The Ultimate Fights Season12 Episode5
Hello once more fans and friends and welcome to the latest edition of “TUF Talks”, where I recap and give my opinion on the latest episode of the “The Ultimate Fighter”. Last week’s episode 4 gave us an inspirational speech courtesy of boxing legend Mike Tyson, a near-fight, and another resounding victory for Team GSP. What will episode 5 have in store for us? Let’s dive right in and find out.
Episode 5 starts out with a somber reflection courtesy of coach Josh Koscheck, who is unwilling to go silently into the night but seems fully aware of how his team is in dire straits. Koscheck hopes to remedy that with a surprise guest appearance by Jon Fitch. Back at the TUF house, Alex Caceres is up to no good again, as he substitutes Team Koscheck fighter Nam Pham’s fabric softener for bleach. This ends up backfiring as Michael Johnson, one of Bruce Leroy’s teammates, was doing a load of laundry himself. Caceres says “my bad” with not an ounce of sincerity, while Johnson says that virtually everyone in the TUF house has come to loathe Caceres.
Not to be outdone by Josh Koscheck and Jon Fitch, coach Georges St. Pierre brings in Jean Charles Skarbowsky. Skarbowsky is a feared Muay Thai teacher and practitioner that smokes, drinks, and breaks lesser men down for a living. GSP outright warns his team to treat the man with respect or suffer the consequences. And this is all for good reason: despite being a relatively small man that’s not the greatest physical specimen of all time, Skarbowsky makes wrecking Team GSP look pitifully easy. He leaves more than one team-member on the floor in agony, but at the end of the day most of the people who he trained with are glad for the experience.
It’s fight pick time once again, and with GSP in control, he selects Spencer Paige to fight Nam Pham. Pham seems incredibly motivated for this fight and spends almost all of his free time training. In fact, Pham spends so much time running around the outside area of the TUF house that his teammates think he’s over-training himself. A Team Koscheck training segment ends with a surprise appearance from Chuck Liddell. Team Koscheck sing Liddell’s praises for a bit while Liddell gives them some advice that all fighters should live by: train hard and love what you do, because fighting sucks if you don’t like it and it beats the hell out of everything else if you do.
Speaking of fighting, it’s now time for Spencer Paige vs. Nam Pham. Both men come out swinging, and Paige actually drops Pham to one knee with a well-timed and very powerful leg kick. However, that one moment of weakness causes Paige to over-indulge on the leg kicks, to the point where Pham catches one and puts Paige on the ground. What follows it an outright domination by Pham, with a barrage of punches that has me thinking that Pham is going to gas himself out if he keeps it up. Pham ends the round dominantly with a Kimura that Paige seemed seconds away from tapping to.
Pham proves me wrong in round 2, as it seems like all that running has paid off. The man looks to have cardio for days, he continues to push the pace and hammer a disheartened Paige. When the second round ends, it comes as a shock to no one that Pham wins and gives Team Koscheck their first victory of the season. Koscheck and company proceed to nearly tear the roof down in their excitement. Next week’s episode sees two fights instead of the usual one, Team Koscheck continuing to go crazy over their first win, and Georges St. Pierre getting a nasty cut while training.
I’ll say it right now: this was the best episode of the season. You had guest appearances, more drama, more attempts by Koscheck to rile up GSP, more everything. The fight itself was also very good, since Pham displayed a lot of skill while Paige displayed a lot of heart. I was very impressed with this episode of TUF, and it seems like Season 12 is finally starting to live up to my expectations, since I predicted that it may end up being one of the best seasons in recent history. I can’t wait to see next week’s episode, so I’ll see you then, fans and friend. But what about you? What did you think of TUF 12 episode 5, and the season as a whole?
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