It was a bittersweet night at UFC 320 for Syndicate MMA, one of Las Vegas\u2019 top fight teams.<\/p>\n
While Merab Dvalishvili put on another impressive performance, beating a honed in Cory Sandhagen<\/a> with what has become typical ease, his teammate Khalil Rountree Jr. collapsed in the third round against Jiri Prochazka after winning the first two frames of their fight. He\u2019d end up getting KO\u2019d brutally,<\/a> sending him out of the contender\u2019s circle.<\/p>\n In a new interview with the Jaxxon podcast,<\/a> Rountree had nothing but positive things to say about Dvalishvili and shared a crazy story that underscores yet again just how much energy \u201cThe Machine\u201d has in his seemingly bottomless gas tank.<\/p>\n \u201cMerab in the gym, it\u2019s it\u2019s really hard to say that he\u2019s any different in the gym than he is in the cage,\u201d Rountree said. \u201cI promise you this is a 100% true story. At 12 in the afternoon on fight day, Saturday, October 4, Merab sparred five rounds in the cage live. On the day of his fight because that\u2019s just who he is.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, five full live rounds,\u201d Rountree reiterated. \u201cFive full live rounds at 12, not even half a day before he has to be in the arena to put on the biggest fight of his career. That\u2019s just him. You cannot make it up. So to be around that, I mean, it\u2019s just it\u2019s just another experience.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, most guys will sit in the hotel room or try to collect their thoughts or do whatever, maybe even get a bike ride in on the Assault bike to kinda burn some energy. I\u2019ve never in my life seen somebody spar five full rounds the day that they have to fight and go do another five full rounds with Cody Sandhagen.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo yeah, he\u2019s a different breed,\u201d Rountree concluded. \u201cBut like I said, he shows up to the gym the same way he shows up to fight night, and it\u2019s just interesting to be around. You know? But it\u2019s great.\u201d<\/p>\n Merab would go on to party it up all night in Vegas following his win, with cameras catching him wild and shirtless at 5 am.<\/a> He then suited up for Aljamain Sterling\u2019s wedding, and was still looking fresh as a daisy for that.<\/p>\n Rountree could use a bit more of Dvalishvili\u2019s cardio if he wants to keep hanging around at the top of the light heavyweight pile. While he starts out strong and fast in all his fights, he has a tendency to fall off in the later rounds.<\/a> It\u2019s cost him greatly in his last two losses to Alex Pereira and Jiri Prochazka.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a bittersweet night at UFC 320 for Syndicate MMA, one of Las Vegas\u2019 top fight teams.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202852,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-202851","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-mma","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}