You know you gotta give it to Mark Munoz. In a time in which MMA fighters are not willing to fight just about everybody that is thrown up against them, he has been the constant company man. From Aaron Simpson, to CB Dollaway and now Lyoto Machida, Munoz has had no problem stepping in the ring with anybody for 25 minutes. The three aforementioned fighters happen all to be Munoz’s friends. Which makes his stance and attitude towards fighting comrades all the more rare in the current scene of MMA.
“We are going to step into the cage for 25 minutes and afterwards we will go back to being friends,” says Mark Munoz of this weekends fight with longtime training partner and former UFC light heavyweight champion Lyoto Machida. The two were prepped to help each other for Machida’s drop to middleweight as well as Munoz’s bout with Michael Bisping. Bisping of course was forced to withdraw and we arrive at the current match up. Both fighters found out about the match thru twitter and Munoz admits it took a awkward phone call with Machida whom he had just trained with two days prior to confirm, “It was a awkward phone call. We were like ‘we are fighting each other man,’ it was just awkward. We didn’t want to fight each other but it is something we have to do.”
Being friends and training partners makes this match up a bigger high stakes game of chess seeing that both fighters are extremely familiar with each others strengths and weaknesses. Munoz contends though the he didn’t teach Machida everything he knows, ” I always leave some surprises. I don’t ever give everything. It is hard, everything I have learned over 25 years of wrestling…you just can’t learn it with in 6 months. It is impossible. There are a lot of intricacies that make those moves work and you got to drill for hours and hours just to be able to do it. So we will see what happens.”
Well something is going to happen, but that something is you watching the full interview below that Marcos Villegas did with Munoz! And of course, these two fight this Saturday in Manchester on Fox Sports 2 at UFC Fight Night.
