Posted by Stephen Rhodes on January 23rd, 2010 under Octagon Buzz Exclusive

Chuck sent this in:

At UFC 102 in Portland, Oregon, this past August, Ryan Bader was backstage helping his Arizona Combat Sports teammate Aaron Simpson get ready for Ed Herman. In the same dressing room, not ten feet away, Keith Jardine was readying for his fight with Thiago Silva, slamming his feet into pads held by Trevor Wittman. They walked around each other a dozen times. Both were zeroed in on their tasks at hand, peaceably sharing a small space for a couple of hours—in fact, neither showed the slightest hint that the other even existed.

Funny how a dotted line and a little bit of ink can change a man’s focus completely. Neither would look past the other again.

Five months later, Bader thinks about Jardine with competitive obsession, and the next time they’ll share a small space together – at UFC 110 in Sydney, Australia on February 20 (Feb. 21st in Sydney) – it’ll be in the Octagon. That’s a place where two ships cannot go passing as peaceably in the night. Well, not with Jardine tweaking his nipples and charging like a mutant billy goat . . .

“I see a tough, tough fighter who’s going to come after me for three rounds hard,” Bader, the former D-1 All-American wrestler from Arizona State, says. “If he doesn’t get knocked out, or if he’s not knocking you out, he’s going to keep that pace up and come after you with unorthodox strikes. His number one attribute is his overall toughness.”

Ryan “Darth” Bader is one of the scary up-and-coming prospects in the light heavyweight division, carrying an unblemished 11-0 record (including 3-0 in the UFC) very lightly at his side. Though he won the Ultimate Fighter: Team Nogueira vs. Team Mir and has been successful in every phase of his young mixed martial arts career, everybody knows all the escalating pressures and greater tests still sit on his ever-closing horizon.

He knows it too.

But it’s the next challenge—a fight against the ominous-sounding “Dean of Mean”—that becomes the biggest of his career hitherto. Beat Jardine, one of those “next echelon” fighters who has stood in against every big name legend in the book, and people will know you’re legit.

“He’s been in there with some headline fights with Rampage (Jackson), and Chuck (Liddell), and Wanderlei (Silva) and all those top guys,” Bader says. “So he has toughness and experience. And of course he’s going to be a hungry fighter. Coming off of two losses—he’s not going to want to take three losses in a row. As a fighter, you go out there and give it all you got every fight. He always does. He doesn’t want a loss, but neither do I.”

To help out, his teammate Steve Steinbess has been acting as a Jardine clone in training camp, emulating the “unorthodox” kickboxing combos that the Dean confuses opponents with. You know, the right hand then right leg kick, rather than the left. The “herky-jerky” rhythm that has closed the eyes of more than one opponent. The truth is, he concedes, you can’t simulate the awkwardness of Jardine.

“He’s just kind of a brute brawler coming at you,” he says. “If you try and outslick him, if you try to duck and weave and all that, he’s going to catch you with a weird punch.”

Bader has been very impressive ever since beating Vinny Magalhaes to win TUF. His underdog tag has all but disappeared since those introductory days. He dominated a distance fight with fellow wrestler Carmelo Marrero by taking him down at will, and followed that up with a three-round thrashing of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu ace Eric Schafer at UFC 104 in Los Angeles. As a wrinkle in his game, the latter he accomplished almost exclusively on his feet.

In fact, Bader’s been so dominant at controlling where his fights take place and dictating tempo that he’s never been in real trouble in a UFC fight. Yet, if he took anything from the Schafer bout it was what to do when he smells blood in the water.

“I was surprised by how tough Schafer was—I mean, I knew he was going to be tough from watching his fight with Houston Alexander,” he says. “But I hit him with some good shots. We went back and watched the film, and it was 55 seconds where I was just trying to kill him after I dropped him. I was holding my breath the whole time. So we’ve been working a lot on that in sparring, just my breathing. That’s kind of why when I came out in the second round I gassed a little bit. My arms felt real heavy, because of my breathing. A minute without air is a long time. Hopefully I will get those kind of shots in on Jardine and I’ll be more composed now.”

Take one look at the thick neck and arms of Bader and you know he’s a bona-fide gym rat. He took only a week off after his victory over Schafer and got back to it. He loves the fact that 

he is 100% healthy for the first time in a camp since before his UFC days, because it means he can train everything freely and without hindrance.

“There’s usually a nagging injury, a rib here, a tweak there, but this time I’m in amazing shape,” he says.

The game plan for Jardine will be “loose,” he adds, enabling him a chance to freelance—something he wasn’t as ready to do with Jiu-Jitsu practitioners like Magalhaes and Schafer. In other words: He likes the matchup, because he can take liberties.

The added bonus of fighting in Australia and being an ambassador of the sport there excites him, too, as he says he asked Joe Silva immediately after his last fight to be put on that card.

“The number one reason I love fighting is going to a different place, seeing different parts of the world, and connecting with the fans,” he says. “It’s awesome. Australia has never had a UFC, and the energy level is going to be really intense—20,000 people just going nuts.”

That’s a lot of people, plus all those who’ll be tuned in elsewhere in the world, to see if Bader can take the next big step into becoming a threat to the 205 throne. There’s pressure, sure, but that’s more of a state of mind.

“Every fight I have, whether it be my first fight in a smaller show, or my first fight in the UFC, or a big fight with Keith Jardine in Australia, it’s the same pressure,” he says. “It’s the pressure I put on myself. I train too hard to lose. For me, putting in all this work, I want to go out there and win. That’s what drives me. I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I am not worried about the undefeated record. I am worried about the here and now and everything else will take care of itself.”