Shields: Media schedule seems ‘kind of ridiculous’
The average MMA fan sees only the tiniest slice of a fighter’s life. The handful of minutes in the cage…
The average MMA fan sees only the tiniest slice of a fighter’s life. The handful of minutes in the cage are preceeded by many weeks that are captured in the words “train hard, fight easy.” No one but a fighter or members of his camp knows about the injuries, about the full time job that 99 out of 100 fighters have to maintain, and more. Dan Severn still works part time as a substitute teacher, but that does not get conveyed to the asses in seats that cheer him on.
At the very pinnacle of the sport, an additional challenge arises – the media schedule. Below Jake Shields talks about it during a teleconference in support of UFC 129, which takes place April 30 at Rogers Centre in Toronto.
“They have me getting up at seven in the morning doing interviews, which is four in the morning my time. It seems kind of ridiculous to me.”
“I know Georges is dealing with it, too. But really, I put training first. I squeeze my interviews in between training. But I haven’t missed one training session because of it. So that’s all that really matters.”
“The worst part is this. It’s bad because it messes up your sleep time. But when you’re champion, you have to be ready to make the sacrifice. People forget sometimes that what pays us are the fans, and the fans want to know what’s going on with us. It’s not fun, but we have to do it.”
One thing that eases Shields’ burden is trust in his manager. Managers can play the role of father figure on a fighter’s life, but in this case, his manager, Jack Shields, really is his father.
“After the Sakurai fight he didn’t get any offers,” Shields’ father relates. “He upset Sakurai and then two months later he still wasn’t in any fights. So he asked me to find him a figt.”
The elder Shields had some experience representing bands and putting together the occasional music festival in the Sierra Nevada mountains, but he had never come close to managing a pro fighter before.
“Jake asked me to manage him after that and I said, ‘I’m sure there’s someone down there who knows the business a lot better than I do. I’m all the way up here in the mountains. There’s got to be someone closer to you who knows this business.’ Six to eight months later he sent me a contract that somebody wanted him to sign and then I took over. It was terrible. I had to [delete] the whole thing and write a new one.”
“Unfortunately, Jake didn’t play it as close to the vest as I would have liked,” Jack said of his son’s public announcement that he wanted into the UFC when hisStrikeforce contract came up for renewal in 2010. “We were in Strikeforce under a welterweight contract, and we were fighting middleweights because there wasn’t any welterweight competition. After Henderson, there wasn’t really anyone left at middleweight. You couldn’t see three fights ahead. You couldn’t even see two fights ahead.”
“It’s been crazy, but Jake’s been a top level fighter, in the top ten since 2004. He’s beat a lot of top fighters and yet he’s never gotten a lot of attention. This fight is getting more attention than any fight I can remember, and it’s just gone off the hook. The enormity of this particular event is even bigger than we imagined.”
“Jake is somebody who fights cool. Before the fight he stays relaxed and he’ll be back there joking. I’ve been back there with other people – I’m not going to name them, but friends of ours who fight – and some of them work themselves up to get mad and angry before they go fight. Jake doesn’t do that. He’s totally relaxed and totally confident. That relaxed confidence tends to wash over me, and I usually go into the fights relaxed and confident as well.”
One things that may not ease Shields’ media burdens is interviews like this one, with Conservative New Media founder John D. Villarreal, who opens the interview by asking if Shields thinks he can win.