The Rear Naked Choke, Featuring Joe & Ted

Shad Lierley’s toe is fine. Fine enough to allow him to fight for the IFL featherweight belt.

Matt Horwich has the IFL’s middleweight belt and cauliflower ear.

Mario Sperry is the “Zen Machine”.

The three were guests of Joe & Ted on the Rear Naked Choke over the past couple of weeks. Shad and Matt were on the week after Mario.

Shad will battle Wagnney Fabiano on April 4 in the Meadowlands for the featherweight title. Matt puts his middleweight title in the line Feb. 29 at the Orelans in Las Vegas against Tim Kennedy. That same night, Mario’s camp will make its IFL debut against Xtreme Couture, mentored by Shawn Tompkins.

Shad is coming off a now-famous broken toe - the toe broke through the skin. He talked about the injury and how his buddy (and ours), Bad Brad Blackburn, was nowehre to be found when the blood was spewing all over the place. OK, so we might be embellishing a bit, but we did push Shad to bring Bad Brad back east to corner him for the title fight.

Shad also talked about the famed fight of the year of 2007 with Chris Horodecki and said he still would love a rematch, even at 155 pounds, so our thoughts that Shad’s move to featherweight would shelve such a potential rematch might be premature, and hope springs eternal!

Just before we left Shad, he threw the phone over to Reese Andy. Reese’s gym houses just about all of the former Seattle TigerSharks. Get an update on what Reese is doing to get Shad ready!

Matt then came on and Ted hit him right away (not literally). He wanted to know what Matt thought of himself against Anderson Silva. Matt broke it down in his own way after he adjusted the phone (and sent Joe into hysterical laughter) so he could hear the guys. He said in his first appearance on The RNC that his goal was to eventually be at the level to fight Silva. Politics and contracts between promotions will prevent that, though.

The spiritual Horwich, who was reached at Matt Lindland’s Team Quest, recently was a star at the Portland TrailBlazers game, along with teammate Ryan “The Lion” Schultz. While he did not get into too much detail about that, Matt did talk about his hair styles, gave his thoughts on some secrets as to why he has never been knocked out despite taking some massive blows, and his social networking. We asked him to add us on mySpace and make us a top friend, and he did it! THANKS MATT!!!

note: The same offer remains open to all. We’re at www.myspace.com/rncjoeted and we love being in your top friends! It helps the show grow!

Mario sized up his camp entry. The Zen Machine talked about how he got to the IFL. He gave his thoughts about the system, and the MMA world in general.

Mario has been traveling constantly in the months since arriving in the USA from Brazil. It was exceptionally nice of him to take the time to join Joe & Ted. Mario was so concerned that the battery on his cell phone was going to run out during the interview that he made them call him back on a different line! That’s class, ladies and gentlemen!

SWITCHING GEARS

If you have not seen the show “Fight Science” on the National Geographic channel, then stop what you’re doing and make a point to set the DVR for it RIGHT NOW.

Bas Rutten, Randy Couture, Tito Ortiz and Dean Lister are run through a series of experimental scientific tests, and the results stunned the compilers of empirical data.

The only down side was that if you knew nothing about MMA organizations, you would think the UFC was the only one in existence. This was an observation made by Ted and confirmed by Joe.

We have seen in the past that the UFC is not above leveraging their footage and general access to mainstream and other media under the conditions that the written or televised piece keep exclusive mention to their promotion. No one from The RNC has checked into confirming that was the case for this episode of “Fight Science” because we really do not care that much, other than to just levy our positive and negative criticism of the show.

Speaking of Bas Rutten, a hearty RNC congratulations goes out to “El Guapo” for being named the VP for fighter relations at the IFL (from “Fight Science” you can see he’s still in fighting shape!). Fear not, he’ll still be bringing his top-notch analysis to the IFL’s telecasts. Now Bas gets to use those endless connections to help bring talent into the IFL and help create sensible and exciting fighter and camp matchups.

Additionally, Kurt Otto will be able to focus more on the ring-related aspects. As the new head of the business side, Jay Larkin, said last week, the team concept changing to the camp vs. camp setup means we’re not so much talking about a league except in official name. Without a league, there is no sense of having a commissioner. The good thing is, you’ll still be able to hear Kurt, Bas and everyone involved in the IFL inside and and outside of the ring right here on The Rear Naked Choke!

More big news this week was the announcement that the April 4 card will include a total of three title matches:

Featherweight (145 pounds): Wagnney Fabiano defends vs. Shad Lierley

Welterweight (170 pounds): Jay Hieron defends vs. Mark Miller

Light Heavyweight (205 pounds): Vladimir “The Janitor” Matyushenko defends vs. Jamal Patterson

We already have had on Jay (”Nice playa, nice!”), and we’ll eventually have on everyone on that list. We’ll also keep focusing on the Feb. 29 card and will continue to have guests from that lineup!

JUMP ON THE TRAIN!

<—pass it down—>