Koscheck steps into great unknown

Josh Koscheck will be no different than most people watching his Feb. 21 fight with newcomer Paulo Thiago: He’ll have no idea about who his Brazilian opponent is.

“I don’t know anything,” said Koscheck. “I’ve seen no tapes. That’s my coaches’ jobs, Javier Mendez, Bob Cook and Dave Camarillo. They’ll come up with the game plan and we’ll see how it goes. I’ve never even seen a picture of him.”

Thiago (10-0) has been fighting three-and-a-half years in Brazil, and had won seven of his 10 matches via submission, four via triangle chokes from the bottom. The two battle on a Spike TV special coming from the O2 Arena in London.

“I don’t study tapes,” said Koscheck (14-3), a former NCAA champion wrestler who has evolved to the point he had two of the most memorable knockouts of 2008 with a head kick knockout of Dustin Hazelett and a scary punch that not only finished off Yoshiyuki Yoshida, but had him down for several minutes. “I’ve learned this sport is evolving. I have to use my time to get better and that comes with more practice.”

Koscheck is one of the company’s most recognizable fighters, starting as the curly-haired wrestler who sprayed a water hose on a sleeping Chris Leben in the backyard of the fighters’ house in an early episode of the first season of “The Ultimate Fighter” reality show in 2005.

This led to a grudge match, which is still the most-watched episode in the show’s history. With no stand-up game to speak of, the actual match was anticlimactic after one of the best buildups of any fight in UFC history. Koscheck continually took Leben down to win a decision, while doing little damage. He was portrayed as the bad guy in the buildup and in the match, which was so effective that even years later he was booed as much as any fighter in the company.

To the fans who didn’t like him, the combination of his continually winning using little but wrestling, to the point he was nicknamed “the blanket,” made it easy.

He switched from wrestling to MMA after being put in contact with Cook and DeWayne Zinkin through a wrestler friend who had started fighting. At the time, he was assistant wrestling coach at the University of Buffalo.

Koscheck met Cook and Zinkin in Las Vegas at the U.S. Open wrestling tournament more than five years ago.

“I didn’t do that well, although I placed in the top eight,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘This [wrestling] is a hard sport and I’m not making any money.’ I asked them if I could make any money fighting and they said the champions make good money. I asked who is the champion, and they said, ‘Matt Hughes.’ I was thinking he’s a wrestler so maybe I could be the champion. And at the time, it’s possible that could have happened. But then everybody got so good. After ‘The Ultimate Fighter,’ the sport changed over the next two years. You have to learn to defend takedowns, strikes and submissions.”

“Five years later, life is good and I’m living in the gym.

In his case, that’s not just a figure of speech.

Koscheck has a home in Fresno, Calif., about a two-and-a-half hour drive from the American Kickboxing Academy camp in San Jose, home away from home. Most weeks, he makes the commute home Friday afternoon and returns for a training session Monday morning. But even in Fresno there’s only one day off, as he does Muay Thai every Friday night after the commute, trains Saturdays and spends Sunday resting and watching the NFL or NASCAR.

Monday through Friday, he trades punches, kicks and takedowns with many of the elite fighters in the sport, including two of the UFC’s best welterweights, Jon Fitch and Mike Swick. In his final workout before leaving for London on Sunday, he went three rounds, including, after already sparring with Strikeforce lightweight champ Josh Thomson, doing a spirited round with a fresh and much larger Fitch that contained more action than most UFC fights. And that was his easy day, as he started tapering off after his final hard session Wednesday.

He lives most of the week in what he jokes is a box. It’s actually a room upstairs at the gym. It’s got a bed, a TV set with a VCR, a tiny refrigerator crammed into a tiny room with barely enough space for some clothes, supplements and other supplies.

There’s no temptation to miss workouts or skip out early, because he’s already at the gym and there’s nothing else to do but train, eat and sleep. There’s no junk food. There’s no temptation to drink, which he said he swore off of at the end of 2006. Every morning starts with oatmeal. Every night ends with an orange. It’s a routine that he learned from his college wrestling days at Edinboro.

“I could get a hotel, but that would make live too easy,” he said. “I stayed at a hotel at Santana Row [an upscale part of San Jose] before the St. Pierre fight, and I lost.”

“I take very little time off from training,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go to Las Vegas and play blackjack, but I don’t want to get too far out of shape because it’s so hard to get in shape.”

There has been some preliminary talk of Koscheck getting a match with the winner of this summer’s Georges St. Pierre vs. Thiago Alves championship match. Both men in the title fight hold wins over him, both via decision.

To do so, would require Koscheck to look impressive in winning next week, and follow it up with another win, which, barring an injury, is scheduled for the May 23 show in Las Vegas.

Koscheck is the last fighter to win a round against St. Pierre, taking the second round in their match Aug. 25, 2007, which St. Pierre won by unanimous decision. With Alves, he took the fight on two weeks notice and feels with a full eight-week training camp the result would be different.

“I’ve been asked probably 30 times this week about St. Pierre and greasing,” he said. “I don’t know. He won because he was the better man that day. I don’t make excuses when I lose, and I don’t make them when I win.

“He’s [St. Pierre] a great champion, but I think his time is coming,”

said Koscheck. “You can only be on top for so long. Everybody loses in this sport. But I’m not thinking about that right now. I’m thinking about my next fight.”

Fitch and Koscheck would be considered with Alves and St. Pierre as the top four welterweights in UFC right now, and Swick is right there with them. That’s created a tough situation with three of the top fighters from the same camp. Even though they fight each other routinely in practice, they won’t in UFC, at this point.

Koscheck said that would change if one of the three won the championship, but until that time, he’ll fight anyone at any time, except his teammates.