By looking at the pictures on this page, I guess you can probably tell that I think that fighting (including events like the UFC, not just boxing or other ring events) is a valid sport. By this I don't mean that all the degenerates picking fights on a Friday night while pissed are sportspeople, but I do believe that those who train for this sport deserve as much respect (if not more) than all the basketballers, footy players and track and field athletes. All the fighters who go into events like the Ultimate Fighting Championship are skilled martial artists who have trained hard to compete in their chosen events and they deserve lots of respect.


Before I saw the UFC and other 'No Holds Barred' events, I'd only seen the "fight night" tapes that are available at most local video shops, which are just (at best) kickboxing matches where occasionally they can use their knees aswell. You can imagine how amazed I was when I checked out the UFC, where there where pretty much no rules, no pads or gloves, and no bullshit. I have watched that tape so many times, and even though I know the results off by heart, I can still always sit through it another time.

I’ve just recently got in a few more fighting videos, and I’ve now got UFC 2, Australian Caged Combat 1, Extreme Fighting 1 + 2, and Vale Tudo 3. The UFC is probably the best, with some awesome fights, and I prefer the ‘cage’ setup they use rather than the traditional ring in events like the Vale Tudo (which is unreal - the fights are brutal as fuck). The main reason behind this is that in ring events (VT), fighters can get caught up in the ropes or corner protectors, or even roll out of the ring when they’ve decided they’ve had enough. In VT 3, one fighter (Pat Smith, who was unreal in UFC 2), is told to stop hanging on to the ropes, and when he does it again, some fuckhead from the sudience pulls at Pat’s hand. After this, Pat refuses to continue with the fight, which was a huge disappointment as he’s a great fighter.

At the moment, the only way I know to get more of these videos is via relatives in the U.K. (where you can them up at most music/video stores), and they cost about $35, which is a fair bit just for a video. I’m trying to get some copies from people on the internet, but I’m not sure how well that’s going to go, but if anyone wants to trade or sell dubs, definetly get in contact with me.

I do two martial arts - Zen Do Kai and Muay Thai. Zen Do Kai (freestyle) is a combination of thai boxing, western boxing, shootwrestling, grappling, and even some traditional martial arts thrown in aswell. Out of the two, Zen Do Kai is definetly the better system for practical fighting, as it's more like a street fighting version of Thai. At the moment I'm a brown belt in ZDK and a brown singlet in Thai, and shit like work and Army has been stopping me quite a bit from getting through the ranks higher, which is pretty annoying.  If anyone's looking for a good and practical (not flashy) martial art, I recommend either of the two martial arts I do. You should check out a few different places that do the martial art you're after as most instructors train pretty differently, adding emphasis on different points.

Apart from this, I also like to play squash on the weekends against a friend of mine who usually kicks my ass each time we play. I've beaten him a few times, but he usually wins pretty comfortably. He even won the time when I (accidentally) hit him in the groin area with a squash ball which I had hit very hard. I was feeling pretty bad (even though it was an accident), but I was also confident of winning that day's match, but he still beat me. Bastard.

I'm vaguely interested in a few other sports including cricket, Formula 1 (Schumacher is excellent - he can't win the race by racing, so he tries to ram his opponents off the course!), which I saw in march 1999 in melbourne, and that's probably about it, as every other sport is for women as far as I'm concerned.