Matt Brown – A Rough Summer, A Better Fall

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By Thomas Gerbasi

Following a stint on the seventh season of The Ultimate Fighter and four post-show fights that have established him as a prospect to watch in the welterweight division, Matt Brown’s fanbase has grown significantly since 2008. But in September, he lost his biggest fan when his father, James, passed away after a battle with acute myeloid leukemia.

It’s a painful situation anytime you lose a parent, but in Brown’s case, it stung even more because his father had finally seen him turn his life around and find direction after years in which a bad end seemed to be the only option for the wayward son. Yet the 28-year old wasn’t about to let this loss send him back to old habits or on a downward spiral. Instead, he went back to what had saved him in the first place – fighting – and got right back to training camp in Washington for his bout this Saturday night against James Wilks.

“Having the fight coming up was probably the best thing that could happen at that point,” said Brown. “I just had something to focus on and keep my mind occupied. Fighting is what’s got me through a lot of hard times, so it just happened to get me through another tough time. Literally the day after my Dad’s funeral, I went straight back to training camp. I figure I’ll get through this fight, focus a hundred percent on it, and afterwards spend some time with my family. That’s what they’d prefer me to do, and that’s what my dad would want me to do.”

At Matt Hume’s AMC camp in Washington, Brown has the training team and isolation he needs to focus all his energies on Wilks, a fellow Ultimate Fighter alum and the winner of season nine of the reality series.

“Half of it is getting away from everything,” said Brown, a native of Xenia, Ohio. “I don’t have a big social network up there, so for me there’s really nothing for me to do except train. It’s cool to be living somewhere where you really don’t have anything except for your training gear and your food, because you can just focus on your fight. The other half is that it is Matt Hume and AMC. He’s the best coach in the game.”

It’s his first full camp with Hume since a razor-thin loss to Dong Hyun Kim at UFC 88 in September of 2008, and Brown has made even more strides in his fight game since then, submitting Ryan Thomas in two rounds in November of 2008, and then scoring a bizarre first round TKO over Pete Sell at UFC 96 in March. And what made the Sell fight so bizarre was the fact that after a furious initial barrage by Brown, referee Yves Lavigne appeared to stop the fight, causing Brown to back off. But as Lavigne moved in, Sell began to rise and Lavigne allowed the fight to continue. Brown’s assault then continued, but it was clear that Sell was in no condition to fight on. In response, Brown would back off again and even look towards Lavigne to stop the fight, but it was allowed to keep going until finally it was halted at the 1:32 mark of the first round.

“I’ve never really felt that before, but in that fight, you could tell that he was really hurt,” said Brown. “He was stumbling and just going off muscle memory. It was just really awkward and I’ve never been in a situation like that before.”

Yet while he was finishing Sell off, he had a brief flashback to another Sell fight, the one with Scott Smith that saw Smith rebound from almost certain defeat to knock the New Yorker out.

“I guess a little bit in the back of my mind I was thinking of Pete Sell’s fight with Scott Smith,” smiles Brown. “I’m sitting here trying not to cause any damage to this guy, and he could throw some wild haymaker and hurt me and the whole fight changes.”

Fortunately for ‘The Immortal’, that didn’t happen, but unfortunately, all the post-fight talk surrounding the fight focused on the stoppage and not how good Brown looked in the Octagon that night. You won’t hear him bragging though.

“I’m improving every day for sure,” he said. “I’m always getting better, always working hard, but more than anything, it’s all about matchups. Without trying to sound arrogant, I think I’m intelligent when it comes to fighting, and I think I was just able to pick out Pete Sell’s weaknesses and expose them quickly in that fight. I’ve seen the weaknesses in Kim and Thomas’ games, and my particular style made it a little bit harder to expose those weaknesses. Matchup-wise, Sell just happened to match up very badly against my style.”

Sell probably won’t be the only one matching up poorly against Brown as he continues to improve while marching up the ranks. And what may be the most impressive part of Brown’s evolution is that he isn’t just going in there, brawling, and hoping for the best. He’s become a student of the game over the years, and working with the world-renowned Hume isn’t going to hurt him either. This devotion to his craft has allowed him to see things in a fight that most of us aren’t going to.

“Obviously when you’re in the cage you’re gonna see little things here and there that nobody can see,” he said. “When I fight an opponent, I watch his videos a thousand times, so I’m constantly trying to pick out little things.”

But how does he keep his poker face when one of those openings he’s seen in videos get exposed?

“You still have to execute the technique,” laughs Brown, but with each passing fight, he’s not only finding those openings, but he’s taking advantage of them as well. That ensures that James Wilks will be in for a fight this weekend, and if Brown has his way, he’s also going to deliver a loss to the hometown favorite. As for everything after November 14th, Brown isn’t even looking that far ahead.

“The first thing is to get the win over Wilks and see how I perform and see how that fight goes,” he said. “That will tell me a lot about where I’m at. I don’t think I’m ready to fight for a title or anything like that, for sure. I don’t really think about all that too much; I just focus on being the best I can every day and let the cards fall where they fall.”

So far, they’ve fallen in his favor, and he’s not complaining.

“I look at my life a couple years ago compared to where it’s at now and it’s just a dream come true,” said Brown. “Just about every day I wake up and I can’t believe that this is happening to me still. I see my family or friends and they’re living their normal lives and I just always remember what it was like doing that and I can’t believe that this is what I’m doing. People see me at a store and say ‘you’re Matt Brown,’ and it shocks me, even to this day. I can’t believe I’m where I’m at.”