Josh Bryant is one of the members of Chuck Liddell's team on the current season of The Ultimate Fighter, and he says that after watching six episodes of this season, he suspects that one of Liddell's assistant coaches, Jake Shields, might be the reason Team Liddell's training sessions haven't gotten much air time.During the taping of The Ultimate Fighter, Shields was preparing to fight Dan Henderson for Strikeforce, and the UFC may not have wanted to give him any type of promotion. Of course, as it turned out, Shields beat Henderson on the last fight of his Strikeforce contract and may soon sign with the UFC. So maybe soon the UFC will want to show the scenes involving Shields that were left on the cutting-room floor.
In an interview with MMAFighting.com, Bryant also talked about this week's fight between Nick Ring and Court McGee. The interview is below.
Michael David Smith: One of the themes that's developing on the show is that there's tension on Tito Ortiz's team whereas on your team everyone seems to be happy with the way things are going. Is that an accurate reflection of how it went?
Josh Bryant: Completely accurate. They didn't want to talk about their training and we would be talking about all the things we were learning and how much fun we were having. They haven't shown a lot of our training sessions, and I wonder if that's because Jake Shields was training with us every day. He pretty much acted like he was one of us: If we were all grappling, he was grappling. If we were all sparring, he was sparring. If we were doing cardio, he was doing cardio. He definitely acted like one of us and we learned a lot from him, but maybe they didn't want to show all of that on the show.
Did you get a sense from Jake whether he's going to sign with the UFC?
Jake mentioned that his fight with Dan Henderson would be his last fight on his Strikeforce contract, but I think he's just going to go where ever they're going to pay him. He's a businessman and he's going to do what's best for his business. Hopefully that's the UFC. I hope the best for him and hope he gets what he wants.
Also in this episode we saw James Hammortree get injured in training and have to get carried out on a stretcher, although it turned out that he was OK. What did you think of what happened there?
It was a basic takedown that happens all the time in practice, but he went down the wrong way and got hurt. You know that can happen in MMA but you try not to think about it. You try to just go out there and practice hard and focus on that.
The fight we saw on this episode was Nick Ring vs. Court McGee, and it went to Ring by majority decision. Two judges scored it 20-18 for Ring and one judged it a 19-19 draw. Afterward Dana White said he thought it was a case of bad judging and Chuck Liddell called the judges "embarrassing." What did you think?
It was a really tough fight to call, but I felt like it should have gone to a third round. It was almost even, and I thought in the second round you have to give it to Court. He landed a takedown, got some front kicks, and I don't know what the judges were looking at. I didn't see it as 20-18 for Ring. I would have liked a third round because that puts it back in the fighters' hands, let them decide who wins by who wins that round.
As a fighter does bad judging concern you?
Yes. That's something that's in my mind as I'm fighting. If a guy takes me down I want to take him down, if a guy punches me I want to punch him twice, if a guy kicks me I want to kick him twice, because I'm thinking to myself about how the judges might be scoring it. If it goes to the judges it could be a bad call and I could lose, so that makes me try that much harder to decisively win.
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