Thamesford, Ont.’s Mark (The Machine) Hominick blogs again for sportsnet.ca ahead of his fight against Eddie Yagin on April 21 at UFC 145 in Atlanta.
It always makes me feel good to see how incredibly loyal Canadian MMA fans are.
The amount of support has been overwhelming and I always appreciate it. I also continue to get lots of media attention and it’s quite humbling.
It was naturally huge for my last fight in Toronto because it was the first UFC event in Ontario, and I was fighting for the featherweight belt against Jose Aldo. One could have expected it to dwindle and not be as high for this fight in Atlanta, but that hasn’t really been the case. There’s obviously more attention on a Canadian card for the Canadian fighters, but the fans in this sport are loyal and the attention MMA gets in Canada remains strong.
And then on Friday I got a nice Easter treat — I was featured on the front page of the Toronto Sun. They didn’t tell me at the time that it was going to be a cover story. I knew it was a feature story but thought maybe it was just going to be online.
So it was pretty cool to know I have the interest here, especially to be on the front page of a major newspaper, which means my UFC fight is again mainstream news. It was definitely great exposure for myself, the sport and the fight.
To see me and my daughter Raeya in the newspaper, especially on Easter Friday was pretty cool. She’s gotten more exposure over the past year than most people do in their lives! She’s been in lots of papers, videos and online.
And it seems like she has no problem with the attention because she’s quite the active baby. She’s just nonstop, go, go, go! My wife was a very competitive gymnast, and of course there’s me as an MMA fighter, so we definitely knew that she had some of those genes and would be pretty active. She’s lived up to that so far!
Speaking of which, I’m still trying to juggle my family life. It’s tough obviously when I go out of town to train elsewhere and just the usual demands of a fight career, especially when the fight’s coming up. But I have a strong support system and it’s part of the lifestyle.
The big thing after my fight will be planning her one-year birthday, so we’re excited about that. After my fight, that will be my focus.
As for now, I’ve got just over a week left before my fight and I’m more or less just getting good sparring in. I had a Canadian kid who is competing this year at the Olympics in London come and spar with me in boxing. I do a lot of drilling every night and just cover all the bases.
Training is obviously different than it was a year ago. After Shawn Tompkins passed away, we all wanted to stand strong for our first fights without him and just kind of show commitment to each other. But now moving forward we’ve re-established our relationship with Jeff Curran and his team down in Chicago. Team Tompkins formed an alliance with Team Curran in 2006 (I believe) so it’s nice to get back training with Jeff.
I went back and forth to Chicago over the course of this training camp. I spent two and a half weeks there in Chicago and he’ll be meeting me in Atlanta next week and will corner me.
Even though I’ve been adding to my usual training partners, I haven’t really been doing too much differently. I had that winning streak of five in a row and then the big Aldo fight, so I don’t want to change too much. I feel like I’ve been improving in every fight, aside from the last one when I came out and fought out of character. So I just have to do what I know I’m capable of doing and that’s what I’m prepared to do.
Of course it doesn’t always work out like you want it to and envision it will, as my teammate Chris Horodecki can tell you. It was a disappointing weekend for Chris, who lost by knockout just over a minute into his fight against Mike Richman in Windsor on Friday.
He got hurt early and a lot of times in MMA — or any combat sport — if you get hurt early it’s hard to recover. If you took that shot later in the fight and your body’s into the fight, you can bounce back. But when you get hurt early, it’s sometimes hard to recover. We’ve all experienced that. Look at my last fight against Korean Zombie. It’s part of the game.
The thing that’s most frustrating is it’s almost like you weren’t even in the fight. You train, you do your 8-10 week camp all for that moment and then that moment passes so quickly. We all hope he can get back at it and show in his next fight that it was just an anomaly. Which is exactly what I’ll be trying to do next weekend in Atlanta.
But before that, we’ve got the UFC back this weekend after a long layoff. I’ll be home on Saturday afternoon, so I’ll definitely watch it. It’s gone a little lost under the radar, just with the hype of my fight and the Jones-Evans fight, but it will be live on Sportsnet so any time you get to watch the UFC live on free TV it’s great.
UFC Live: Gustafsson vs. Silva airs live Saturday from Sweden at 3 p.m. ET on Sportsnet ONE, and will be replayed at 8 p.m. ET on all Sportsnet regional channels.
UFC 145 from Atlanta will take place on Saturday, April 21 at 10 p.m. ET on pay-per-view, while live prelims will air at 8 p.m. ET on all Sportsnet regional channels.