MEGADETH's DAVE MUSTAINE Talks Martial Arts

Fight! magazine recently conducted an interview with MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Fight!: So martial arts saved your life?

Mustaine: It totally did. As corny as this sounds, I get a lot of my strength from what I've been taught in my life. I learned it because I was alone in the world and nobody was there to protect me or to take care of me. My dad was gone and my mom couldn't do it, and my brother-in-laws were my brother-in-laws. They weren't my dad and I was alone, and it helped me and I draw on that all the time.

Fight!: Changing gears, how did the performance with Affliction come about?

Mustaine: Well, we're good friends with the guys at Affliction and we still are. I did a commercial for them with a bunch of rock stars, a bunch of fighters, baseball players and stuff, and it was a fantastic commercial. They used this ridiculous camera that used 50,000 frames a second or something like that — I know that's not true, but that's what it seemed like — and then after that, they said, "We got this fight thing coming up. Would you be interested in playing it?" I think we said, "You got this fight thing coming up. Why don't you try to do this rock ‘n roll and metal, and fighting?" I don't know who the person was who initiated the idea, but it was something we worked on and it was great. I think they tried to do it again. I heard that Ozzy [Osbourne] was supposed to do it, but he wasn't able to finish the commitment and it didn't happen. So if that's the case, then I think we're probably the sole people who ever played for them.

Fight!: What was the last event you attended?

Mustaine: I just watched "The Dragon" Lyoto Machida and what was the other fighter's name … Shogun! They were fighting at the Staples Center in Los Angeles just recently. It was a really, really bad decision on that fight. You know what I'm talking about, right?

Fight!: UFC 104 in October.

Mustaine: Yeah. I thought a lot of the preliminary bouts were good. I really liked that fighter who was fighting "The Dragon". I think the pace of the fight was terrible and there may have been a little too much hoopla around it. I think [if] that fight would've happened at a bar, it would've been great. But I think just because it was done in a big environment and so much show business was going on, I was thinking maybe people lost sight of what was going on. And the fight that I saw was not scored the way that the cards came down because "The Dragon" did not win.

Read the entire interview from Fight! magazine.