Here I am, back from my trip to Vegas and my stint as co-host for The Rear Naked Choke for a week plus and nary a word written about it.
Every time I sat down to write about the trip and what happened it just didn’t feel right. I think I have four drafts sitting here in WordPress right now. In one I’m trying to be Dave Barry, in another I’m trying to be an ESPN Page 2 guy and in another I’m Marvin McFadden covering Lucas’ MMA debut. In other words — I’m just trying too hard and thinking too damn much about it. Not that good writing doesn’t require the articulation of cogent thought, it certainly does. But there’s also trying too hard for a hook of some sort. And then there’s being reduced to talking about trying too hard to write something about a whirlwind weekend in Vegas that involved no betting, no hookers, one glass of beer and not even a pair of bare breasts.
CK was a bit disappointed in my lack of lack of decorum. How cool is that?
So, because I feel the need to recap the trip SOMEHOW…I’ll start by asking you to head over to http://www.joeted.com and listen to the shows done at the IFL event in Vegas at The Orleans from March 27th through March 29th.
Frustration
From the show perspective – -we struggled with technical issues and location challenges on the first two days. From a technical perspective — Joe had a new computer that he had never really tested all the software needed to do the show on. He figured it’s the same applications on the same OS — what could be the issue? Well, if you’ve worked in IT at all ever you know that different builds can and do behave differently sometimes. Stuff that worked breaks. On top of that, it was apparent that Talkshoe was having issues and that just screwed the live streaming version of the show on the first night. Add on top of that some white noise coming out of the speakers in the room we were in along with a loud ass HVAC system blowing hurricane winds into the room and it’s a bad situation for doing a live Internet radio show from all angles. Throw in the fact that the room we were set up in to do the show the first two nights was in the Orleans Arena and waaaay removed from any sort of foot traffic by the time we were ready to go. Throw in on top of THAT a Doodlebops concert going on at the arena which cemented no one coming by.
Well – that’s not true. Geno the Driver helped us out. Thanks Geno! We appreciate you taking the time to discuss The Notebook among other things with us. Yeah, that happened. On an MMA show. You need to listen to understand the segue that led to that.
Things Turn Around
On fight day/night it all came together though. During the day we went to a press luncheon with Djimon Hounsou who was there doing press for the MMA movie, Never Back Down. On top of getting a free sandwich and a half a cookie, I got to lose my press virginity and actually ask a question. It was filmed, but I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe it winds up on an extra feature on the DVD.
Around 4:30PM we headed over to the arena to find our location on press row and had an awesome show with a crap-load of live listeners and a pretty stellar guest list to include Ken Shamrock, Gary Grate and even Never Back Down actor Sean Faris.
As for the fights, it was my first live MMA event and ringside press seats were a nice way to experience it. I called four of the fights correctly to include a victory by Ian Loveland and Ryan McGivern’s five round decision over Matt Horwich. The Loveland pick was a guess but picking McGivern came after actually getting to meet him and Pat Miletich and spend some time shooting the breeze with them over the course of the three days. It just seemed that wherever we went, they happened to be there too and they already knew Riz so striking up a conversation was pretty easy. Before the weigh in on Thursday, Ryan said he felt great — wasn’t tired or weak or crabby from cutting the weight and Pat mentioned that Horwich was getting married the next day. Now, if there is someone who is not going to be distracted by something like that, it’s Matt…but still. I thought McGivern would have superior conditioning and he did. That allowed him to eat some hard shots and still keep coming in the later rounds and continue to be aggressive while Horwich faded just a bit.
After the fights we wound up staying up all night and hanging out with Roy “Big Country Nelson”, chatted a bit with McGivern who at that point was all talked out and just wanted to eat a well deserved big ass meal in peace and then had a beer with Pat Miletich and bs-ed with him for a while. Great guy, well all of them are, but I put Pat up there at the top of the respect pyramid. Great fighter, great coach and a great guy. He’s one of those people that are almost impossible not to like.
I caught a cold at some point that night too — so that combined with staying up for 30+ hrs might have had something to do with me falling asleep on Saturday around 3:30PM and waking up at 11:40 AM on Sunday. Only other time I did something like that was back in my high school days after two weeks at a hockey camp at Brown University. My parents picked me up on Friday, we went to the hotel and I fell asleep at a normal time but woke up on Sunday morning. Don’t even remember going to the bathroom.
