Muñoz will change game plan in future

Former Vallejo High wrestler views loss to Hamill as learning experience. He didn’t see the kick coming. How could he? A swift right roundhouse to the side of the head rarely announces its course. Mark Muñoz was caught off guard and ill prepared. And the results were disastrous. He was slightly blinded by the lights and stature of his UFC debut last Saturday in Columbus, Ohio.

For nearly four minutes Muñoz held his own against Matt Hamill, but offered attacks with only punches. What about the wrestling background that garnered him state and NCAA national titles? What about the muay thai training he had devoured over the course of his short mixed martial arts career? All that went out the window at UFC 96 as Muñoz lost consciousness after Hamill’s shin made devastating contact with Muñoz’s temple, immediately ending the fight in a scary scene and handing the Vallejo High graduate his first loss in six MMA fights. “Honestly, I think I went in with the wrong game plan.” Muñoz said by phone a week after the fight. “I should have went in there and kicked and kneed and elbowed. But I was just doing boxing. I was preoccupied with moving like a boxer when I can kick.” Muñoz tried to shoot on Hamill early in the fight in an attempt to wrestle. When Hamill effectively defended that move, Muñoz’s had to rely on his still-developing standup abilities.

Muñoz was fine, if a little angry, after the fight. But he admits that he may not have been ready to make his UFC debut on such a large stage. The light-heavyweight Muñoz-Hamill fight was the second televised match on the undercard of the Quentin Jackson-Keith Jardine Pay Per View. “It’s unheard of for a new fighter to get on UFC and get on Pay Per View in front of that many people,” he said. “They had a lot of confidence in me and I think it was a little premature looking back at it.” Muñoz had dominated his first five MMA fights, including two in UFC’s sister organization World Extreme Cagefighting where, in his debut, he knocked out Chuck Grigsby in the first round. His quick advance to UFC came when WEC dissolved its light heavyweight division and the parent organization absorbed fighters into the largest MMA stage there is.

From the start, Muñoz knew he was running uphill against Hamill, a UFC veteran who was fighting in his home state. While Muñoz represented his hometown by coming out to a song by Vallejo rap legend E-40, flashing a “V” with his fingers and saying “V-Town” to the camera, Hamill decided to come out to “Hang On Sloopy,” an unofficial Ohio State fight song. That turned the crowd in Hamill’s favor early. But it likely wouldn’t have mattered for Muñoz if the fight was in the Vallejo High parking lot.

Muñoz has embraced the loss as a learning experience, grouping it with the roadblocks he’s suffered as a wrestler. In a way, he needed a loss to show him the realities of the sport. Before Saturday, he had a relatively smooth MMA career with no close calls. Now he has a failure to learn from for when he gets back into the octagon, perhaps as soon as June.

He has also decided to drop a weight class, to 185 pounds. “I’m a young fighter,” the 31-year old Muñoz said. “I’m not the type of fighter, or the type of person, that likes the easy way, you know? My whole wrestling career I’ve had to earn things the hard way. I’ve lost a lot in wrestling but it’s taught me so much about the type of person I am and the type of fighter I need to be. “I’m definitely going to be a 110 percent better fighter than I was when I walked out of that cage.”

Muñoz takes heart that many of the UFC’s top fighters have suffered tough losses. In the week since the fight, he’s heard encouraging words from the likes of Randy Couture and Renato “Babalu” Sobral. They say he has a bright future in the sport, and Muñoz agrees. “This is not the last you’ve seen of Mark Muñoz,” he said. “I am going to just go back and learn from this experience. You learn from every fight, every experience in the octagon. I truly believe that from every loss you learn 10 times more than from every win.”

By Dan Nied/Times-Herald sports writer Posted: 03/15/2009 07:53:37 AM PDT