King James, World Cup Fail to Distract Lamas and Jansen

By Frank Curreri

Ricardo Lamas couldn’t care less about a certain member of basketball royalty ‘taking his talents to South Beach.’ The 28-year-old Chicagoan has been intensely laboring in Miami for the past several weeks, oblivious to the city’s sizzling nightlife and comfortably clueless about the widespread hoopla surrounding LeBron James’ decision to join the Miami Heat.

“I haven’t watched much basketball ever since (Michael) Jordan left Chicago, so I haven’t paid much attention to it,” Lamas said. “I just let it pass by, stayed focused and keep training.”

While Lamas relentlessly attacks those three- and four-a-day training sessions, his next opponent, Dave Jansen, is doing the same across the country in Oregon. Leading up to the fight, Jansen has played host to relatives visiting from Holland. His visitors were glued to the television to watch The Netherlands’ magical and historical run in the 2010 World Cup, but like Lamas, Jansen was unfazed by the excitement that had engulfed the land of his ancestors.

“I’m not really a football fan,” Jansen volunteered. “I’m not really a sports fan. I don’t watch other sports.”

What Jansen does, for the most part, is plot ways to topple Lamas and bounce back from the only loss of his career to Kamal Shalorus by unanimous decision. It is the only blemish on Jansen’s record through 12 pro fights.

“Man, three wrestlers in a row,” Jansen said, a former Division I wrestler at the University of Oregon. “I had Rich Crunkilton, then Shalorus, and now another wrestler. They’re everywhere.”

Jansen said he was most impressed by Lamas’ performance against veteran Bart Palaszewski, when Lamas took the bout on short notice and burst on the scene by earning a unanimous decision in his WEC debut.

“He’s a good fighter and he’s not just a wrestler; he’s got flying knees and he’s hungry,” Jansen said. “So it will be like fighting my shadow because I’ve been working on my flying knees, too.”

He’s only half-joking. Jansen cracked Shalorus’ upside the head with an overhand right in the first round, and was forced to fight the remainder of the bout with a broken thumb. He underwent surgery to repair the injury.

“It was a pretty bad break. There were 15 pieces of bone just shattered,” Jansen said. “The doctor said it was like putting together corn flakes. I wondered if I could ever make a fist again because the thumb was locked. I was in a cast for two months and then a splint for a month. I couldn’t tie my shoes.”

As is so often the case, the emotional wounds cut deeper than the physical.

“The loss hurt more than the thumb,” Jansen said. “It’s a pain like no other. It’s like your dog dying, your girlfriend breaking up with you, getting injured – all in the same day.”

Unable to grapple or live spar, the 155-pounder immersed himself into shadow boxing and his standup, a realm many of his opponents view as the most underdeveloped part of his game, the area where he would be most vulnerable.

“I worked kicks for a long time, and my jab, footwork,” Jansen said. “I couldn’t roll for awhile, but now, strangely enough, I feel stronger than before with my ground skills, maybe because I was able to watch a lot of instructional videos and look at things from a different angle. Now my jiu-jitsu is through the roof.

“I’ve been working with Hermes Franca, who is just down the street. For the first time ever in my career I am training in more than one place. I got my blue belt. With the gi I do OK. Well, Hermes gives me some trouble, but then he’s Hermes.”

Lamas, 8-1, is a former Division III wrestler whose aggressive fighting style has earned him the moniker “The Bully.”

“He’s got a lot of wins from submission so I’m kind of thinking he might want to take it to the ground, but then again you never know,” Lamas said of Jansen. “He seems willing to stand in there and bang; he did it with Kamal. It’s going to be action-packed. You’re either going to get an exciting ground fight or we’re going to stand toe-to-toe the entire fight.

“With each fight I’m getting more and more comfortable inside of the cage. I still haven’t opened up fully and let everything go. I opened up more in the last fight and I think you’ll see me open up more this time.”

Jansen, who has been training at Team Quest alongside Chael Sonnen and Matt Lindland, among others, said he unwinds after training by reading books and watching movies.

“I’ve watched two post-apocalyptic movies back to back,” he said. “I think hand-to-hand martial arts would come in handy in an apocalyptic environment, once the ammo runs out, of course. So I’m in the right profession for that.”