By JAMES BRYDON
sportsnet.ca
The new season of The Ultimate Fighter has a Canadian connection.
No there aren’t any fighters who hail from Canada like there were last year with Winnipeg’s Krzysztof Soszynski and Halifax’s Ryan Jimmo.
But there is one contestant who is a former champion of a mixed martial arts promotion based north of the border (the one in which Jimmo primarily fights). That’s American Scott Junk.
Junk (6-2-1) is a relatively unknown heavyweight — at least outside of his home state of Hawaii. But MMA fans in Edmonton got to know him quite well in the middle of 2007, when he stormed into the Maximum Fighting Championship and captured the organization’s heavyweight belt in a matter of months.
Yes, this edition of the reality series, which premieres Wednesday night on Sportsnet, will have characters worth following beyond Kimbo Slice. (And we’re not even counting coaches Rampage and Rashad.)
Junk, 30, is quite a bit different from the other 15 cast members. At six-foot-one, and walking around at about 255 pounds, he is one of the smaller guys on the show (relatively speaking, of course). He said he has another distinction.
“All the guys in the house were either ex-NFL football players, internet stars or professional fighters,” Junk said. “So none of them have jobs. I was the only one with a full-time job in the house.”
The married father of one works over 12-hour shifts Sunday through Thursday doing construction for a company that installs sewage lines in Hawaii. Junk, who said he “works his ass off” in between training twice a day, said his situation provided him an entirely different perspective on being confined to the TUF house.
“A lot guys were complaining about things and I was just like, ‘What are you guys complaining about? This is heaven.’ Who cares if we can’t use the phone or watch TV, let’s just deal with it.”
Junk has had some interesting beginnings in the sport. He said he picked up MMA just as a hobby, because he didn’t want to get out of shape. But he immediately fell in love with it.
His first fight was a May 2007 bout in a small promotion in Hawaii against Ricco Rodriguez, a former UFC champion who years earlier won the vacant heavyweight title over Randy Couture.
Though Junk lost that match by submission, he did quite well… considering.
“I didn’t really expect that much out of it, I just wanted to do it to see where I was at,” Junk said. “I didn’t know who Ricco Rodriguez was when I first started, I found out after that he was the ex-UFC heavyweight champion. I had no idea.
“It was one of those fights where the first round I beat him up, in the second round it was similar but I just got caught in a guillotine.”
After that, Junk worked hard on his jiu-jitsu and nine months later began a four-fight win streak including a 10-second knockout victory in February 2007. All his fights up to that point had been in Hawaii. But that would change.
He had met MFC president Mark Pavelich at a UFC event in December 2006 when he cornered one of his teammates Steve Byrnes. Pavelich asked him to fight in his organization, which was opening up a heavyweight division.
In April 2007, he took on top contender Dominic Richard at MFC: Unplugged 3 in Edmonton, winning by verbal submission in the second round. At that point their relationship went further and Junk joined Pro Camp Sports Management, with Pavelich becoming his agent.
Two months later he fought for the vacant title against Jimmy Ambriz, earning a TKO victory when the corner for the overwhelmed Ambriz called a stoppage after the end of the first round. The first round did see Ambriz suffer an accidental blow to the groin, and while he was given a full five minutes to recover, he wasn’t the same. There was talk of a rematch; but that was before Junk caught the eye of the UFC.
When Justin McCully had to pull out of a September 2007 bout against Christian Wellisch, the UFC had to scramble to find a replacement fighter on short notice. So they gave Pavelich a call, and Junk got his first shot at the Octagon.
“As soon as I signed Scott I knew he would win the MFC title and make the jump to the UFC,” Pavelich said at the time. “It won’t take long for Scott to become a force and a serious contender in the UFC heavyweight division.”
Unfortunately, Junk blew out the ACL in his left knee before the fight, and he injured it further in the UFC 76 contest en route to being submitted by Wellisch at 3:19 of the first round.
“It was one of those things where I shouldn’t have taken the fight, but I didn’t want to turn the UFC down, you know,” Junk admitted. “I came back (home) that Sunday and I had full reconstructive surgery on Tuesday.”
As a result he was out of action for about 15 months. Fortunately for him, he got a call back from the UFC, just this time they wanted him to audition for the show.
He and Pavelich have since parted ways because of the distance between Edmonton and where he is based in Hawaii made it difficult to communicate and get on the same page, let alone train with the Pro Camp team. But it was an amicable split. The MFC has also retired its heavyweight division, making Junk its first and only ever champion.
“Pavelich was an awesome guy and I thank him for everything he did for me,” Junk said.
Yet to this point, the most life-changing experience has been his time on The Ultimate Fighter; in particular what he gained from another one with a Canadian connection.
“I learned a bunch of stuff from John Chambers, Georges St. Pierre’s strength and conditioning coach, that I could actually bring back.” Junk said. “We all thought we were doing the right thing in Hawaii in our gym, because we’re all self-taught. We were doing cross-fit and all kinds of other things to work out, not knowing that was actually bad for us. It was breaking our bodies down instead of building our bodies up.”
He has now hooked up with a strength and conditioning coach named Dejuan Hathaway, originally from Tennessee, but who is now working in Hawaii. And fighting on the show let him know his leg was starting to get back to where it should be.
He believes those who watch the show will be able to see the strides he’s making. And his message to others once he gets back to 100 per cent: Watch out.
JUNK ON KIMBO: “(Kimbo Slice) was one of my best friends in the house. He’s cool, he’s an islander too. He’s from the Bahamas. Nobody really realizes that. He’s not from the States. He’s an islander. He’s chill. But at the same time he’s still a thug. He has had a hard life.
“He’s an athlete. You’re going to enjoy watching him. He puts in the work, he goes after it. I think he’ll do good. He just has to get his jiu-jitsu down.”
JUNK ON THE HOUSE ATMOSPHERE: “There were older guys this time, more mature guys. There wasn’t too much shenanigans going on.
“Though, there were a couple douchebags in there.”
