By Mary Grace Padin and JT Nisay
A PEEK into the life of fast-rising Filipino-American mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Mark Striegl will reveal scenes straight from cliché sports drink commercials: him remaining steadfast in training sessions while sweating profusely; or the fighter on the brink of giving up only to will himself back into focus.
What these commercials miss out on the life of Striegl is the scene where he lines up at buffet tables.
Not more than 48 hours removed from his impressive promotional debut in One Championship on April 24, in which he scored a quick first-round submission victory over his previously undefeated opponent Casey Suire, Striegl, along with his MMA fight group Team Buffet, launched their eponymous food, travel and fitness web site (www.teambuffet.com) at the Alchemy Bistro Bar in Makati City. The site went live on May 1.
“[Our site not only focuses on healthy food but a bit] of everything because as a fighter, you can’t eat oatmeal and chicken breast year-round. You’ll go crazy,” the food-loving Mark joked, who shared the stage with his older brother Frank, who is the web site’s editor in chief. The Striegl brothers cover a huge ground for all of the topics on the site, based on their experiences of hoping from one country to another throughout their lives and being surrounded by people from different countries and cultures. The duo, whose father is an American, while their mother a Filipino from Mindoro, was born and raised in Tokyo, spent some years in Baguio and San Diego, then started to circle Southeast Asia.
Frank said the web site’s main draw, the food department, features a wide scope of not only the food choices of everyday eating and healthy living, but also the various dining destinations in the Philippines, other Southeast Asian countries and beyond.
As for the travel aspect, Mark said his career has helped him see the world, and, thus, their website features articles that promote the “fun things and different attractions in cities while we’re travelling there for fights [or for leisure trips].” He added, “I fought my first professional fight in San Diego and since then, I have fought in different Southeast Asian cities.”
The group’s name “Team Buffet,” according to Frank, was conceived following a massive food trip in Taipei-Taiwan.
“For whatever reason, our friend Justin [also a member of the team] was taking Mark and I into every single buffet in the city,” he said, adding that at the time they wanted a team name that veered away from the usual macho-focused appellations. “We were sitting down to about our fifth buffet and five kilos later, each of us, with full stomachs, decided, ‘Why don’t we name it Team Buffet? Let’s have fun with it.”
They also went with a playful, winking tiger for their logo to underscore the lighthearted nature of the team and now,
the web site, which, as Frank put it, is “a wacky-one stop shop” for recipes, travel and fitness content.
Frank added that there will also be a lot of things dedicated to their countrymen in the Philippines. “As a web site, our inspiration was a lot of fans, particularly here in the Philippines who wanted to know what goes into Mark’s diet. What Mark does in terms of fitness training, what he likes to eat off-season, so this kind of interaction with fans is the pillar or the foundation of the web site.”
Image credits: Alysa Salen