Aug-22-2008
Tim Boetsch – The ‘Barbarian’s MMA Education Continues
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UFC 107: Penn v. Sanchez DVD
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By Thomas Gerbasi
The tank was empty and Tim Boetsch still had ten minutes to go.
“This isn’t gonna be pretty,” thought the light heavyweight prospect as he trudged back into battle for the second round of his April bout against Matt Hamill. The first round had gone fairly well for the Sunbury, Pennsylvania resident, but by the time those opening five minutes were over, the altitude at the Broomfield Event Center in Colorado had kicked in and sapped him of his strength.
“It took me back to the first professional fight I had, when the same thing happened to me,” he recalled. “I gassed in two minutes of the first round, and then it just clicks over to pure survival mode at that point and you just want to finish it and get the fight over with so you can get the heck out of there.”
Boetsch won that night in 2006, submitting Demian Decorah via strikes in the third round. Against the talented Hamill, he wasn’t so lucky.
“It was going back and forth at a pretty good pace in the first round, but I knew right away that I was in trouble because I wasn’t recovering at all from those flurries,” he said. “In the room that I train in, I’m able to recover within a few seconds of flurrying like that and it just wasn’t happening out there. I knew it was gonna be an ugly fight in terms of just being gassed. Then the second round started. I made some poor decisions and took a terrible shot and actually smacked my head real good into the mat and knocked myself loopy.”
Moments later, Hamill pounded Boetsch out on the mat, gaining the TKO win at 1:25 of the second round. For ‘The Barbarian’, who suffered his first UFC loss after a spectacular debut win over David Heath in February, it was a bitter defeat.
“I’m never gonna accept a loss and honestly it’s super frustrating for me because there was nothing about Matt Hamill that bothered me going in,” said Boetsch, now 7-2 as a pro. “If he would have come in and just stomped me outright, that’s one thing, and I can say that I have to go back to the drawing board and work on some things, but in this case, with a factor like the altitude and me gassing because of that, I think I was even more frustrated that I lost that fight. So I’ve been working my cardio hard and that’s a situation I never want to put myself in again.”
Boetsch had actually gotten to Colorado earlier than he usually would have gotten to the fight site, giving himself a full week to get used to the altitude, but it wasn’t enough, and he wasn’t the only fighter on the card to experience a depleted gas tank in the Mile High State.
“I thought if I got myself in good enough shape that the altitude wasn’t gonna be a factor, and I got out there a couple days ahead of when the UFC was gonna send me, so I had a full week – which I thought was gonna be enough,” he said. “But as it turns out, in talking to people, it really takes almost three weeks or a month of training in that to really let your body adapt.”
When it comes down to it though, a loss is a loss, regardless of the circumstances. Luckily for fight fans though, Boetsch didn’t take the defeat as a reason to wonder if he was cut out for life in mixed martial arts.
“It definitely didn’t make me question myself as a fighter,” he chuckled. “I didn’t take a step back and say ‘am I doing the right thing with my life here?’ I definitely know what I’m capable of doing, and losing to Matt Hamill didn’t make me question myself as a fighter at all. So being able to look at that and say ‘yeah, I gassed because I was 5,000 feet above where I normally train at’ does help me in rationalizing things, but I hate to lose. I hate to lose a game of checkers, let alone a fight on national TV.”
If anything, it made him work even harder in the gym for his UFC 88 bout on September 6th against newcomer Mike Patt. That meant supplementing his regular training with some time in Las Vegas with former UFC heavyweight champ Frank Mir and jiu-jitsu wizard Robert Drysdale.
“Those guys are awesome at what they do,” said Boetsch. “Drysdale blows my mind with what he can do with grappling and jiu-jitsu. To know that there are people out there like that just boggles my mind. It opened my eyes to what I need to be training towards and what people can actually do with themselves when they devote themselves to a sport.”
Taking time to train outside Pennsylvania will also be a regular part of Boetsch’s routine moving forward.
“I need as much learning experience as I can get,” he said. “Someone asked me the other day how much of my potential I think I’ve used up already, and honestly, I’m a baby in the sport. I haven’t even been doing mixed martial arts two years so I’m real green still, and I have a lot to learn.”
Yet after his first round stoppage of Heath at UFC 81 in February, expectations skyrocketed and fight fans were breaking down hypothetical matchups between Boetsch and the big names at 205 pounds. Premature? Yes, but it also helped put the Camden, Maine native on the MMA map and made him one popular light heavyweight. He’s taken all the attention in stride though.
“I’m a pretty humble guy and I try and keep grounded, but after the Heath fight there was definitely a lot of attention from the fans and the media, about a billion interviews a week and that sort of thing,” he said. “But my family helps keep me grounded and it’s not really in my personality to get too big of a head on my shoulders. I just like to go in there and perform, and with my style of fighting, I like to mix it up and keep it exciting, so for the fans to want to see me fight, that just motivates me more to go in there and perform for them.”
And there’s nowhere the former social worker would rather be than in the UFC Octagon.
“People say that if you’re doing what you love, you never have to work a day in your life, and honestly, that’s how I feel,” he said. “I love the training, I love to compete, and in this sport every day’s a competition in the training room. But fighting full-time is definitely surreal. A lot of people ask me how I get up knowing that every day you’ve got to fight and train and put yourself through it. Well, in this sport, you’ve got to be a little wacky, because I look forward to that every day. I love it.”
Boetsch also feels at home among the big names of the sport at 205 pounds like Griffin, Jackson, Liddell, Machida, Silva, Evans and Rua, and while he’s content going along at a pace in proportion to his experience level in the sport, that’s not to say he wouldn’t step up if offered a mega-fight.
“I want to go at things at the right pace, and I want to develop myself at the right speed,” said Boetsch. “I would definitely take a tougher fight if that’s what my management and the UFC want me to do, but I’m comfortable with trying to put a few wins together here and progressing up the ladder at that rate. But I’m not gonna say I won’t take a big fight if they offer it to me. This is definitely a weight class full of superstars and in order to find out where you rank in the world, you’ve got to take on the best guys and that’s something I’m definitely looking forward to doing.
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