Fighting his way to the top
Bouncer job led to spot on ‘The Ultimate Fighter’
BY COLLEEN KANE | ENQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Matt Hamill claims his television career was born just because he did his job. The 29-year-old Loveland native said he was working as a bouncer at a bar in Utica, N.Y., when one night he was forced to put his long-developed wrestling skills to use.
“There was a fight that no other bouncer could handle, so I used some technique moves to throw them out easily, “Hamill wrote in an e-mail last week. “A hush came over the crowd when they realized I was a good fighter. They said I should join the (Ultimate Fighting Championship).”
A short while later, a fellow bouncer introduced Hamill to his cousin, who worked for the UFC, a mixed martial arts association with a rapidly increasing fan base. With Hamill’s lengthy wrestling résumé, he was chosen as one of 16 rising mixed martial artists to compete on the third season of the reality show, “The Ultimate Fighter.”
The show, filmed in January and February, features fighters living and training together in Las Vegas for seven weeks. The fighters, who practice boxing, wrestling, karate, kickboxing and jiu-jitsu, among other disciplines, face eliminations each episode until four fighters are left for the live finale June 24. This season debuts at 11 p.m. Thursday on Spike TV.
“When I watched the UFC show, I saw some of the fighters use takedown techniques that are used in wrestling, “Hamill said. “I have been wrestling for many years, and I can use those techniques for fighting.”
Hamill, who is deaf, began wrestling at Loveland and became a three-time NCAA Division III champion at the Rochester Institute of Technology from 1997-99.. In 1997, he won gold medals in freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling at the World Games for the Deaf, or the Deaflympics, and was named the USA Deaf Sports Federation Athlete of the Year.
He spent five months at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., in 1999 and also picked up medals at a mixed deaf and hearing Pan American championship in Cuba that year. He returned to the Deaflympics in Rome in 2001 to win a gold medal in freestyle and a silver in Greco-Roman wrestling. His goal is to train for the 2008 Olympic team.
Hamill was born deaf and attended daily speech therapy as a boy. He can talk and read lips and often has an interpreter that helps him communicate at sporting events. During fights, he can’t hear his coach in the corner and he can’t hear the bell, but he thinks he might have an advantage because he can focus better without hearing outside distractions.
“I learned to persevere (through his hearing impairment), “Hamill said. “… Just like speech therapy and wrestling through high school, college and the upper echelons, I decided when I joined the UFC that if I could do all that, plus international competitions, I could do this, too.”
Hamill joins a growing list of local mixed martial arts competitors who have participated in Ultimate Fighting Championship events. Rich Franklin, a Cincinnati graduate and the reigning UFC middleweight champion, was a coach on “The Ultimate Fighter “at the end of last year. He defended his UFC middleweight title for the second time March 4 but since has been forced to take six to eight months off because of a broken left hand. Josh Rafferty, a former Cincinnati State student, was a competitor on the original “The Ultimate Fighter, “and Kerry Schall, also a UC graduate, was a competitor on TUF 2.
“Once Cincinnati produces a (mixed martial arts) champion, other people in the area look to follow in his footsteps, “Franklin said.
Franklin trained with Hamill in 2003, when Franklin needed a wrestler to help him with his defense and takedown skills.
“Matt’s a great wrestler. Anybody from Cincinnati knows that, “Franklin said. “He’s a take-you-down-to-the-ground-and-pound-you fighter. … You have to assume if you’re facing him that he’s a guy that will shoot in on you and take you down and start putting elbows and fists in your face.”
Hamill was just 2-0 in mixed martial arts fights and had been training only five months before the show’s third season. After training twice a day, every day at the Las Vegas site, he is back in Utica, N.Y., training, unable to share whether he will be one of the four fighters left in June.
Wrestling Gear
