Mac Danzig is contributing a weekly blog for the Orange County Register. Here are some interesting excerpts from this weeks blog:
The next thing you see is Matt Serra once again, trying to justify Scarola’s loss by lecturing his team and trying to convince them that Joey “was looking for a way out and found it” … I can’t stress how completely nonsensical this is.
Let’s get it straight, Joey is not a “quitter”, and he didn’t “throw” the fight. I really feel that Serra was simply trying to take the credit of the win away from me.
Ah yes, on to the Bible issue… Hughes had asked resident bible enthusiast and speedo-wearer Dan Barerra if he had been reading “the good book” and Dan informed him that no reading materials were allowed in the house whatsoever. So Hughes took it upon himself to provide the team with huge hard-cover versions of the bible that we could read while we were at the gym.
With no other entertainment or reading materials, some of the team elected to read “Esther” like Hughes asked, simply because they were bored. I on the other hand made a conscious decision not to read it.
The whole thing was very awkward for me. I really don’t feel like that sort of thing has a place in a training camp unless everyone is a devout Christian and has agreed upon it as a group.
Both Blake and I felt that religion is a personal thing and beliefs should not be forced upon other people under the guise that it’s “just a story.” In most cases, I would have immediately told someone off who tried this sort of routine, but I wanted to avoid making a huge issue out of it. Remember your rights on a reality TV show: Anything you say or do can be turned into an entire “segment” and used against you in the court of TV. I also wanted to preserve my relationship with Matt Hughes, who I respect as a coach.
Behind the scenes, coach Fiore reassured me that it was ok that I didn’t want to read it and that he felt the same way I did. Luckily, this all blew over and the focus went back to training after a while.
You can catch new episodes of the Ultimate Fighter: Team Hughes vs. Team Serra every Wednesday night on SpikeTV starting at 10:00pm EST. If you miss an episode make sure to check back with us for a detailed recap.