If I had a dollar for every video MiddleEasy has discarded over the years, then I could afford a better intro to a Top Ten list.
Throughout the years, we literally have terabytes of archived footage we’ve never used on the site. We can’t explain it, we just love to shove a camera in the face of people in the MMA industry and hopefully capture some rare multimedia gem. This generally ends up with hours of LayzieTheSavage unintetionally pointing the camera to the floor while he talks about something that happened in Stockton, California that no one cares about. Seriously, if I have to go through another video of him talking about ‘the homie that’s in prison’ then I’ll — well I’m not sure what I’ll do. If it happened right now, I would probably go to bed because I’m pretty tired. In any other case, I would do something drastically different that I can’t quite figure out at this moment.
Regardless, there is no such word as irregardless. People that use the term should be stabbed in the forehead with a plastic fork regardless of time or location. Those same people are also not allowed to check out our new list of The Top Ten Unreleased MiddleEasy Videos You’ve Never Seen…Because They’re Unreleased.
I know that you know that we know we have an enormous amount of unreleased footage gathered over the years. Some of this stuff was intentionally buried, others were just forgotten in the infinite expansion of time and space. Therefore we felt to manifest a new top ten list to compile these lost wonders. Enjoy — and remember to brush your teeth twice a day. Thank you.
Don’t be jealous, homie.
LayzieTheSavage has a plethora of sweaty male groupies that love to make physical contact with him whenever he’s in their vicinity. It’s like Layzie is a magnet for Nick Diaz superfans that scream at inappropriate times. I’ve personally witnessed the bromance from MMA fans across the world when they encounter the videographer formally known as ‘Michael Mardones.’ It’s undoubtedly a sight to witness. Generally I stand just behind him and check out the hysteria he creates whenever he walks down a crowded hallway before and after MMA events. Keep in mind that Layzie isn’t even an on-camera interviewer and he gets more dudes wanting to hug him than — well, than me. That’s cool. I’m dating a chick. She’s Canadian and is far more attractive than the dudes in this video captured after the UFC 143: Diaz vs. Condit weigh-ins.
The first time I met Vinny Magalhaes, I completely ignored him at a dinner table. It was one of the most unintentional gangsterish thing I’ve ever done. I blame it on a horrendous level of light at the restaurant we were dining at.
That entire statement is a lie.
The first time I met Vinny Magalhaes, he slept on my sofa in Las Vegas with one of my friends way back in the day. Wait, not that way folks. Well maybe that way. You’re going to have to ask the 2011 ADCC champion on Twitter because that’s not a topic I’m getting into.
It goes without saying that we love Vinny Magalhaes on MiddleEasy. We’re not sure why, but we just do. We love Magalhaes like kids love to climb on a sofa and pretend the floor is a never-ending pit of lava. Coincidentally, we also love Mike ‘The Joker’ Guymon — especially when he use a MiddleEasy shirt to videobomb an interview with Vinny Magalhaes in this clip captured at an M-1 Global event in Orange County, California back in 2011.
We’ve spotted Gilbert Yvel on two separate occasions in two different areas of the country and both times we ran up to him like fat kids running up to a stranded ice cream truck. Ever since MiddleEasy started, we’ve talked about Gilbert Yvel like some demigod living on a cloud, occasionally coming to earth to procreate with our human women. We assume Yvel would also try to reproduce with Targzissian women if he had the chance, but they just seem a little difficult to locate in our galaxy.
We caught up with the Dutch consciousness collector at some random MMA event and decided to pick his brain, before he devoured ours with some fava beans. Yvel told us that above else, some promoter burned him in an upcoming fight and apparently he wanted to inform the entire planet of this severe lack of respect.
Sometimes people get rocked and you sit back and say ‘Oh yeah, I saw that coming’. Occasionally there’s a punch that drops a fighter in such a spectacular fashion that you can’t help but kick every piece of furniture in your living room. UFC 107 was one of those scenarios. I think we all incidentally threw our bottle of Red Stripe half-way across the room when Kongo went down from that frate trane of a punch Mir landed on his dome. Seconds later, Mir climbed off his unconsciousness body, threw his hands up in the air and at that exact moment we all knew the final transformation of Frank Mir was complete. Whatever humanoid Frank Mir was before Brock Lesnar made his face into an incomplete cherry pie was dead. He was resurrected as some 265lb megalodon that still had beef with Brock Lesnar.
I’m not sure what demons haunt Frank Mir, but whatever they are, they have to be better than the ones in that ‘Paranormal Activity‘ movie. I watched it because the people in the commercial were jumping out of their seats in the movie theater. Paranormal Activity just made me realize people in commercials that jump out of their seats are idiots. It’s as if Brock Lesnar accidentally pushed the ‘I will never stop obsessing over you’ button on the back of Frank Mir’s head.
LayzieTheSavage caught up with Frank Mir in the hallway of local Las Vegas MMA show a couple years ago and asked him what exactly his beef is with the former UFC heavyweight champion. Mir admitted that — well maybe you should just watch this video coming in at number seven of our Top Ten Unreleased MiddleEasy Videos You’ve Never Seen…Because They’re Unreleased.
Scott Coker referring to Georges St. Pierre vs. Nick Diaz is like watching a commercial for a new Atari 2600 system. Both entities are antiquated technologies that were pretty cool at the time, but now about as entertaining as going into beast-mode with a pair of nunchucks in the comfort of your living room.
It’s the fight that everyone wanted, but as we slowly crawl into 2013, it appears to be an impossibility. Sort of like folding a single piece of paper in half more than seven times. However, you can’t tell past-tense Scott Coker this.
Check out this interview we conducted with the (former) Strikeforce head honcho regarding a bout the MMA world will never see.
This video was captured shortly after Nick Diaz put on what some consider fight of the year in 2011. It seems like just yesterday when the entire MMA community proclaimed that ‘if Nick was smart, he won’t trade strikes with Paul Daley.’ Apparently all of you arm-chair strategists out there that urged Diaz to take Daley down as soon as possible have nothing on Cesar Gracie, a guy that actually called Nick would win by a knockout in the first round.
Nick Diaz is a fighter known to take boxing to a boxer, bring grappling to a submission artist and in this unreleased clip, he brings paranoia to an already paranoid LayzieTheSavage.
We have a ton of video of Jay Hieron that will never be released on MiddleEasy. Let’s just say the dude loves to have a great time. Back in 2009, I broke the news to him via phone text that Marius Zaromskis got a Strikeforce welterweight title shot against Nick Diaz over him and, well that’s the last time Jay Hieron and I really texted. He was beyond angry, and justifiably so.
We caught up with Hieron at the ‘It Ain’t Chemo‘ charity event in Las Vegas this year shortly after his title bout against Ben Askren. As always, Jay held nothing back in regards to the judging of the Bellator title bout — and then he drops a story about how he fought God. Yeah, we’re not making this stuff up.
In all of our years on MiddleEasy, we don’t think we’ve ever been totally disregarded from an MMA clothing company as much as we did with RevGear.
In the Summer of 2011, we thought we would get a clothing company on board with the site and feature a short ad in the beginning of all of our videos. We approached RevGear because they seemed to be interested in the idea. The response we received from the owner of RevGear seemed positive, but he needed to wait on his business partner to get back into town before making any decisions. ‘That’s fine’ we thought. In the meantime, we actually took the initiative and created a small video in which we got a crew of MMA fighters to sign the same piece of RevGear and we were going to present the clip along with a media package to the owner of RevGear. The video was completed, so we shot an email back to the company. We received a response from his business partner stating the owner of RevGear was now out of town. The optimists that we were, we developed an entire RevGear sponsored contest in which we would give away the signed gear to one of our lucky readers. Contest was ready, proposal was sent — and nothing. Seriously, that was the last time anyone at MiddleEasy heard from the guys at RevGear. Sure we sent them an influx of emails, but they didn’t respond to a single one.
After we finally realized that we were burned, we just ate our losses and gave up on the entire concept. In fact, I think LayzieTheSavage sold the signed RevGear shorts on eBay last year. Egh, whatever.
Let this be a lesson to all budding MMA websites out there, don’t do what we did — but watch our failed RevGear pitch video anyway.
Some of you remember the infamous Nick Diaz/Mayhem Miller hallway altercation that spawned an entire movement. A movement that was ultimately never fulfilled.
You’ve undoubtedly heard the story before, but I’ll give all you MMA newcomers a little rundown on Strikeforce lore. After Nick Diaz grabbed a unanimous decision over KJ Noons back in 2010, he made his way to the dressing room only to cross paths with Mayhem Miller. Now it would have been smart of me to preface the entire Mayhem Miller vs. Nick Diaz history before I got to this part of the story, but I’m listening to MGMT’s Electric Feel as I write this, and it’s really funky so I apologize for my brain not operating in a sequential order. Funky as in good, obviously. Anything that band puts out is stunning.
Prior to the encounter, Mayhem Miller claimed Nick Diaz’s ‘hood’ antics were getting old and he felt that he needed to ‘mature.’ Miller then called out Nick Diaz to a superfight middleweight bout. It was now time for Nick to make his move, so he accepted the challenge but only at a catchweight between middleweight and welterweight. Mayhem Miller claimed he couldn’t cut anymore to make the catchweight and then stated it would be easier for Nick to put on a few pounds. Nick Diaz, being the Strikeforce welterweight champion at the time, proclaimed that it was ridiculous that a guy who he felt was ‘irrelevant’ was essentially trying to talk his way into a fight ‘he didn’t deserve.’
Now jump to 2010, minutes after Strikeforce: Diaz vs. Noons wrapped up at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, California. When Nick saw Mayhem in the hallway, he slung a full water bottle directly at Mayhem Miller’s head. It clipped Miller near the eyebrow, exploded, then splashed over Mayhem Miller’s manager. Immediately, Strikeforce personnel and HP Pavilion security got in between the two. Mayhem Miller appeared to be shocked, but Nick Diaz started yelling ‘Come on you fat [expletive], fight me!’ (referring to Mayhem’s inability to cut weight). After the two were separated, Nick made it to the post-fight press conference where the entire incident was somewhat ignored.
The reason why I know the details is because I saw the video of the entire altercation the night of the fight. We didn’t film it, but the people that did capture the incident are in our video below. We tried everything to get the footage, folks. Money, theft, trades — nothing worked.
This video represents the minutes leading up to the altercation. In fact, at the end of the clip, Nick Diaz walks down the hallway where he has the incident with Mayhem Miller. The reason this video is deemed illegal, is because it was. Media were instructed not to film backstage, and LayzieTheSavage is obviously the living incarnation of the Honey Badger in this video.
Imagine traveling 24+ hours to the other end of the planet in order to make one YouTube video — and it gets rejected. Speaking from experience, there’s nothing you can really do except hop on the next plane back to the US and smack yourself on the forehead repeatedly while you nearly circumnavigate the globe.
Over a year ago, I flew to Singapore in order to get the jump on the MMA industry and be the first site to thoroughly cover an emerging gym called ‘Evolve MMA.’ No one really knew much about it aside that it appeared to be a slice of Beverly Hills nestled deep in the South Pacific. Back in 2009, MiddleEasy broke the news about the grand opening of the gym and served the MMA world with some of the first pictures of the facility.
In early 2011, I took the pilgrimage to Singapore and met with Evolve MMA owner, Yodchatri Sityodtong. If you’re an avid MiddleEasy reader, then you probably remember the first article I composed on the gym with a tour of the Evolve MMA facility. Shortly after that feature was published, I promised all of you a second video which covered fighters actually training in the second Evolve MMA gym, also located in Singapore. Unfortunately, that video never surfaced — until now.
When I finalized the video, I sent it over to Yodchatri to get his opinion on the piece. Within seconds, I received an email with something along the lines of ‘Dude, don’t release this!’ Apparently, Yodchatri felt the video didn’t really do justice to the talent Evolve MMA truly had to offer. I guess he felt that a flying armbar performed by Shinya Aoki just wasn’t impressive enough. I think I responded to his email with ‘Look, we don’t have to release it, but it would be an incredible waste of really good hip-hop.’ There was no budging, so the feature was hacked, slashed and murdered on the MiddleEasy editing room floor.
Well, here’s the video that took me 48+ hours of traveling planet Earth just to complete. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s pretty damn slick.
