This week we saw The Ultimate Fighter contestant Joey Scarola quit the show, mainly because he was homesick and missed his girlfriend.  And during that episode we saw coach Matt Serra tell his friend Joey that if he left the show then he’s also be leaving a job as one of Serra’s instructors back home in NY.  Did the UFC champ mean it?  Sure seems like it.  Scarola has opened his own studio and is not longer an instructor at Serra’s Jui-Jitsu academy.  I have no idea of the exact terms of their departure, but the fact that Joey dropped out of the show was an obvious impetus. 

I don’t mean to pick on the guy, but hell, you land yourself a gig with the biggest MMA organizations in the world and you can’t hack it for a few more weeks? Joey has some great skills, it wasn’t as if he was totally out of his league. All that training, all that sweat, all thrown away. He’ll never get a second shot at the UFC. Hopefully just teaching jiu-jitsu (and not competing mma) makes him happy and brings him some decent coin. If you want to roll with Scarola, you can check out this academy’s website here.

Joey’s bio taken from his new website: Started training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu when he was 18 years old. He is the first black belt under UFC welterweight champ Matt Serra and Cage Fury welterweight champ Nick Serra. Professor is also part of the legendary Renzo Gracie team. He has trained w/ and is greatly influenced by many people. These include Renzo Gracie, Ricardo Almeida, Rodrigo Gracie, and especially Matt And Nick Serra. Professor Scarola has been competing in mma and jiu-jitsu competitions for about 10 years. Now it is his goal to use everything he has learned and gained from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and give it back to to his students.

This week in honor of Mr. TUF Coach extraordinaire Matt Hughes, here’s an old high school pic of him and his brother.  Sweet mullets dudes!  The bolo tie and suspenders are nice touches too.

The Ultimate Fighter season 6 contestant, Mac Danzig will be writing down his thoughts each week for the Orange County Register.  Danzig won his prelim fight (the first fight of the season) against sappy Joey “I just want to call my girlfriend” Scarola via triangle choke in impressive fashion. Mac looks like a force to reckon with this season. Here are some of the more interesting comments from Mac’s weekly blog:

The next thing you see is Matt Serra once again, trying to justify Scarola’s loss by lecturing his team and trying to convince them that Joey “was looking for a way out and found it” … I can’t stress how completely nonsensical this is. Let’s get it straight, Joey is not a “quitter”, and he didn’t “throw” the fight. I really feel that Serra was simply trying to take the credit of the win away from me.

Ah yes, on to the Bible issue… Hughes had asked resident bible enthusiast and speedo-wearer Dan Barerra if he had been reading “the good book” and Dan informed him that no reading materials were allowed in the house whatsoever. So Hughes took it upon himself to provide the team with huge hard-cover versions of the bible that we could read while we were at the gym. With no other entertainment or reading materials, some of the team elected to read “Esther” like Hughes asked, simply because they were bored. I on the other hand made a conscious decision not to read it.

The whole thing was very awkward for me. I really don’t feel like that sort of thing has a place in a training camp unless everyone is a devout Christian and has agreed upon it as a group. Both Blake and I felt that religion is a personal thing and beliefs should not be forced upon other people under the guise that it’s “just a story.” In most cases, I would have immediately told someone off who tried this sort of routine, but I wanted to avoid making a huge issue out of it. Remember your rights on a reality TV show: Anything you say or do can be turned into an entire “segment” and used against you in the court of TV. I also wanted to preserve my relationship with Matt Hughes, who I respect as a coach. Behind the scenes, coach Fiore reassured me that it was ok that I didn’t want to read it and that he felt the same way I did. Luckily, this all blew over and the focus went back to training after a while.

You can read Danzig’s entire TUF episode 2 recap here.

If you missed Thursday’s episode of The Ultimate Fighter, one of the fighters (Roman Mitichyan) ended up breaking his elbow, apparently during the fighter evaluation training.  At the doctor’s office he flipped out a bit when told the disappointing news.  He was very adamant that he was still ready to fight, even with a broken elbow.  Obviously Dana White wasn’t having any of that and sent him packing (via his coach Matt Serra).

Matt Hughes had some harsh words on the matter as he stated in his blog:

I think what Roman did (after he found out that his elbow was broken) was terrible because now when people watch the show they’ll think we are all idiots like Roman was. I believe he is just a bad ambassador of the sport.

You can read more of the Matt Hughes blog here.

Yes, we all know that season 6 of The Ultimate Fighters is supposed to be one of the most volatile seasons yet.  And we all know that there is plenty of bad blood between welterweight coaches Matt Hughes and Matt Serra.  What we don’t know is much about the contestants of The Ultimate Fighter 6.  Here is a quick overview of the relatively unknown mixed martial arts fighters who will appear on the television show:

Mac Danzig, 27
MMA record: 17-4-1
Will be the most experienced fighter in the house. Trains at Legends Gym in Los Angeles along side Karo Parisyan and Manny Gamburyan. Most recent fight was a KO loss to Hayato Sakurai at Pride 33.

Joe Scarola, 28
MMA record: 6-0
Scarola is a member of Matt Serra’s Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Academy in Long Island. (we can only hope Hughes picks him for his team)

Matt Arroyo, 24
MMA record: 2-1
Attended the University of Tampa on a baseball scholarship, but by the time he graduated in 2003, had given up baseball and earned a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Roman Mitichyan, 28
MMA record: 8-1
Born in Armenia, moved to LA in 2000 to pursue acting. (not sure if he trains with Karo or Manny who are both from Armenia)

The rest of the cast…

(more…)

The participants for the upcoming The Ultimate Fighter - Team Hughes vs. Team Serra will include the following welterweight fighters:

Matt Arroyo, Daniel Barrera, Blake Bowman, Mac Danzig, Paul Georgieff, Richie Hightower, John Kolsci, Troy Mandaloniz, Billy Miles, Roman Mitichyan, Dorian Price, Jared Rollins, Ben Saunders, Joe Scarola, George Sotiropoulis, and Tommy Speer

A deeper look at these fighters will follow shortly, check back soon.

The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) season premiere will begin September 19th on Spike TV.

Source: UFC.com