Lucas Punkari
By all accounts, a second career MMA victory for Emo’s Terry Carmody was well in the making earlier this month in Walker, Mn.
However, the 22-year-old now finds himself with an amateur record of 1-1 after being forced to submit just 1:02 into the first round of a welterweight bout against Minnesota fighter Jacob Juvland.
“As much as it sucked tapping out, the worst feeling was thinking over what happened afterwards,” Carmody noted.
“I knew how to get out of the submission, and I felt that it was my fight to win because not many amateurs have my skill set or my cardio.
“I should have had that fight as far as I’m concerned but I just didn’t come to play,” he reasoned.
Coming off a win in his first MMA bout back in May, Carmody had to shed almost 20 pounds from his regular 190-pound weight to the 170-pound limit needed to be a welterweight.
As a result, Carmody, who spent two months training for his latest bout, was forced to do a lot of weight cutting in the final few weeks leading up to the fight.
“I absolutely hated it,” he recalled. “It was just a lot of proper dieting and a lot of smaller meals to keep your metabolism jacked up.
“And while I wasn’t starving, I definitely would have liked to be eating a lot more,” he admitted.
“In the last week was when we started to cut down my water weight, so instead of drinking two gallons of water a day, I was drinking something like two litres of water.
“The last couple of days were almost like a complete famine as I could barely eat or barely drink, but in the last week of training I dropped about 12 pounds,” he added.
In addition to weight cutting, Carmody also spent the months leading up to the fight working on many aspects of his game.
“This time I was working a lot on my wrestling, along with my Jiu-Jitsu defence, as I kind of had a heads-up going into the fight that my Jiu-Jitsu was something that I needed to work on,” he explained.
“I also started to work with a boxer out of Chisholm named Darby Smart, who was a former featherweight boxing champion, and he was an incredible guy that taught me a lot about the stand-up game.”
Going into the fight, which was put on by King of the Cage, Carmody knew his opponent had an identical 1-0 mark but nothing else.
“I knew that they were saying that both him and I were top
prospects around here, and that they were expecting both of us to be going pro soon, so it was a pretty hyped up bout,” Carmody noted.
“But as for strengths and weaknesses going in, I had no idea what to expect.”
Both fighters immediately went swinging for the fences early on in the bout., but soon after Carmody felt he had a bit of an advantage.
“I remember that he hit me with a leg kick, and I scooped his leg and tried to hit him with a superman punch,” Carmody recalled.
“That didn’t connect, but I got him up against the cage and we worked there for a while before I ended up hitting him with the takedown.”
However, once the fight went to the ground, momentum began to swing quickly into Juvland’s favour.
“He managed to transition into side control on me, and I remember taking a solid knee to the liver,” Carmody said.
“I went to transition out of side to get into full guard again, and that is when he went for the arm bar.
“I had him stacked up and I knew what I should have done, and I’m not sure what exactly happened there,” he admitted.
With Juvland now having him locked in the arm bar submission, a lot of different thoughts were going through Carmody’s head as he tried to get out of the hold.
“One thing I thinking through all of the pain and the adrenaline was, ‘Is it worth going through the pain to keep fighting?’ because there is always a way out of it until you are knocked out or you arm is broken,” he stressed.
“I have a couple of guys that I train with who have been caught in the exact same position, and a year later their arms are still not the same, so that went through my mind, as well.
“The last thing that you want to do is submit, because as a fighter there is nothing worse than doing that, but eventually it was just too much to take,” he said.
Moving forward, Carmody is looking to get back on the winning track as soon as possible as he’s been offered a fight with Fearless Fight Championship at the Black Bear Casino in Duluth on Saturday, Nov. 12.
However, Carmody more than likely will have to find a new place to train instead of his familiar home of Borderland Combat Sports over in International Falls, as he is planning to move to Thunder Bay for school.
“It’s just a matter for me of finding a gym to continue training while I am there in Thunder Bay,” explained Carmody, who is planning to take a one-year pre-health sciences course at Confederation College before enrolling in the two-year paramedics program.
“The guys at Borderland Combat Sports have taught me so much, but I think being able to train with new people and new sparring partners will help me advance my game and also give me a chance to grow as a fighter,” he reasoned.
