Feb-24-2009
Big game hunter Tim Boetsch continues to adapt
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By Chuck Mindenhall
It’s said that during the Hyborean Age, Conan the Barbarian trained just outside the northern town of Aguilona, mostly working his pecs with barbell curls. Tim “The Barbarian” Boetsch, in very stark contrast, trains in his garage.
Boetsch, it should be noted, is also nonfiction—but everybody has icons.
“I’ve always been a huge Arnold Schwarzenegger fan,” says the light heavyweight, whose entrance song is taken from “Conan the Barbarian” the movie. “For awhile I thought I wanted to be a body builder, kind of following in Arnold’s footsteps but then—you know—life kind of steered me towards fighting and this definitely feels like what I’m meant to do in life.”
Boetsch is gearing up for his March 7 fight with the dangerous wrestler Jason “Hitman” Brilz at UFC 96 in Columbus, Ohio. Though the firefighter Brilz is a guy who seldom loses (16-1-1 as a pro), Boetsch doesn’t care about all that superfluous stuff so long as it’s him. That’s because what distinguishes this fight from Boetsch’s previous four—and here he knocks on wood—is adequate notice.
In his last IFL fight with Vladimir Matyushenko in 2007, the Lincolnville, Maine native took the fight on 72-hour notice. He took his UFC debut against David Heath at UFC 81 on 10-days notice, and for the Matt Hamill fight in April of last year, Boetsch again stepped in for Stephan Bonnar with a little more than a month to ready himself. Talk about a competent on-call employee . . . Tim Boetsch always answers his phone.
“For me, we were training all the time,” he says. “That’s something I would tell any young fighter coming up, to make sure you’re in shape all the time, and ready to jump on whatever opportunity is put in front of you, because some things in life you only get one shot at. And that’s exactly what happened with my UFC debut. I was keeping myself in shape and I definitely felt blessed that I got the opportunity to get in the UFC.”
His next opportunity was to be against James Lee at UFC 88 in Atlanta, but to top things off, the submission specialist Lee injured his hand and had to be replaced by submission specialist Mike Patt. Luckily for Boetsch, the two fought similar enough that he didn’t need to drastically alter his gameplan, instead he just adapted quickly. He TKO’d the replacement Patt with powerful blows, which is the same outcome he’d had in mind for Lee.
That sort of trajectory just seems par for a guy with a degree in Criminal Justice.
For all his recent successes, the 28-year-old Boetsch (8-2) is still relatively new at the game of mixed martial arts. He was a four-time wrestling champion at Camden-Rockport High School in Maine and he also wrestled at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, so that’s his bedrock. Anybody who saw his last bouts against Patt and David Heath knows that he uses these abilities to dictate where the fight takes place so that he can set something up with those heavy hands.
His lone UFC loss was against Hamill in the high altitude of Broomfield, Colorado, a place that is infamously stingy with its oxygen.
“I’ve never gassed in the Octagon like I did out there,” he says. “That’s just the worst feeling in the world when you have no gas in the tank and somebody is trying to punch your face in. Yeah, Broomfield is definitely not one of my favorite places in the world to fight.”
The one punching his face in was Hamill, the more direct culprit in making that night a bad memory.
“I kind of chalk that [Hamill loss] up to experience. I know what I think should have happened in that fight and I know what I was capable of doing in that fight, and it just didn’t work out that way.”
What he did take from that fight was a friend—he and Hamill are planning a hunting trip this fall at an elk and mule deer ranch just outside of Rifle, Colorado, in those same Rocky Mountains. Boetsch is an avid outdoorsman who grew up hunting, fishing and building forts in the New England thatches.
And now he trains Jeet Kune Do in his Pennsylvania garage.
He does this with the same cast of roughnecks he did when he got started in MMA a few short years ago.
“I’ve got a group of guys that I’ve been training with since I first started fighting and they’ve kind of stuck right along with me from the beginning,” he says. “There are no professional fighters in my camp—just a lot of tough guys.”
Though he does train in Pennsylvania “95% of the time,” Boetsch was able to get some work in with Mark DellaGrotte up in Boston to hone his striking skills a bit heading into his bout with Brilz. As pugilistic guys like Marcus Davis have touted, there are new levels of confidence in the stand-up game when DellaGrotte becomes a part of your mental scaffolding.
Or, as Boetsch says, here’s a guy who can teach somebody who likes to throw bombs a few new tricks.
“Working with DellaGrotte, I mean, obviously he’s one of the best strikers in the game,” he says. “I want to take my striking to the next level and I think that, combined with my wrestling background, I’m going to be able to keep this upcoming fight on our feet and display some of that striking ability that I’ve learned. I definitely want to show that off.”
Voila. Bring on Brilz.
Boetsch has seen enough to know that Jason Brilz is no flash in the pan, that he’s a hungry fighter looking to carve out his own identity in the UFC. With that, Boetsch expects a good—potentially quick—war.
“I see Jason Brilz coming out and really trying to get this fight to the ground,” he says, “and I’m going to do everything possible to stuff his shots and frustrate him. Then I’m going to unleash the strikes on him and see if he can weather the storm. I don’t think he’s going to be able to, so I see a finish in the first or second round.”
Spoken like a true post-Atlantis reaver, just what you’d expect from somebody who walks around with a nickname like “The Barbarian.”
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