(Mark Miller knocks Josh Neer out cold at an IFL event in 2007)

I spoke with Mark Miller this week for an SI.com article about his Strikeforce cancelation and the ensuing financial difficulties that resulted from losing his sponsorship money while he sat around backstage waiting to fight on Saturday night.  He was excited to hear that Strikeforce would be paying him his win bonus as extra compensation for the mishap, and he seemed generally way more understanding about the whole thing than a lot of guys who had just trained for six weeks might have been:

I was supposed to be the fifth of six fights on the undercard, and then they were going to go to the main card which was going to be aired on CBS.  I was warming up backstage, getting ready to go on, and they told me that they were going to skip us to make sure the women got their fight in, and then after the Fedor-Rogers fight they were going to let us fight after that.  I said, ‘Whatever, that’s fine.’  I unwrapped, chilled out for a little bit, then as it got closer to the main even I got warmed up again.  When the Fedor-Rogers fight ended I heard them call back on the walkie-talke to the athletic commission that the last fight was going to be a no-go.  I was kind of confused at first.  I wasn’t sure what was going on so I stayed wrapped and stayed warm, just in case, but they came back and told us for sure that it wasn’t happening.  They told me the reason was that in the beginning of the fights there was some problem with production.  I don’t know, I was kind of surprised by it all so I wasn’t paying too much attention to what they said.

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