By Joe Ferraro

Since our arrival to Los Angeles earlier this week, we have been running non-stop all across the State of California, let alone the City of Angeles.

Tuesday morning, we landed at LAX and hit the ground running to The Black House Gym, home to Lyoto Machida, Anderson Silva, the Nogueira brothers, Junior Dos Santos and Mark Munoz….just to name a few. 
Machida was there with his two brothers, as well as his father, who now goes out of his way to pick me out in a crowd. The founder of Machida Karate may appear to be a humble and kind soul but one look into his eyes and one can quickly see that he can probably still school his son in the cage.

Wednesday was spent in downtown LA, where we focused our attention on the UFC 104 media workouts, where we sat down with Joe Stevenson, Spencer Fisher, Cain Velasquez and Ben Rothwell.
While Velasquez was all business, his opponent was very laid back. Rothwell was joined by his wife who assisted with throwing Ben “under the bus” a few times, launching a tidal wave of laughter throughout the interview.

Fisher was in a reserved state when we commenced our conversation, and eventually loosened up. As for Joe Daddy, he was his typical comedic self, dropping witty and well crafted words of sarcasm that had us all in stitches.
At Thursdays pre-fight press conference, I caught up with Mauricio Shogun Rua, who appears calm before the storm. He is focused on proving all the naysayers wrong, and bring the title home to Curitiba, Brazil.

We also caught up with Dana White, who brought us all up to speed on the situations with Dan Henderson, Rampage Jackson, why he disliked the Simpson MMA episode so much as well as a plethora of other topics we will showcase on Monday’s epissode of “MMA Connected”.
Friday was an early start, as we had brunch and a sit down interview with both Shane Carwin then Brandon Vera, followed up by a visit from Dan Miller.

Carwin is very excited to take on Brock Lesnar at UFC 106, while Vera is training specific greco-roman techniques to neutralize his UFC 105 main event opponent, Randy “The Natural” Couture, while making the living legend pay for signing on the dotted line.
The highlight of the day, by far, was an exclusive interview with UFC owner, Lorenzo Fertitta, who shared with us some interesting thoughts on the business of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, as well as his relationship with company president Dana White.

Look for a special feature incorporating both Fertitta and White in an upcoming episode of “MMA Connected”, one which highlight not only their working relationship, but what motivates them to wake up in the morning and what the future holds for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

“MMA CONNECTED” Mon, Tues and Thurs at 11:30pm on Sportsnet.

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