UFC middleweight Tom Lawlor may be the one who's gotten all the attention for weigh-in antics and entertaining pre-fight entrances that seem to exist somewhere in the space between parody and performance art, but he didn't pull them off alone.
If you look closely at the human dog Lawlor lead around on a leash before UFC 100, or the terrified training partner he dropped with a Dan Severn takedown during the UFC 113 weigh-ins, that's where you'll see Seth Petruzelli's contribution to these great moments in pre-fight fun.
So when Petruzelli makes his return to the Octagon at UFC 116 next weekend, you better believe he's going to call in a favor or two from Lawlor.
"He definitely owes me one," Petruzelli told MMA Fighting. "Unfortunately, I have to be serious with my walk-ins. I can't flip that switch like he can where he can go from being goofy and funny, which we both are normally, to serious in the cage. Weigh-ins is where I'll show my character and do something funny."
"For the walk-in it's going to be pretty serious. It's going to be something no one's ever seen before and it's going to be extravagant, but it's going to be a serious entrance."
So does that mean Lawlor won't have to dress up in an embarrassing outfit in front of thousands of MMA fans, as Petruzelli did?
"Oh no, he'll have to dress up," Petruzelli said. "It will be more of a serious dress-up, but he'll have to do it. Basically the goal is that if anyone ends up looking like an idiot during the entrance, it's going to be him."
A simple Google Image search will tell you that both Petruzelli and Lawlor will do almost anything for a laugh in their spare time, though some of those efforts don't always appeal to the more macho MMA fans out there, Petruzelli has found.
"That's the problem with some people. They just don't have a sense of humor. We just think that stuff is kind of funny. Especially in a sport like MMA, there's some shock value in it, and we're both just kind of goofy. It's all for fun. It doesn't bother us when some people don't like it. Some people don't have much of a sense of humor. That sucks for them."
Petruzelli will begin his third stint in the UFC on July 3 as he takes on Octagon rookie Ricardo Romero on the preliminary portion of the UFC 116 card in Las Vegas. We'll all just have to wait patiently until then, and pray that this "extravagant" entrance makes the pay-per-view broadcast.