Mark Munoz interview on UFC Tonight
On UFC Tonight, a facial hair sporting Kenny Florian interviewed “The Filipino Wrecking Machine” Mark Munoz via webcam from the middleweight’s living room in the lead-up to his clash this Saturday night with former UFC light-heavyweight champ Lyoto “The Dragon” Machida.
At UFC Fight Night: Machida vs. Munoz live on FOX Sports 2 in Manchester, England, the original main event was Munoz against hometown hero Michael Bisping. After suffering an eye injury, Bisping had to pull out of the fight and was quickly replaced by Machida who is dropping down to 185 pounds for the first time in his 15 fight Octagon career. Besides being highly-regarded fighters, Machida and Munoz have been regular training partners for a couple years.
“We trained a lot together in the past,” tells Munoz. “A year ago, we were probably training together two to three days a week at some points. We were just training two days ago before we got the call we were fighting. We know each other quite well.”
Everyone is unique, but Machida’s striking and timing is notably extra unique. “He picks his times very precisely to come forward and I’ll have to pick my times,” explains the former NCAA Division I National Champion wrestler about his hands-on experience training with Machida, which should be an enormous boon for Munoz that other opponents of “The Dragon” were not fortunate to have. “I’ll have to be able to put him on the cage and put him on the ground from the cage.”
From there “KenFlo” asked Munoz, how he sees himself winning this headlining opportunity? “I’m going to get the takedown and you’re going to see some Donkey Kong punches from there on out,” states Munoz about his trademark hammerfist-heavy ground and pound.
Also mentioned, UFC Tonight co-host Chael P. Sonnen who has been training out of Munoz’s Southern California gym Reign Training Center.
“Chael is a tremendous worker,” says Munoz. “He’s very humble in the room. He asks a lot of questions. He’s very open to know what technique works best for him. I’m very fortunate there’s another wrestler at the gym and we can definitely scramble.”
Lastly, Florian asked Munoz, who will win the UFC 168 middleweight title rematch between Anderson Silva and Chris Weidman? And, Munoz picked another former training partner in “The Spider” Silva.
