It’s critical to be ready when you place that call to a reporter. It may be that they are so interested in your school that they will start firing some questions at you right away.

If you can’t answer those questions clearly, it’s the equivalent of a first round knock out.

With no preparation, you may end up like one of the karate guys in the initial UFCs that had no clue about what a real fight was like, who had never taken or dealt a hard punch to the face, who flopped around like a dying fish once they were taken to the ground.

This doesn’t mean that you should be afraid of reporters, even though many people are. I can’t tell you how many people find the idea of talking to a reporter frightening -- including many of the people that I have dealt with in the military. These are guys that train to kill and build systems capable of killing many people very efficiently. So why are they afraid of a guy like me who has never killed anyone?

The point is that these reporters are busy, underpaid (for the most part), over-stressed people. They don’t have time to fool around, so they want to cut to the chase. It’s tempting to hope that since you are someone who has not dealt with the media before, that they will take it easy on you, the same way you might take it easy on the newer or smaller people in your class during sparring.

But this is a different situation. The reporter has no reason to feel much sympathy for you, the way that you can easily put yourself in the position of the guy who has just started training, and maybe you don’t want to scare them away from training at your school.

With the right preparation, you will have nothing to worry about.

But it has to be the right preparation – preparation alone is not good enough. You can probably think of countless examples of fighters who trained hard for fights but did not train right. A great example is Frank Trigg, an enormously talented wrestler in the UFC. Trigg appeared to have all the tools to be a great fighter – solid striking, excellent wrestling, great athleticism – but he lost three fights in a short stretch to a rear naked choke. You’d think after the first time this happened, Trigg would have worked hard to learn every escape possible from a rear naked choke. But no, he didn’t. Trigg has even admitted on the Pride broadcasts that he has been lacking in mental preparation.

Another example is an experience I had in 2005, when I was invited to appear on CSPAN on a Saturday morning and answer questions from the host and callers for 30 minutes. I was honored by the invitation, and spent my entire commute for several days asking myself the sorts of questions I imagined I would receive. I asked myself every question I could think of, and by Thursday evening, felt ready to handle anything.

The problem was that I was only envisioning sorts of questions I thought of myself. Had I gone on the show without additional preparation, it would have been one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. I would have likely frozen up in the face of the questions. It would have been worse than Tank Abbott and John Matua.


But I saved myself. The day before going on the show, I decided to check it out for myself. First, the pace of the show was much, much different than I expected – this was no lounging on the couch with Oprah, the host was firing questions one after another. BAM BAM BAM, like a Vitor Belfort (old Vitor, not new one) flurry of punches.

Even more striking were the questions that came from the callers. The guest that I was watching came on to talk about homeland security, but these people asked him about just about everything under the sun that had to do with government and the military.


Remember Vitor Belfort blowing away Tra Telligman in one of his first major MMA fights? Telligman thought he was getting into the ring with a grappler, and wasn’t ready for the flurries of Vitor’s fists.

Start to think of some of the questions that you need to be prepared to answer.