02/21/2008
Tim Boetsch – From Part-Time to Prime Time
By Thomas Gerbasi
Tim Boetsch has heard the snide remarks before, the snickers when he tells people that he’s a strong proponent (and practitioner) of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do style. They’re remarks borne in ignorance, of not being able to separate Lee’s teachings on actual fighting with his on-screen persona as one of the first true action heroes.
That’s okay though, as the soft-spoken Boetsch is not one to flick his nose with his thumb, Lee-style, and challenge people to a knockdown, drag ‘em out brawl. He’s a pro, and he’ll let his fighting in the Octagon do the talking for him. And after February 2nd, not too many people were talking negatively about Jeet Kune Do anymore.
“I think Jeet Kune Do got a lot more respect after my fight with Heath,” laughed Boetsch, who made quite an impression in his Octagon debut at UFC 81 by stopping David Heath in the first round. “I know a Jeet Kune Do school about 45 minutes from here and he said his enrollment bumped up 40 guys already.”
“In my opinion,” he continues, “Jeet Kune Do is the essence of MMA in that you have to be good at everything and if you’re relying on one style too much, you’re gonna get in trouble. You have to be proficient at everything, and when people see that, it should put a big question mark in their head – what is this guy gonna do? Obviously Heath thought he was gonna go in there and outstrike me, and I proved otherwise there. It’s a great philosophy towards fighting, that wherever the fight may go, you’ve got to be prepared, and you go wherever the fight leads you.”
For Boetsch, that meant foregoing his main discipline as a former Division I wrestler, and instead using front kicks, body punches and knees in the clinch to score points and throw his opponent off guard before a throw heard around the MMA world planted Heath on his head and allowed Boetsch to finish him off on the ground with strikes.
“To finish a fight that way, it caught a lot of people’s attention and there’s definitely been a lot of talk about the throw at the end of the fight,” said Boetsch, now 7-1 as a pro. “It’s been really cool and I didn’t go into the fight planning to do that, but I’m glad it worked out that way because it got everybody talking.”
That’s an understatement. From the time the prelim bout hit the airwaves on UFC 81’s pay-per-view broadcast, fans lit up internet message boards with everything from praise for the newcomer and speculation on how he would stack up against his peers at 205 pounds to animated gif files capturing the final sequence of the fight. It was as big an entrance into the UFC as experienced last May by fellow light heavyweight Houston Alexander, and to cap it off, Boetsch only took the fight against Heath on ten days’ notice.
Then again, that’s nothing new to the Sunbury, Pennsylvania resident, whose previous fight against Vladimir Matyushenko on August 2nd took place on short notice and just five days following a win over Brendan Barrett on July 28th.
“Before the Matyushenko fight, fighting in smaller shows, the opponents are always changing at the last minute and you might not even have an opponent until a week before the show, so finding out who you’re fighting on short notice is nothing new to me,” said Boetsch. “We train hard all the time and we train to fight, so we don’t really switch up our gameplan a whole heck of a lot for individual fighters. We may adjust a little bit, but we don’t need a ton of time to get ready for most people.”
Not impressed yet? At the time of the fight against Matyushenko - a former UFC light heavyweight title challenger who went five rounds with Tito Ortiz and holds wins over Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, Yuki Kondo, and Pedro Rizzo – Boetsch wasn’t even a full-time fighter. But he went the three round distance with Matyushenko and performed well in losing a hard-fought decision.
“He was solid everywhere, in all positions he was strong, and he just had that confident air around him,” said Boetsch of Matyushenko. “You couldn’t see any weakness or vulnerability in his eyes that you can in some opponents. There were a couple of times when he looked at me at the end of a round like ‘where the heck did this guy come from?’ and that kinda amped me up a little bit. He’s definitely been in the game a long time and he’s a great athlete, but at that time I wasn’t even training full-time. I was only training four days a week, like an hour and a half a go, so after that fight it really opened my eyes and made me make the switch to fighting full-time. To that point I had been knocking guys out and taking guys out in relatively quick fashion, and in the back of my mind I was thinking that maybe I was just getting lucky in here. I had that little bit of self-doubt early on, but after I got in there with him and gave him his best fight of the year, that made me step back, re-evaluate things, and realize that if I put a full effort into it, I think I could be very legit in the sport.”
Soon after, Boetsch quit his job as a social worker and began on his road to the top as a full-time fighter. Of course, breaking that news to his wife wasn’t particularly easy.
“When my wife met me, I was a wrestler, so she knew I was an athlete and that I liked to train,” said Boetsch, whose son will turn five months old at the end of February. “But convincing her initially that fighting was a good idea was a little difficult.”
When his wife saw his dedication and conviction to his craft though, she came around, and being a UFC fighter with a high upside doesn’t hurt either. But what about those UFC jitters that plague so many first-timers but that didn’t seem to even be in the arena when Boetsch stepped into the Octagon?
“I’m a pretty cool and collected guy for the most part, but my main concern was controlling the nerves for that first fight,” he said. “I knew I was in shape and I knew that technically I was pretty sound. So the only thing that had me worried was the talk of the first time jitters being in the Octagon. So I made it a point to remain calm, and focus on what I was in Vegas to do. I didn’t go out and see all the sights or get caught up in all the hype, so the nerves for me in that fight weren’t even a factor.”
Apparently. But there will be no rest for the weary, as an injury to Stephan Bonnar again brought a call to the Boetsch household, this time to take on Matt Hamill on April 2nd in Colorado.
“This doesn’t seem to be that short of notice to me,” laughs Boetsch, who would probably fight tomorrow if you asked him. So there are no worries from his end about not having X amount of time to train for a particular bout.
“I’m training hard all the time, and we just ramp it up a little bit more before a fight, and we’re ready to go all the time,” he said. “To think I would have to prepare eight weeks for any individual just blows my mind. To me, you should be ready to fight, and I think that I’ve progressed my career so quickly because of my willingness to take fights on short notice. When other people have passed, I’m sitting here chomping at the bit because I’m training hard and waiting for something to come along. To me, eight weeks is a lifetime to train.”
The former Lock Haven wrestler isn’t too worried about having to take on a fellow wrestler in Hamill either. In fact, if he had his choice, wrestlers would always be on top of his wish list.
“I would love to fight a wrestler every time if I could because where he might know my tricks, I know where he’s coming from as well,” said Boetsch. “I wrestled D1 at Lock Haven and the guys I train with now are all former wrestlers with solid backgrounds, and I think I’ve got more tricks in the other areas than most wrestlers have, so if the wrestling is equal, I think my tricks are gonna take me over the top.”
If his first fight in the UFC proved anything, is that this Jeet Kune Do devotee has plenty of tricks up his sleeve. That’s made him a must-see for fight fans, but while he admits to feeling some pressure from fans’ expectations, he thinks it’s just the right amount to push him towards bigger and better things in the Octagon.
“You want to go in there and perform well every time and I don’t think putting a little pressure on yourself is necessarily a bad thing,” said Boetsch. “It’s just gonna push me to train harder and go in there and really execute my game plan. I try to put on a good show every time I step in the cage to fight, so a little added pressure isn’t a bad thing all the time. Having everybody saying they want to see me fight just motivates me to go in there and fight that much harder, and hopefully they’ll see me fighting a lot more. I’d like to get in five fights in this year, God willing if I stay injury-free, and they can always expect me to go in there and put on a good show. I’m really determined and driven and I’m gonna get in there, mix it up, use my technique, and brawl if I have to because it’s all about the fans. Without the fans we wouldn’t have the sport we have today so you’ve got to keep them onboard with you, and I’m gonna keep training as hard as I can and make fights exciting.”
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Tim Boetsch – From Part-Time to Prime Time 
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