Following each episode of The Ultimate Fighter Heavyweights, Team Rampage member Abe Wagner will share his thoughts on what happened on camera and behind the scenes.
The most notable thing that this week starts off with is the bug that “attacks” Marcus. It was the scariest bug I’ve ever seen in real life. I didn’t know what it was when I was there, but some clever use of Google once I got back to the real world and had internet access revealed that it was a Sun Spider aka ‘Wind Scorpion.’ Google it yourself if you want to see the scary-ass bug in detail for yourself. It has what looks like ten legs and four jaws. They call it the Wind Scorpion because it moves like the wind, so in addition to being ridiculously scary looking, it’s also super fast.
When they showed someone throwing the dead bug on Marcus and Marcus jumping up and freaking out, it was Rampage that threw it on him on one of the times he came to the house to hang out with us. I’m not sure why they didn’t show that it was him that did it, maybe him being at the house didn’t fit with whatever storyline they are trying to show. But from a personal standpoint, I find it interesting that they didn’t show Rampage being the one to do it.
Then we came home from practice one night and there were pictures drawn of Marcus and put up on the window. I thought the drawing was in good fun and just some playful humor, but I don’t have kids. So while I do think that Marcus overreacted a bit, considering that he has small children that are for sure watching the show, you could see where he might not be as ok with it as someone who didn’t have kids would be. In a bit of foreshadowing, he vows to rip the guy who wrote that’s arm off.
Going into the fight, everyone was talking about the size difference between the two fighters, but while Marcus is six inches taller than Wessel, Wessel is really thick and the two weighed in at 262 and 260, respectively; only a two pound weight difference.
The fight happened really fast, with a lot of position exchanged on the ground in a short time, but ultimately Marcus pulled out an arm bar (following through on his earlier vow) and won the first fight for Team Rampage. From where we all were standing, we thought the Mike’s arm was broken for sure, but later we’d find out that it wasn’t. In real life, it looked pretty bad.
After the second round of match up announcements, Rashad asked all of Team Rampage if we wanted to come over and train with them to help their guys get ready. What you have to realize is that in this social dynamic and situation, there really is no option here. Hypothetically if you did go over and train with the other team, you wouldn’t truly be treated as a full member of their team, and your actual team would make you an outcast too for going outside of them. Effectively, you’d be removing yourself from any group while you were there. So while I think in principal that it was a good idea by Rashad, given the social experiment that we were in the middle of, nobody was in a position to train with the other team if they wanted to. Also, I felt like we would be just used as bodies for their fighters as opposed to being able to learn from the other coaches while we were there. So ultimately we all declined and stuck together as a team.
Next week starts the quarter finals and these are some of the best fights of the season.
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