Sooner or later if your in the fight game, the time will come when you get to a point where you have to fight a close friend. Someone who knows your weaknesses, has seen you at your worst and has grinded it out with you on the training mats day in and day out. It is never a hard thing to do, but hey, it’s business. It seems to be a touchy subject as of late in combat sports. Boxers Andre Ward and Andre Dirrell have been friends since the amateur’s and recently were schedule to face each in the Showtime Super Six tournament. It was no secret that the two did not want to have anything to do with each other until the time came and would rather fight other people than fight themselves. When push came to shove, Dirrell feel mysteriously ill citing mental problems. Boxing is not the only sport to have witnesses this phenomenon.
At Strikeforce: Babalu vs. Lawler, with King Mo just being crowned new Strikeforce Light heavyweight champion a few weeks back, many fans and media alike had pushed for a Sobral vs. King Mo match up. The two cross train at each others camp’s and had made it public they would not like to fight each other due to the friendship established during this time. The same goes for so many other fighters that cross train at mma gyms. The attitude that is had is that their team mates and training partners are off limits. They do forget that the fight game is a business and sometimes you just gotta take care of business.
This was certainly a choice that UFC middleweight contender Mark Munoz was faced with when learning that he would face friend Aaron Simpson at UFC 123. Rather than state publicly that he would not fight a former training partner and friend, Munoz acknowledged that it was just business and went ahead with the fight. In what turned out to be a very close fight, Munoz’s cage control and aggressiveness won him the judges nod as he reflected to our fight correspondent Marcos Villegas in this one on one interview!
Recently, many athletes
