Justin McCully mixes with Edmond Tarverdyan in Travis Browne's latest camp

You may remember Justin McCully as the guy in the mask for a laughably cheesy staredown between UFC Hall of Famers Tito Ortiz and Stephan Bonnar in the Bellator cage.

But in addition to planning hijinks like that, McCully is a professional sparring partner, MMA’s version of a consultant. For example, he was brought in to training camp to be an extra training partner for Travis Browne’s recent camp in Los Angeles.

McCully, who retired from active competition in 2011, is also keen on giving advice, which is why his latest gig – an extra body for UFC heavyweight Browne – didn’t initially go very smoothly.

Browne (17-3-1 MMA, 8-3-1 UFC) faces Matt Mitrione (9-4 MMA, 9-4 UFC) on the FOX Sports 1-televised main card of UFC Fight Night 81, which takes place Sunday at TD Garden in Boston. He needed a few extra looks, so he called McCully, a former UFC heavyweight and longtime training partner of Ortiz before a public falling out.

McCully said they first met several years before Browne became a top contender in the UFC. A former resident of Hawaii, Browne’s native state, McCully saw potential in the fighter from the start.

“That’s the new era of heavyweight – these big guys that can run and shoot in all areas, kind of like the small men, but just in a big man’s body, and that makes for a really exciting fight,” he said.

When he was called in to assist for Mitrione, McCully said he had his own ideas about how to approach the fight. That’s where he initially encountered some friction with striking coach Edmond Tarverdyan, whose other pupil, former UFC women’s bantamweight champ Ronda Rousey, is Browne’s girlfriend, and Ricky Lundell, a wrestling and grappling coach who’s guided dozens of UFC stars.

“When you have people coming into camps late in the game and there are other coaches, you’re going to kind of butt heads, and you have different theories,” he said. “You can’t have too many chefs on one pot of stew. When you come in to a group and you want to throw a spoonful of pepper in another chef’s soup and they say, ‘Don’t throw any pepper in there,’ well, you know the pepper’s going to make it taste better. So it’s a little bit tough to get that OK to get in there.

“Sometimes it’s tough to come into a camp late, but I think the temperament of everybody allowed it to transpire and to become a really good environment. I was grateful to be a part of it.”

Although McCully won’t be traveling to Boston to assist Browne, he left the camp with nothing but praise for Browne’s coaches and said the heavyweight is going to rebound from a knockout loss this past May to Andrei Arlovski.

McCully said the goal is to make Browne into a title contender again with a win over Mitrione.

“I really think he’s got the potential and ability,” he said. “It’s just about going into these fights and being smart and having the right game plan.

“(Against Arlovski), he was working against his old coach. They had a lot of information there, a lot of game planning there. Maybe he was talking confident about Arlovski, who he’d owned in practice all the time. So he got sloppy and lazy out there and got caught. It was another big lesson that I think he learned. We’re looking for a better, smarter gameplan to come out of Travis on Jan. 17.”

Whether Browne took McCully’s thoughts about the matchup or merely provided a patient ear is irrelevant in the end. Even McCully admitted that whatever work he’s done, the work Mitrione has done will play perhaps the biggest part in determining how the fight plays out.

“There’s plenty of things that make him dangerous,” McCully said of Mitrione. “He’s one of those sleeper-type guys, those tough journeyman types that you might take light, and next thing you know, you’re taking a barrage of punches you didn’t want to see. There’s obvious holes in his game, where if he hadn’t made an adjustment, you could attack and expose. But people make adjustments in this game.

“I think he’s beatable. He is beatable. We’re looking at that as an advantageous fight. I think Travis with his skill set matched up against Mitrione’s skill set, I think we have a slight if not a pretty good advantage.”

For more on UFC Fight Night 81, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.

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