Don’t call it a comeback: Torres ready for Saturday bout with Benavidez

Mar 3, 2010 | by MattE | No Comments

By Matt Erickson
cagedin.mma@gmail.com

Brian Bowles did a lot more than take Miguel Torres’ title last August. He just might have knocked some sense into him.

Torres, the East Chicago native who runs Torres Martial Arts Academy on Indianapolis Boulevard in Hammond, was considered to be one of the top five pound-for-pound fighters in all of mixed martial arts when he took his 17-fight winning streak into the cage against Bowles. And he was a heavy favorite on Aug. 9 at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas.

With one tight inside right hook, Bowles dropped a charging Torres to the canvas, then turned out his lights — for the first time in Torres’ 50-fight career — with a few follow-ups, one of which even broke Bowles’ left hand.

On Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, Torres officially begins his journey back to what he hopes is a reclamation of the World Extreme Cagefighting bantamweight belt with a top contenders match against Joseph Benavidez, a protege of WEC star Urijah Faber. But it was his loss to Bowles that set the pieces in motion for a revival of sorts, a return to his roots. For some fighters, it takes years to discover they need to make some changes. For Torres, it took just one fight.

“After about two or three years, I haven’t really had anybody coaching me or training me,” Torres said last week on a media call for WEC 47. “I was doing my own thing, and it was working. But everyone’s catching up. Guys are getting strength and conditioning coaches, boxing coaches, wrestling coaches. They’re working on the weaknesses, and the game’s a lot different than back in the day.”

Back in the day, in MMA parlance, is really only a few short years ago. Torres took great pride in being a martial artist, in keeping with his roots, in not being too Hollywood. He was a superstar who had managed to fly under the radar of all but the hardest of the hard-core fans. But a championship belt brings lots of attention, and Torres admits to letting the newfound fame derail his past best practices.

“I got caught up to where I was doing a lot of traveling, doing a lot of business stuff, and I wasn’t focusing solely on the training,” Torres said. “So I had to get back just on training.”

This time, he’s moved his training camps around — a month in Las Vegas with jiu-jitsu wizard Robert Drysdale, a few weeks in New Jersey with UFC fighter Kurt Pellegrino, who was in his corner at his last win over Takeya Mizugaki in Chicago last April — as a means of getting back to his roots.

“I’m not dissing my guys — my guys are great training partners,” Torres said. “But they’re not dedicated fighters. A lot of my guys, they have full-time jobs. They have families. They have careers. They have different groups that they’re involved in. So getting all the guys together at one time to train was hard, especially this last training camp for Brian. It was summertime. So I had to seek out partners that can give me a good challenge and guys that can raise the learning curve for me.”

For the fight with Benavidez, which will be the co-main event before Bowles defends the bantamweight belt for the first time against Dominick Cruz, Torres said he improved his dieting and conditioning as well as his wrestling game. He believes the seven months he’s spent improving his overall game after the loss will be key on Saturday and key to an eventual return to the title.

“I’m not trying to just get better to beat Joseph,” Torres said. “I’m trying to make my skills better all around to beat anybody. I like to consider myself a martial artist, and that’s how I got to be where I’m at right now.

“I got away from that for a little bit and I got into being an entertainer in a couple of my fights, trying to entertain the crowd. I got back to my roots, and I’m back to focusing on getting my skills better overall, not just bettering myself and my fights or bettering myself as a person. And that’s what got me to where I’m at, and that’s where I’m getting back to.”

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WEC 47: Bowles vs. Cruz
When: 6 p.m. Saturday (prelims); 9 p.m. Saturday (televised main card)
Where: Nationwide Arena, Columbus, Ohio
TV: Versus (cable)
Tickets: $27-127, ticketmaster.com
Main card
135: Brian Bowles (8-0) vs. Dominick Cruz (14-1) (for bantamweight title)
135: Miguel Torres (36-2) vs. Joseph Benavidez (11-1)
145: Jens Pulver (22-12-1) vs. Javier Vazquez (13-3)
145: Deividas Taurosevicius (12-3) vs. LC Davis (15-2)
155: Bart Palaszewski (32-13) vs. Karen Darabedyan (9-1)
Preliminary card
135: Scott Jorgensen (8-3) vs. Chad George (11-4)
145: Chad Mendes (5-0) vs. Erik Koch (9-0)
155: Danny Castillo (8-2) vs. Anthony Pettis (7-1)
145: Leonard Garcia (17-5) vs. George Roop (10-7)
145: Fredson Paixao (8-3, 1 NC) vs. Courtney Buck (6-2)
155: Ricardo Lamas (7-1) vs. Bendy Casimir (19-5-2)

Don’t miss live coverage of WEC 47 on Saturday night, right here at Caged In. You can also follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/cagedin and become a fan on Facebook to be the first to hear about breaking stories.

» Posted in: Local MMA
» Tagged: #top, miguel torres, WEC, wec 47

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