Many agreed with Meerschaert, with 14 of 17 media members polled for the MMADecisions.com website believing “GM3” should have gotten the nod. But it wasn’t meant to be, with Meerschaert left baffled when the scorecards were read.
“I could see maybe giving him (Holland) one round just because I know some judges value striking a little bit more than grappling, but when you go over the rules, it’s effective striking, effective grappling and Octagon control, and I got two of those three for pretty much every round,” he said. “So I wasn’t really sure how they saw what they saw, but I can’t change it and, if anything, I just gotta look at it like it’s my job to finish the fight and I didn’t finish it, so I can’t be too mad about it.”
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It’s the frustrating part of being a professional prizefighter, but Meerschaert, a 39-fight veteran, knows that dwelling on a negative result can only lead to more of them. So he’s taken the lessons learned from March and moved on.
“There’s definitely room for some changes,” he said. “I was trying to finish the fight the whole time; I can’t really think of a time that I wasn’t either trying to get him down to get to his neck or had my hand near his neck going for the choke. So I think a little bit of it is, in the future, taking my time more and softening him up and maybe throwing more strikes while I’m on top to open up the submission. Even if I’m not doing a lot of damage, at least make him freak out enough that it makes the neck more available instead of just trying to hunt for the submission before I do anything else.”
