UFC Fight Night 85’s Frank Mir: Have to assume Mark Hunt still isn't great at grappling

BRISBANE, Australia – For ex-UFC heavyweight champ Frank Mir, it’s not a matter of if, but when, he gets the fight to the ground against Mark Hunt on Saturday at UFC Fight Night 85.

Mir owns the second-best submission record in the UFC, falling just one behind Nate Diaz’s nine career subs in the octagon, while five of six Hunt wins have come by knockout. That says a lot about how the fight should go down.

But the difference in their skills isn’t just a statistic, Mir said. It’s about where they train.

“I look to make sure that I really force the grappling early on because I feel that down in Australia, you have lots of good kickboxers,” he said ahead of the FOX Sports 1-televised bout at Brisbane Entertainment Centre in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. “There are lots of good standup sparring that I’m sure he’s had. Wrestlers and jiu-jitsu guys, I have to assume that in the States, we probably still have a higher level of wrestling and jiu-jitsu. So I’m assuming that his muscles are more used to banging right now.”

Of course, Mir (18-10 MMA, 16-10 UFC) might be discounting the fact that Hunt (11-10-1 MMA, 6-4-1 UFC) is very capable of calling in American wrestlers and grapplers to assist him, to say nothing of traveling overseas to help him bolster his grappling game. The Sydney resident and New Zealand native has a working relationship with Florida’s American Top Team, which houses some of MMA’s better grapplers.

Maybe Mir is making an educated guess that the Kiwi won’t go that far.

“I hope to make it a grappling match early on,” Mir said. “I think the submissions will be earlier, before the sweat really sets in.”

One factor that might confound Mir’s plan is the environment of Saturday’s fight. Weather forecasts call for a day between 70 and 80 degrees with 64 percent humidity, which makes a long fight a potentially slick affair for a grappler.

“We’ve actually made a couple of adjustments in my game since we’ve been here that we wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t come out so early,” Mir said. “(But) obviously, once someone gets broken down and they’re extremely fatigued, it doesn’t matter how slippery they are. A choke’s a choke.”

With four-ounce gloves, Mir doesn’t consider himself a sitting duck against the heavy-handed slugger. But if he wants to limit his exposure to a sudden lapse of consciousness, he might as well direct the action to where he’s at his best and Hunt is, well, not.

Check out the above video to get Mir’s thoughts on Hunt as an opponent and his time in Australia. (The full scrum can be found below.)

For more on UFC Fight Night 85, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.

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