. He's definitely running uh long in the tooth, but he's still got it. He was able to score a knockout win or I guess it would have been a TKO and he did so in his classic style which is just hands down. And the other thing that was kind of weird, it wasn't just hands down, he was square which is [laughter] pretty bold. You know, normally you would have a a angle, you know, so that you're a little bit of a smaller target, but he was standing in front with his chest out the whole time and still evading all the punches. He had really good head movement, very good counter-striking ability, and uh he was able to piece up uh his opponent and score the TKO. So, he's showing that he's still a threat. And uh I guess he's going to hold that. I feel like he's got a good gatekeeper position right now where if they want to really see if someone can step up, they got to get past Bobby first. And uh yeah, so I mean he's keeping himself employed. I don't think he's going to ever really challenge for a title at this point, but that might not be necessary. You know, he's he's been around for a long time now. Now moving into the RAF6. This is again the real pro wrestling as it would say. There are a lot of matchups on there. Um, and if you look, there was like Benson Henderson with Aljo Sterling, which was interesting. Aljo teched them. He might have even pinned him. I'm not sure. Totally. I think it was a pin even. But uh what I've seen with this is that there's a lot of mismatches. It seems like because there's tons of tech falls. I'm saying tons, but if there was like 12 matches, there was probably four or five tech falls. And if you're not familiar with wrestling, that's not very common. At least from my wrestling experience, you didn't really run into tech falls too often because that means you really outclassed your opponent. It would be like putting a blue belt with a black belt. So blue really doesn't have much of a chance and he's just getting destroyed technically. So with the matchmaking being I don't think you should have a significant portion of your matches being tech falls because that's showing that one guy is clearly way better than the other. Right? It's going to happen of course because we underestimate somebody or overestimate somebody and we're going to put the match together. But it shouldn't be many matches being set up this way, especially now that more and more people are being known. There shouldn't be a lot of surprises as far as I'm concerned, but I guess it makes for entertainment because there's still a lot going on. It certainly would be more entertaining the two guys that are deadlocked and that scoring at all. So, I'm not sure how if that's really a problem for them, but it is something that I've noticed that when you watch these RAF cards, there's a lot of tech falls more than you would see. At least, and mind you, I don't have a world of experience in competitive wrestling. I just did high school wrestling. I did some like open divisions as an adult, but you didn't really see tech falls happening too often, especially with the way this is set up where these are all like, you know, main event type things. They're not just random people being matched up in a tournament. In any case, the match that stole all the fire from the main event, which was Uriah Faber and Henry Cejudo. And spoiler alert, Cejudo tech favor. Not surprisingly, he's an Olympic gold medalist, right? But no one's really talking about that match. The match they're talking about is Armen Serukian with Giorgio Pulos. Now, you guys obviously probably know Armen. He's probably the best guy that's not the champion in the UFC. He seems to always, you know, put his foot in his mouth and keep himself from getting that title shot. He's not doing himself any favors of this either. He's been doing a lot of side questing, right? Like he's been doing grappling events. He's been doing wrestling. This is his second event on RAFS. He did one where he was matched with Lance Palmer, who was a a D1 wrestler, a really good wrestler from my understanding. He might have been a runner up or a champ, I'm not sure, and teched him 100. So, he's not uh he's shown he's a very good wrestler. Giorgio, on the other hand, is a YouTuber who was a D1 wrestler. I don't think he won any big awards or, you know, any titles. I don't know if he was even an all-American, but he was a D1 wrestler, which already puts you at the top 95% of wrestlers, you know. Uh so he's no slouch. And but he's very famous because he does these takedown challenges where he says he'll pay anybody on the street $1,000 so they could take him down. No one's ever taken him down on his channel. At least some videos that have been shown. The leadup to this though, there's a lot of uh talk between these two guys. I did see one thing where Armen was trying to give him money like, "Oh, I'll give you $5,000. We don't have to weigh in." And uh he Georgio wasn't buying it. They're both big. I mean, they're both jacked. Although, at the actual match, Giorgio was completely juiced up. looked like a I guess a bodybuilder. He was pretty big. Now Arman's not too much smaller to be honest. He he can stack on weight pretty well. The interesting thing was this match was very ugly. And what I mean by that was Georgio seemed to go right away into big head clubs and got called well the order events he did a big it wasn't a head club. It was more of a slap because he caught him like right on the edge here instead of the back of the neck and uh pretty blatant. Armen complained. The ref didn't do anything. So then Armen retaliates, gives him a slap. The ref stops it, warns the both of them. They restart the match. Georgia slaps him again and they call him on a minus point or they give a point to Armen instead, but penalty point. The first three points are all penalty points, by the way. Uh, Armen gets a penalty point after that. Then Giorgio gets another penalty point and I think he even got a third one. I'm pretty sure he got a third one for like fing because he was starting to grab fingers and twist them. Giorgio looked to be playing very dirty and Armen was returning whenever he felt he needed to. And this is something I wanted to talk about is when you are dealing with somebody who's dirty, how do you handle it? Because you can expect the referee to save you from experience. And I know because in wrestling people tend to be pretty dirty, you know, like and if you listen to that commentary, it is very true like Chelsea was saying, you know, this is the hardest or worst thing I've seen. And I would agree. Uh I've been involved in stuff at a high school level that was a lot dirtier than this. I know one of my matches, uh, this guy was or one of the things I hate when people do investing, which is like they do the stiff arm, you know, and they they post on your forehead. But instead of just using it as a post, people are actually palm striking you and they're like going like boom, and they're trying to sneak that in. And I had a guy doing that and that was pissing me off. Uh, so I started clubbing him really hard. And mind you, I know how to conceal the clubs pretty well. You know, if the trick I tell people, if you pull your hand back, it's going to be very obvious. So, you don't do that. And that besides doesn't get weight behind it. It just gets uh speed. I can get my arm here. And you focus on the elbow and the lat pulling down to get like the little judo chop on the inside right in the back of the neck. that will get people and or in the back of the head. It would be even better. That will get people to blink whenever you hit someone in the back of the neck, which is why it's illegal in MMA. Doesn't feel great. In wrestling, you can get away with it, though. And uh when this guy started foreheading me, you know, palm striking me in the forehead, I'm like, "All right, fair game." So, I clubbed them pretty hard, then he clubbed me back. And at one point, we were just like poof poof, and we're just both smacking the crap out of each other. referee came in, stopped it, and then the nonsense uh stopped at that point. But if I would have just let this guy come around and keep stuffing me in the head, the ref would have done anything. So, you have to understand the referees a lot of times, they don't want to intervene. So, they'll just let it slide and they figure, well, if you're not complaining, then it's not a big deal, right? It might look bad to me, but if you're not complaining, then I'll let it play, right? So I don't have to get involved and create controversy. So Armen played this right when he complained first, referee did nothing and go, "Oh, fouls are are legal now." All right, then boom. [laughter] And uh the commentators also agree with me on that. It's like if I complain and the ref does nothing, now it's my turn to fail you. If you don't do that, you're going to get bullied because at that point now I have a free pass to bully you. And bully a bully is going to do what bullies do, which is bully you some more. If you don't fight fire with fire, you're going to get into trouble there. And I I feel this is for generally all types of fouls. You know, that's why like if someone if and you kind of know in wrestling is a lot more obvious. It's not as easy to foul somebody. So, you know, when someone's fouling you, it's most of the time on purpose, right? The exception being headbutts. Headbutts tend to happen just because everybody's dropping level, trying to shoot, you know, so and you're head posting. So, it does happen. In this match, it happened and nobody actually got upset about it. Um, but outside of that, people who are clubbing too viciously or they're like, you know, checking too hard, it's pretty obvious that it's intentional. So, you see it heat up in wrestling a lot quicker. And in MMA, since we're striking, it's a lot trickier. You know, with the the groin kicks and the eye gouging being the two fouls that we always worry about. The groin kicks is a lot more understandable. You're throwing an inside kick. Kick rides up a little bit and you miscalculated and you hit him in the in the testicles. To me, if that if I knew that happened intentionally, I'd probably throw my next kick to be in the groin also. Like, okay, we'll go ball for ball. You know, like if you're going to foul me, I'll follow you right back just to show you that I can do it to you. Also, you would have to be a little sneakier in hiding it, but it's not that hard to do. You throw an inside kick. After throwing a few inside kicks, one of them slides up. Oops. Uh, the eye gouging one. That one's a nasty one. That's not one that um, and it's another one that can be accidental to a certain point. I feel when people like I've talked about this before. I won't push too long, but if you're doing this type of thing, you're asking for it to happen, right? There's no reason to do this in combat sports. I can't post off you with my hands down like this. I can only eye gouge you here. Uh, this makes a lot more sense, right? And every so often it might be like this. And then there's some eye gadge potential here. But even this is not great for posting. This is a posting hand. And this is much harder to eye gouge from because look, my fingers are pointed up. It's not impossible, but it's a lot less likely. In any case, I feel like if someone's roughing you up, you need to rough them back up. Don't let yourself get bullied. So, I think Armen did a good job of being aggressive back. Like, he didn't let Giio get away with too much. Although, Giio kept doing the finger twisting stuff and a lot of clubbing. He's Cho seemed and I think Ben Aspen both seem to suggest that Giorgio was trying to get Armen DQed so that he wouldn't have to wrestle him which is an interesting prospect because he did actually try to get him DQed after the slap. So like when I told you in the beginning of the match uh Giio clubbed him or really slapped him Armen complained nothing happened. Arman slapped him and then Giorgio right away was trying to call for a DQ which is kind of gay in my opinion. Well, it kind of it is. If you're not hurt, which clearly he wasn't, why do you want the guy to be fouled out for doing something you just did to him? It's one thing if you know I clubbed them and then Armen kicked him straight in the nuts. Yeah. Now I'm compromised a bit because you hit me in the groin. My legs are shut off and that's obviously a blatant foul. I could see wanting the guy to be DQed because you're not going to be able to perform perform at the same level, but you slap somebody, they slap you back, and you want them DQed. Now, you know, that is weird. So, I do see there's some argument to that, but this was really evasive. like the first round ended I think it was like 3 to one or 2 to1 in Armen's favor favor purely by penalty points in the second round I believe there were more penalty points given it became 4-1 and then in the final round finally scores a takedown uh then Armen got a push out that They didn't score because it was while he was downed. So, he got taken down. He turned back in and then he pushed Giorgio out of bounds. So, the commentator said it should have been a point, but they didn't scored a point. So, now it was 4-3. So, now it's getting a little bit interesting. Armen scores a takedown out of bounds, but it scored a takedown. So it becomes uh now six to3 and as the match is ending Georgia takes a shot. Armen gets a chest wrap, stuffs him down. Times up. Arman then pushes him after the match is over. Over so that Georgia ends up in his guard and then Armen lands one clean shot to the job before pandemonium breaks loose and everybody starts flying in there throwing punches. There's a few takedowns that are happening. It's all madness. And this is the aspect where I said, well, Armen is not doing himself any favors. He shows that he has it's a loose cannon. Like he just doesn't have any tolerance for disrespect and will instantly go postal the moment that he feels that he should. Uh, great controversy because now everyone's talking about this match, but I don't think Dana likes that where like he can threaten the integrity of a fight simply by hurting somebody illegally. It's one thing when you're being cute with things in a way that doesn't actually hurt somebody. In this case, someone could get sued now because this is after the fight and this wasn't even a fight. It was a wrestling match. You're not supposed to be punching people. So, I think he creates a lot of liability and this is not helping him. It's kind of like the Dan Hooker incident where he headbutt Dan Hooker uh on his nose. So, uh I don't think Dana appreciates I like I think he enjoys it walking up to the line. Unless you're Conor McGregor, you're not getting away with that. So, it's unfortunate because Arman is showing he's a really well-rounded fighter. He can wrestle, he can strike, he can grapple, he can't control his temper. So, I feel like that's something that he needs to learn as I feel that might hold him back. Now, it does create lots of attention, like I say, so he's not gonna not be famous or successful. He already is, but I think he wants the title at some point. And when you're on Dana's list, which he clearly is, that's a hard list to get off of. And uh you have to not give them any opportunities or excuses to not use you. If they don't like you, they'll find ways not to use you. But if you're making it easy for them, you're going to make it hard for yourself. But in any case, this is an interesting foray. Like, and it's good to see his skill level. Now, a lot of people are dumping on Georgia saying, "Oh, he's a garbage wrestler." I'm not a wrestling expert. I can't tell you that. He didn't seem like he's a bad wrestler to me. I mean, Arman Tech fault Lance Palmer who was a high level wrestler, better credentials than Giorgio. And Armen scored one takedown on Giorgio that I can recall and he also got taken down. But of course the push outs and the fouls uh chain sing. That's what it was. Armen had one push out, one taked down. Those were the I think he scored three legitimate points to Giorgio's two. That's a close match minus all the you know shenanigans. And if we're saying Arman's a good wrestler, how can you say that if you're saying Giorgio is a is a average wrestler as someone was saying? like, well, I guess that Arman's slightly above average versus this guy's average. He seems like he's pretty legit. I just wish he wasn't like so dirty. You know what I mean? Like it looks like he could have he didn't really need to be that uh dirty to be competitive. In any case, it definitely makes me want to see Armen get a title shot if he can just keep it together and not get himself in trouble long enough and not do anything stupid to hurt himself either like he did last time. That's probably done more damage for him than anything else was pulling out of a title fight from an injury the week of the fight. especially when you're doing videos of you like doing silly things that could potentially aggravate an injury like that. Uh anyhow, I think moral of the story here that I wanted to get across at least was don't let anyone bully you. If you're relying on a third party to save you, it might not work out for you. And when that third party disappears, you're still going to get bullied. Just like in anything in life, like bullies in real life and bullies in a competition, you have to push back immediately. You have to let them know you're not going to be messed around with someone tries to get dirty, get dirty right back on them to let them know that you can play that type of game. Because what people try to do is they they know they can bully you. They feel like now they have this big brother advantage on you that they're outfitting you, so to speak. And that can really do a number on you if you allow that type of mindset to happen. You have to instantly punch back so that they know you're not someone to be played around with. You're not someone to be bullied. You're going to fight back. And some cases, like in this match, they kept doing it the whole time. And then, you know, you just keep playing rough with them the whole time. And sometimes that's how it will be that you'll get into a match with somebody and it's just going to be rough the whole time. The ref's going to be making lots of calls and that's fine. You're just going to have to keep doing that because you need to have respect. Other times, someone might try to get fresh with you and you check them immediately and then they understand and they don't do it anymore and then that works out for you. But other times you have to be very well this might be an ugly fight, right? Uh there might be lots of headbutts. It might be lots of uh you know in MMA we're going to start foot stomping. You know start doing all sorts of little things that we can get away with when we know someone's going to try to play dirty with us. And you know that's the reality of it. If you're not capable of doing that then you're going to get bullied. So I don't fault Armen for doing what he did. I fault him for after the fight. That was nonsense. You know, I understand the frustration he may have had, but that's not professional at all. Right. Anyhow, that's my take on it. You guys can let me know what you think. Otherwise, I'll see you next week.