Why I don't like Colton Smith's pathetic excuses

I read this article about why Colton Smith isn't a very good representative of the US Army.  It mostly comes down to the justifiable perception that he's a total douche.  He's a smug, self-important asshole who is a bit of a dirty fighter, who brags about cheating to win in the cage ("if you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough") and is basically a jerk.

What bothers me about him, though, is that he makes excuses for his losses before there's even a fight.  Before his fight with Carlos Diego Ferreira (which he lost in humiliating fashion in 38 seconds . . . his third straight loss, I should add), he said, "On the base, we train soldiers, and I’m a combative instructor right now. But that’s life and death stuff, that’s not sport stuff like mixed martial arts.  Missions come first, soldiers come first, then MMA was a pretty distant second. Now it’s just changed, and the Army has been very supportive of me. I took a personal leave for this fight."

I could be critical of the US military's combatives training as a waste of time.  It is.  US soldiers have guns.  There is almost no unarmed hand-to-hand fighting in combat.  Additionally, it takes years of dedicated training to learn unarmed martial arts thus almost a tiny handful of soldiers ever learn combatives.  One would be hard pressed to find a single situation where military combatives actually saved a soldier's life in combat.  I did some googling and couldn't find a case - and even if you can, it doesn't change the point, it's rare as hell.

Though I did find that the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the dudes in charge of deciding how the US Army is trained, wants to get rid of the current combatives program and replace it with a two week course.  This is an ongoing thing.  Soldiers dig martial arts, so when some soldiers get good at them, they get a few officers behind them, get some funding, create a program and then someone notices once again that unarmed combat has no place on modern battlefields and the program gets scrapped.  Combatives is merely the latest in a long line of martial arts whose usefulness has been overblown to rationalize soldiers acting like tough guys who can kill a person with their commando moves.

OK, ignoring that TRADOC wants to get rid of combatives and there is no indication that it has saved any soldier's life, what Smith is basically doing is making an excuse why it's okay for him to lose.

It's bullshit for a couple of reasons, if you ask me.  The first is that it's just some chickenshit thing to say - he is giving himself an out, an excuse to lose.  Mind you, he is losing.  Three in a row.  But he's saving lives . . . oh, wait, except that there is no proof that Army combatives have done anything of the sort, to the extent that TRADOC wants to cut the program.

Second . . . Colton Smith isn't the first guy in MMA to be in a dangerous job.  I can't think of a single policeman who said, after getting their ass kicked in 38 seconds, the third time in three fights that he's been finished (which might not happen so much if he didn't give himself so many ways out).  Before fighting Ben Askren, Karl Amoussou didn't go, "Well, if Ben whips me, it's because my police work in Paris, fighting gangs, is why will have lost.  That's important work, not like this MMA stuff."  (Note: he did lose, but not as badly as Smith makes a habit of losing.)  Mirko Crocop never used his service with Croatian anti-terrorist special police as a justification as to why he lost.  Tim Kennedy hasn't done it when he was a Green Beret sniper.  Even though those guys could legitimately say they're saving lives, or at least fighting a war.

Most MMA fighters hold a day job, even many in the UFC.  Since the kind of guys who beat up each other in a cage have that mindset all the time, many MMA fighters have jobs that are risky - cops and soldiers have populated MMA's ranks from nearly the beginning.  Smith's excuses are a slight to every person in MMA who has done their job and fought and lost and never made excuses - Smith's excuses are doubly bullshit because he made them before the fight.

After three straight losses, it was normal for a dude to get bounced from the UFC.  Especially at lightweight, which is a shark pit.  Smith was never a very good fighter and he keeps getting his ass kicked so I don't imagine he'll be with the promotion very much longer.  Still, he's a jerk.

Chael Sonnen fails another piss test

Chael Sonnen got pulled from UFC 175 because he pissed hot in a random drug test.  It gets funny, here.  Chael's initial opponent, Wanderlei Silva, was pulled from the event because he left town rather than give a piss test - and then Chael publicly mocked Silva's flight, calling him a cheating drug user.  Funny stuff.

It comes from comedy into farce because this isn't the first time Sonnen has failed a drug test.  After Sonnen's first loss to Anderson Silva, Sonnen was popped in a drug test and suspended by the California State Athletic Commission.  The hearings were a riot as Sonnen claimed to have never gone through puberty, you had the quack doctor, crocodile tears, you name it - it was like a soap opera.

The big lie he told, though, was that he told the Nevada State Athletic Commission that he was using testosterone replacement.  He never told them that - or at least he was never able to produce any documents saying he did, and the then director of the NSAC testified that Sonnen has never gotten any medical use exemptions for testosterone replacement.

Around the same time, he got a suspended sentence for real estate fraud - he was taking kickbacks.  The guy is a real charmer.  A real honest character.

In a spiral of weirdness, UFC president Dana White condemned both Sonnen and the NSAC.  Sonnen for breaking the rules but the majority of his hectoring was over the NSAC providing no guidelines for athletes coming off of testosterone replacement that had been approved in previous years.

I'm sure that one baffles the NSAC because there is a standard in place for that kind of thing - you don't apply for a license to fight until you're clean.  Lots of people use lots of drugs that are forbidden in the context of an athletic contest.  Painkillers given to soothe an injury are illegal to use in competition - so you don't apply to fight until that stuff is out of your system.  AND you report your use of it to the commission when the time comes, which Sonnen also failed to do.

Unlike many other athletes who are two time drug cheats, Sonnen will not be fired from the UFC.  Dana White likes the guy too much, and he's a big draw, as well.  Somehow, after losing a title shot to Anderson Silva - again - he managed to talk his way into a championship fight at higher weight class!  Dana White said he was sending a message to the people who said they needed a full training camp to fight Jon Jones, the best mixed martial artist now fighting . . . even though Dan Henderson, who was a legitimate contender, was trying to book the fight.

Chael Sonnen is a real life lesson, though.  The message is clear - if you're a good-looking white Republican man, you can lie, cheat and steal and be rewarded for it.

Post-mortem on UFC 168

Here's my longer analysis of UFC 168 other than, "Whoa, Chris Weidman is a badass."

Dustin Poirier looked great when he clobbered Diego Brandao.  I like Poirier quite a bit as a fighter, he's the kind of quirky guy that I visualize I'd be if, y'know, I was a savage killing machine.

Dan Miller pulled off a great submission against Fabricio Camoes but I can't help think that he's past his prime.  Despite Joe Rogan saying that Miller gets better after every loss, I don't think that's true.  Miller has got a good skill set, he's a tough fighter and I like watching him fight . . . but I don't see him getting to the top of the heap.  Whenever he's had that big fight that might put him into title contention, he's lost it.  Unlike Martin Kampmann, I don't think this is because he chokes, but because he fights at lightweight and it's the toughest division in the UFC.  You've got to be razor sharp to make it . . . and a little luck doesn't hurt, either.  Miller keeps coming up short against top five fighters and this performance doesn't change my opinion.

Uriah Hall played a very good counterstriking game against Chris Leben.  Hall didn't throw very much, but when he did, ouch.  I'm still not sure if Hall has the kind of toughness it takes to be a mixed martial artist.  He's clearly got the skills and oodles of physical ability, but you've got to be a really tough guy to succeed in the sport and I'm still not sure he has it.

As for Chris Leben . . . man, we love you, Chris, but you've lost four straight.  You're slow and you aren't hitting with the power you once had.  Your chin is going, too.  Your take a shot to deliver a bigger shot style only lasts as long as your chin does and it's going, if not gone.   Please, Chris, retire.  Go to your gym in Hawaii and train dudes and hang out on the beach.  It's that time.

I wasn't sure if Travis Browne was the real deal.  He is.  He's murdered Gabriel Gonzaga, Alistair Overeem and now Josh Barnett.  He's going to get a shot against Fabricio Werdum for a title shot against Cain Velasquez - if he beats Werdum, he richly deserves it.  Good luck, Travis.

Miesha Tate . . . you should have stuck to the gameplan.  But time and again you dove head first at Ronda Rousey.  Unsurprisingly, Rousey then dumped you on your head and tried to break your arm while punching you in the face.  Surprisingly, it took more than two rounds for Rousey to sink in that armbar.  Had you not been so intent on grappling and tried to strike from the outside, not giving Rousey nearly so many changes to break your arm . . . well, you didn't do that and you lost.  You're probably not going to get another title shot as long as Rousey is champ.

But, damn, Ronda, I've said in the past how you're a creep, but you still are.  You have no concept at all of how human beings act.  Here's a brief lesson, again.

People you train with for six weeks on a reality TV show aren't your family.  Even if they were, Tate didn't say anything bad about them.  If you were referring to her pranking you and your coach, that's humor, not a personal, hateful insult.  You're a creep and I really, really hope that Holly Holm comes into the UFC or that Sara McMann with her Olympic caliber wrestling can beat you just to wipe the smug smile off your face.

I mean, here's the thing with Rousey's dominance - she's currently a big fish in a small pond.  Rousey is the first really world class athlete to get into women's mixed martial arts (with the exception of Cris Cyborg, who is in another weight class and promotion).  You look at the credentials of a fighter like Miesha Tate, and almost all of the women in that generation of women's MMA fighters, none of them have world class athletic achievements.  So, Rousey came in from judo with world class physical prowess and is steam rolling the older school of fighters who don't have her athleticism.  

We saw the same thing with MMA, too, when guys like Mark Kerr got into MMA - he was this world class athlete and he just messed up dudes until other world class athletes came into the field.  Ronda Rousey is the Mark Kerr of women's MMA.  Kerr won his first eleven fights, dominated the UFC 14 and 15 tournaments and the early Pride FC fights.  There's a lesson here, I think.  Unless Rousey gets out of the game, soon, she could well be remembered with all the fondness of Mark Kerr, if Kerr was a giant asshole.

It's changing fast, too.  Holly Holm is in MMA, now, and before she was in MMA, she proved herself as a boxer with multiple world championships to her credit.  You can see the same thing with Sara McMann - a silver medalist at the 2004 Olympics, so clearly a top notch athlete.

It is quite possible that Rousey's dominance will be contexutalized in the ongoing professionalization of women's mixed martial arts.  Or, at least, I'll provide that contextualization, with some snark because I don't like Rousey.

The best is last!  Weidman and Silva.

Weidman is a monster.  There's a growing narrative out there that Weidman got lucky, again, against Silva.  This is bullshit.  Weidman checked Silva's kicks hard enough to break Silva's leg.  This is a technique people can learn and use - it doesn't often result in a break, but it can.  Ernesto Hoost was very good at it during his stint as the greatest kickboxer in the cosmos.  It was a technique that Weidman studied because Silva's leg kicks hurt him in their first fight.  Not luck.

I mean, seriously.  Weidman has fought Silva twice, now.  Both fights went to the second round, but in both first rounds, Weidman dominated Silva.  In both fights, in the second round, Weidman conclusively finished the fight.  There was no point in either fight when Weidman was in any trouble!  Neither victory was luck.  In both cases, Weidman was the dominant fighter and in both cases he finished the fight.  He didn't "get lucky".  He won.  In both cases, he beat Silva on the ground and standing.  Face it, Chris Weidman is a beastly fighter.  He's got great timing, a lot of power, and an excellent all-around game - he's got great takedowns, submissions, ground and pound along with excellent striking.

Anderson . . . you might want to retire.  You didn't look bad against Weidman.  The guy's an animal, right?  But he shattered your leg.  You're 38 years old and now you've got a pin in your leg.  Sure, in six or nine months you'll be able to start training, again, but it will be a long time before your leg is as strong as it was before Chris broke it.  It could take years, years of your fighting on a weakened leg.  

I know a lot of professional fighters don't know when to quit and their last several fights are an increasingly miserable lot as they slip down the rankings, being decisively beaten by increasingly irrelevant fighters.  I don't think any of us want to see that.  So, please, retire.  Go join Georges St-Pierre on a beach.  Get a belly.

For my part, I'll be looking forward to being able to talk about Anderson Silva without the hype machine of the UFC going full blast all the time, too.  While Silva has a fantastic legacy regardless of what happens moving forward, I think in the future we're going to acknowledge that he beat a lot of second rate fighters - it's easy to look good when you're crushing cans and all the best dudes at your weight class refuse to fight you because of a convenient network of personal relationships . . . so guys like Lyoto Machida and Shogun Rua stayed up at light heavyweight rather than fight their friend.  So, instead, Silva fought losers like Thales Leites and Patrick Cote and Travis fucking Lutter.  Yes, he beat them but let's be honest . . . it's nothing to brag about.  I look forward to this day when Silva has been reassembled as a human being in the same way guys like Fedor Emelianenko and Mike Tyson have been reassembled as human beings.

So, that's my recap.

Steroid use vs. weight cutting - let's talk hypocrisy

Today, MMAJunkie.com's Ben Fowlkes said that we have to make up our mind about steroids in MMA.  In the question about steroids, for me there's an interesting artifact that already exists inside MMA - and all combat sports that are divided into weight classes - and that's weight cutting.

The problem people have with steroids, I find, is often vague.  It's cheating.  In the sense of the term that there are rules against steroids, this is absolutely true, of course.  But let us be clear, in most jurisdictions, cutting weight is illegal.  Let's look at New Jersey, for instance!  Here's what New Jersey law says about weight cutting from the New Jersey Administrative Code 13:46-1A.3 Weighing of Boxers (which also applies to MMA as per the NJAC):

(a) Weighing of all boxers for all shows must take place not later than one o'clock on the day of the show in which said boxers are to take part.
(b) Weights must be determined by a representative of the Commissioner with the matchmaker concerned present.
(c) Opponents should be weighed in the presence of each other.
(d) Members of the press, in addition to the responsible handlers of the boxers, shall be permitted to attend the weighing of principals.
(e) All weights stripped.
(f) No boxer shall be permitted to lose more than one percent of his body weight on the day of the boxing contest in an attempt to make the weight required by his boxing contract and by N.J.A.C. 13:46-1A.3.

To me, this is pretty clear.  There are no provisions in the law for doing weight cuts on any day other than the fight, the law clearly expects weigh-ins to be on the day of the fight, though they can't be later than 1pm, and fighters have a one percent leeway.  I suspect, in practice, is that if your weight at the fight is more than one percent over the maximum weight of the class, you'd be cheating.

Regardless, in New Jersey law, weight cutting is illegal.  It's clearly, definitely and I think unambiguously cheating.  And, yet, in no MMA contest I've seen held in New Jersey has this law been followed.  Weight cutting, by which I mean cheating, is absolutely ubitquitous in MMA and boxing, everyone knows it and no one is doing anything about it.

Weight cutting is also dangerous.  People die from it.  And even when they don't die, it's brutal on your body.  It saps them of health and vigor - of strength and endurance - right before a rigorous athletic contest.

How is this permitted?  Why do we ignore this one rule that is easy to enforce and good for the fighters while freaking the fuck out whenever anyone's testosterone ratios are out of whack?

The only defense is . . . everyone does it.  Everyone does this unhealthy thing to cheat, so it's okay.  This is so legally and morally vapid that it doesn't deserve comment.

But we have a problem with steroids.  I think that all this fuss about steroid is looking for a speck in your neighbor's eye while ignoring the plank in your own.

Further thoughts on UFC 167

While we're on the subject of UFC 167 . . .

It's been a while since I've been impressed with Rory MacDonald. The last time I remember liking him was when he suplexed Nate Diaz through the mat three times. But since then?

I mean, I know that MMA guys are going to, as a group, have some tough guy nicknames. How many are called something-something assassin? But the moment I cooled on MacDonald was when he started calling himself “Ares”.

I find it hard to say that MMA fighters oughtta research their silly superhero nicknames, but Ares . . . ? Really?

The Greeks had a number of war gods . . . well, almost all of them, including Aphrodite, had a war aspect. But the least respected of the Olympians was, without a doubt, Ares. Generally, when he appeared at all in Greek mythology, it was to be humiliated. But if you were serious about war, you were probably going to be into Zeus and Athena, maybe Apollo or Hermes. Ares was a pig, brutal and stupid, a bully who ran away if people confronted him. One of his ceremonies was, and I kid you not, involved puppy killing. It's kind of hard to get into a dude whose actual religious ceremonies involved raising a puppy for a year and then killing it. What a asshole.

So, anyone so arrogant to want to call themselves literally a god and then so ignorant as to choose

Arex is going to rub me the wrong way. Then he started walking around in suits and thinking he deserved a title because he was all but crowned long before he got a title shot. He started to come off as a used car salesman, superficially nice but coated in a thin film of slime.

Which is to say, thank you, Ruthless Robbie Lawler. It is good to see you returned to top contention. ATT has been good to you, clearly, balancing your aggression with better control and technique. I totally want to see a title eliminator between Robbie Lawler and Matt Brown. I'm not sure I'd be on Lawler's side because I have something of a man crush on Matt Brown, but it would probably be a hell of a fight.

On the other side of things, I'm still pretty neutral about Johny Hendricks. Sometimes he comes off as really down-to-earth and humble. Other times? Not so much. He recently said that if GSP couldn't handle the pressure of being champion that he should retire and give up the belt.

Well, duh. This whole business with GSP people have been saying he can't quit fighting and keep the belt. It is interesting to note that at no point did GSP say that's what he intended. He said, instead, that he was having a hard time and was stepping back from fighting. Clearly, if he stays away too long, yes, he should be stripped of the belt. We should also bear in mind that Dominick Cruz was out two years and didn't have his belt taken from him. (FWIW, I'm against that. I more or less feel that any champion who doesn't fight for more than a year, whatever the cause, should have the belt taken.)

At the same time, everyone has been casting what's wrong with GSP in psychological terms, which is weird since GSP hasn't said exactly what is going on, except that it's personal. Medical issues are personal, for instance. Indeed, I strongly suspect that GSP's problem is primarily physical, that he's got a bad knee that is probably limiting his training and explosiveness in fights – which is why he's getting hit so much, lately, I think.

But here's the thing, Johny, GSP owes you precisely nothing. He didn't make the decision, after all. He did what he was supposed to do – he showed up for the fight and he fought a tough fight. Just because you and Dana don't like the decision doesn't mean that GSP owes anything to you, not the least little bit. He is well past the point of needing to prove anything to anyone, given that he's the UFC's biggest draw, their winningest fighter with the longest current winning streak and is without doubt the best welterweight in the organization's history. For you to say anything about GSP is fucking arrogant bullshit that makes me hope that GSP spurns you and you take another fight and lose, slide into depression and doubt and get booted from the UFC. Then you'll take a spot in the World Series of Fighting and get knocked out in three fights in a row and retire to Texas in shame and defeat. Your lack of interest in the personal well-being of one of the greatest fighters who has ever lived is, frankly, disgusting and shameful and it makes an absolute mockery of your vocal Christianity. It makes it hard to like you, moves your confidence into arrogance and makes me wish for your defeat and, indeed, humiliation. Just saying.

Why it may be time for GSP to hang up the gloves

I had an article about Georges St-Pierre vs. Johny Hendricks but I threw it away.  (And, for what it's worth, I thought Hendricks won the fight - that my predictions were wrong and this post addresses that.)  This is one of those times when I wish my blog had more exposure than it does because this is something no one has said and I think it's really important:

Georges St-Pierre does not seem to have fully recovered from his knee surgery.  And, at any rate, since his return from break hasn't been fighting with the same efficiency as before.

Up until this point, I had been making excuses for GSP's relatively poor performance against Carlos Condit and Nick Diaz.  Condit had the advantage of GSP's ring rust and Condit's primary trainer being GSP's trainers down at Jackson-Winkeljohn. That's why GSP had such a relatively hard fight against Condit. Against Diaz, oh, he had a flu. Sure, GSP dominated both fights but . . . not in the style to which I have become accustomed. Yes, he won both fights but he seemed to lack the utter, total, multi-faceted dominance of his previous fights. There were moments when both Diaz and Condit seemed to be, well, winning. In the Diaz fight, there were points where GSP seemed, well, tired.

Against Hendricks, GSP lost, in my view. Indeed, over at MMADecisions.com, it was nearly unanimous that GSP lost. Regardless of whether GSP “really” won is a different issue – that GSP got his ass kicked.

If you look at my previous articles about GSP-Hendricks, it's easy to see that I didn't expect that. The more I thought about it, the worse it looked, stylistically, for Hendricks. It isn't like GSP hasn't fought wrestlers with good power punching before, right? And the most trouble Hendricks has been in has been with fighters with a style similar to GSP – Hendricks had split decisions against Koscheck and Mike Pierce. Hendricks lost to Rick Story. Discarding (albeit with reservations given Hendricks punching power) Hendricks' win over Jon Fitch, Hendricks doesn't do really great against other wrestlers. Furthermore, Hendricks had a very tough fight against Carlos Condit, an opponent that GSP rolled over with only one real bump along the way.

But Hendricks really kicked Georges' ass. Even if you think that GSP won enough rounds to win the decision, GSP lost the fight. Hendricks nearly finished him a couple of times, he may have landed fewer blows but they were much, much harder.

After I heard Joe Rogan point out that more than half of the blows that have landed against GSP have come in the last three fights – that in 21 UFC fights, 12 of them five rounders that went the distance, GSP has taken half of all shots in the last fifteen percent of his UFC career – it occurred to me why GSP has taken such a battering. The short answer is that GSP isn't moving as well as he used to move and he's exerting more effort to do it. While Hendricks is the highlight of this, it was evident in all three fights, really, because, well, GSP got hit a lot, something that doesn't normally happen. There was a time, before GSP's knee surgery, where he was basically untouchable. Successful power punches against him were happening at the rate of two or three a round.  But since his return from his knee surgery, he's literally being hit 5 times as much per minute in the cage.

He got this incredible defense from the very thing that made me a fan of him in the first place – he had this nigh superhuman ability to cover distance. From way across the cage, he could shoot in, land some shots and then disappear. It was like magic. Go and watch his fights with guys like Thiago Alves or his second fight with Josh Koscheck. His defense was as close to perfect as anyone in the octagon, better, I think, that Anderson Silva's at Silva's peak.

So, frankly, I expected the fight with Hendricks to resemble GSP's second fight with Kos, where Kos could do nothing to GSP except walk into GSP's jab and wing the occasional power shot. Instead, GSP was flat-footed with bad footwork. Sure, Hendricks is also able to cover a lot of distance, absolutely, but – as I said – it isn't like this was GSP's first rodeo. But where he was able to dance circles around Koscheck, connecting at will, making Kos at the top of his game look like he should be in another sport – the same Koscheck that lost a split with Hendricks, the same Koscheck whose fighting style is almost identical to Hendrick's – well, Hendricks shows better ability to cover distance and get inside GSP's defenses.

The other place where this is pretty clear is . . . GSP's power. Yeah, yeah, I know that GSP has been criticized for not finishing his fights, but, man, sure, he might not have finished them but his opponents looked like they'd been hit by a truck and in many, if not most of them, at some point GSP had his opponent's seriously rocked. This was true even in the eye-poke-athon that was GSP-Jake Shields – Shields had a plenty hard head but when GSP connected with a high kick, Shields was on his heels on rubber legs.

GSP has not rocked a single person since coming back from his leg surgery. Not one. Nick Diaz even commented on GSP's lack of power and Hendricks said that he was never in trouble, even though there was a time when GSP regularly rocked guys with very hard heads.

Against Hendricks, GSP landed several quite clean head kicks. I had predicted this. GSP is taller than Hendricks so landing the high kick would be easier than against almost any other opponent – he hasn't fought someone shorter than him since Thiago Alves. None of the head kicks seemed to faze Hendricks . . . and GSP kicks, or kicked, quite hard. Hard enough to send people stumbling back, hard enough to put them on their heels, knock them down, put them on rubber legs. They just bounced off of Hendricks. I could see their lack of impact, moreover. It wasn't like Hendricks got hit really hard and just ate it, the kicks lacked drive.  I couldn't help but think if Lyoto Machida had landed one of those kicks that the fight would have ended.

Power also comes from the legs, though. The explosiveness needed to really hurl yourself into a fight comes from the legs. If GSP's legs, or, perhaps, more properly, leg is messed up, it's going to effect his ability to throw himself into blows. It “feels” to me like GSP can still tag a person with speed but that he lacks the power to hurt them.

Since the ability to hurt one's opponent is a vital component of defense in combat sports, GSP's inability to hurt his opponents makes him more vulnerable. If you're already suffering from a reduced ability to move, well, you're in pretty serious trouble.  It might explain why you're now being hit five times as often.

Since GSP is so good, though, him at 80% is still championship caliber. Absolutely. But it's a different kind of champion. It's a champion who gets hit a lot, one who doesn't have a long shelf life.  Especially if he also lacks power.

Moreover, GSP has been talking for a while now about memory problems. While the Joe Rogan Experience podcast where GSP talks about his memory losses might just mean that GSP is weirder than we imagined and thinks, and has long thought, that he is being abducted by aliens, after the fight with Hendricks, GSP was talking about how he couldn't judge who won the fight because he couldn't remember it, that he had blurred vision, stuff like that.  That's bad juju.

For many fighters, the end comes fast. Chuck Liddell was on a seven fight winning streak before he just collapsed, losing five of his last six fights and winning against another nearly shot fighter in Wanderlei Silva (sorry, Wandy, but it is what it is). Four of Liddell's losses, including the last three, were by brutal KO. The same thing happened with Jens Pulver – overnight he went from being one of the best fighters in the world to being virtually everyone's punching bag. Tito Ortiz . . . aw, hell, I could go on and on about it, it's a well-known thing that for fighters the end can come fast and is usually ugly. Do we really want that to happen to GSP? To see an increasingly ragged GSP drag himself into the cage to be thrashed by an increasingly irrelevant group of wannabes and has-beens? I do not. Especially if it means gambling with his health.

Still, to me, it seems increasingly clear – GSP isn't the fighter he was before the knee surgery. It breaks my heart to have to say that, as GSP was my first real MMA man crush, but the evidence seems clear, to me. GSP's once incredible ability to cover distance, and the power that brought, is gone. He's fighting on one leg. Yeah, he's Georges fucking St-Pierre, so he's still a top caliber fighter – if he wants to be, if he's otherwise healthy. Regardless of whether GSP retires, I think we need to acknowledge that he's on the downhill side of his career and that can be agony to watch.  So if GSP wants to get while the getting is good we should look him in the eye, shake his hand and thank him for his ability as a fighter and ambassador of MMA.

Mixed martial arts, "supporting our troops" and US militarism - fuck all that shit

One of the things I dislike about sports in general, and MMA in specific, is the militarism.  WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.  Regardless of the promotion, America MMA has a theme of militarism.

"Supporting" our troops has become something we are required to do if we're going to be taken seriously as Americans.  Americans, we are told, support our troops.  Almost no one really bothers to define what that means, though.

As a taxpayer, I, like everyone else in America, obviously support our troops, in a completely literal, financial sense.  Troops get paid because I, among others, pay them.  Everything they do is public largesse.  Supporting our troops is a fundamental requirement of paying taxes.

I also "support" them in the sense that I wish them well.  I want them to be safe and happy (though since I feel this way for everyone on earth, take that as you will).  I have and have had a lot of friends who served or continue to serve in the military, furthermore, and on an immediate, selfish level I want them to be safe and do well for themselves.

However, the troops are uniquely engaged in a number of foreign policy decisions that I don't support.  I don't, and never have, supported military action in the Middle East.  I most definitely do not support the troops being anywhere except the United States - and I very much mean that in the sense that I think the US should close every foreign military base with a tiny number of exceptions.

It becomes sophistry of the highest order, then, to say that I support the troops while not supporting almost everything American troops do.  The deflection that people use is that they're "defending our freedom".  Nonsense.  Afghanistan does not, and never has had, the power to take away one dram of my freedom.  Doubly so for Iraq.  Troops in Western Europe have lost all meaning - there is no communist threat, anymore.  Russia is our ally and Eastern Europe is joining the EU as fast as they possibly can.  Likewise our East Asian bases.  China is also our ally.  Why do we need bases in Japan, Okinawa and Australia?   We do not.  The day-to-day actual service of almost everyone in the US military does absolutely nothing to defend my freedom because they defend against enemies that aren't there.

(This is not to say that I think we should abandon our military.  I do not.  But I very strongly feel that the role of the US military should be restructured for actual territorial defense, not the ability to project force - which is its current organizational model.  Not defense, but offense.  If you say the best defense is a good offense, you're just offering a meaningless platitude in lieu of something substantial.  It is superficially easy, in the course of history, to find countries that get themselves into it really, really deep because of aggressive militaristic foreign policies.  Using the military for foreign policy often seems like a good idea until it becomes a really, really bad one and a country finds itself surrounded by hostile foes it's own policies created.)

I believe it is also sophistry, and juvenilization ,to say that the troops bear no responsibility for their actions because they're part of the military.  The defense "just following orders" has been ruled, somewhat comprehensively, to be no defense.  Military service does not justify criminal behavior just because someone else ordered you to do it.  (Though it is almost universally ignored in the military, service people who are given illegal orders are obliged to refuse them.  However, the culture of the military does not permit questioning  orders, which makes the laws demanding soldiers question orders meaningless.  De facto always trumps de jure.)  I can't make myself believe that obedience and conformity to military authority clean the hands of soldiers - which would be a standard unique to them, additionally.

In those senses, then, I do not support the troops.  I don't support what they do as being part of a malicious foreign policy that even were it not immoral (and it is immoral) is also short-sighted, creating enemies out of thin air, wasting money and lives in a frankly Orientalist fantasy.  I do not think, furthermore, the facts of service miraculously purge the soldiers of their individual responsibility for the crimes they commit while in the service.

But almost no one talks about the intrigue inherent in any statement about supporting our troops.  "Support our troops" has become a completely hollow phrase, used by people with all manner of political convictions around US foreign policy, that is used to manipulate us into continuing those policies.  Anyone who criticizes, much less attacks, the present course of American foreign policy is accused of not supporting our troops and in the act of "supporting" them conflates the sincere desire for the physical and emotional well-being of those troops with the reactionary political causes of US foreign policy.

In short, saying, "I support our troops" creates a narrative space into which the hawks and warmongers can put an infinity of violence.  Any criticism of the policy of violence enacted by the military becomes transformed through rhetorical alchemy into a condemnation of the people in the military.  It's a giant conversation stopper, preventing Americans from discussing the consequences of the stark militarism of the United States since 9/11.

The second major reason why I have trouble saying I support our troops is I think that a lot of the rightward shift in the United States is due to the near ubiquity of military service among the working poor young men (and, increasingly, young women).  When I graduated high school - and I think this is commonplace for people who come from working class families - nearly all of my peers joined the military.

Only one had any actual desire to serve in the military as a conscious career decision.  The rest were simply at loose ends at the end of high school and having no real academic or employment opportunities, they choose to go into the military as a way to get a paycheck with a job with some social prestige and get out of the house, to be "grown up".  As I said, I think this is pretty normal for "the working class".

This has caused the working class to shift towards the right.  There's hardly a working class family in America that doesn't have several members currently serving, or having recently served, in the military.  For them, supporting the military is immediate - a vital pressing concern.  If they support candidates who wish to defund military adventurism, they are making their loved ones less safe.  What they want is more military, more body armor, more guns, more planes, more of everything that their loved ones say is needed to protect them from their enemies.

Additionally, those loved ones are made part of a system.  Their first political consciousness free from their parents is shaped by their involvement with the military.  To a certain extent, all of their lives they'll identify themselves as being a member of the branch of service where they served - this is particular marked, of course, in the Marines, but is present to some extent in all branches of service.

When young servicepeople get out of the military, there is a great deal of immediacy for them, too.  If they were to act to defund the military, they would be leaving people they know in the lurch.

This drags the working class to the right.  They have a vested interest in US military adventurism!  Funding a large, well-trained, well-equipped military is of vital, immediate importance not only to the servicepeople, themselves, but also to their families and friends who aren't in the service.  The servicepeople are likely to remain supporters of the military their whole lives, too.

I very much believe that a large peacetime, voluntary military is one of the key ways in which the right-wing branch of American politics has subverted the leftist leanings of the working class.  Young people are told that rather than agitated for better access to education and better employment opportunities out of high school, they should just join the military which provides those educational and employment opportunities.  An inherently right-wing organization, the military, becomes the first place of real employment for many millions of working class Americans.

(There is some indication that this is changing, I admit.  Between the privatization of the military and the mechanization of the military, the number of people in the service has declined substantially in the past ten years.  But it's still quite strong.  75% of Americans 50 years or older have an immediate family member in the military.  57% of people 30 to 49 have an immediate family member in service, and 33% of those between 18 and 29 have family in service.  All of these numbers are heavily slanted towards the working class.

(Note I did not say "poor", but working class.  There is a popular Heritage Foundation report out there that conflates middle income with "middle class", saying that almost all soldiers come from families of median income.  I will just assume that people reading my blog know the difference between the middle class and middle income.)

I think what bothers me most, though, is the extent to which - otherwise - sports organizations, including MMA ones, avoid taking a political stand.  Because support of the troops carries with it specific foreign policy implications - it is childish to imagine you can support the troops apart from what the troops actually do, so to support the troops is to support the deeds of the troops, clearly - it becomes boosterism for war.  In almost all other ways, professional sports seeks an apolitical stance.  They never support one position over another except with our mystical, automatically heroic troops.

As I've said, the view is that supporting the troops is somehow apolitical, itself.  That you can somehow support the troops separate from their deeds - but as a stand that's so utterly untrue that I don't know why I need to say it!  Apropos of MMA, if you support a fighter, you support that fighter's fights - you're saying, "Hey, I like that dude, I like the way he fights and generally approve of his behavior and persona."  While it might not be universally true about every bit a given fighter - perhaps you appreciate Anderson Silva's fights but find the man's persona remote and inaccessible; I, myself, appreciate a number of fighters but dislike their overt religion, like cage fighting is a holy mission, like Jesus Christ came down from Heaven and told them to beat people's heads in for money and glory - supporting a fighter at least means supporting their fights.  But with soldiers?  Nope.  Supporting them, absurdly, foolishly, has been divorced from their actual deeds.

This is more or less unprecedented.  Even the police don't receive this kind of unconsidered praise.  I think it's a point of interesting comparison.  First, we don't divorce police officers from their work - if a department is corrupt, it is permissible to speak about that corruption without accusations that you're somehow fostering crime.  Our thinking about police work is nuanced enough to recognize that a corrupt and/or inefficient police department works against the goals of policing - a safe and crime-free community.  Second, we don't talk about police officers as if they have no control over their actions.  They aren't infantilized.  If a police officer commits an act of brutality, even if that brutality is structural in nature, even if their bosses ordered it, it doesn't let them off the hook - we all recognize that cops are grown-ups and that assaulting and torturing prisoners is something that the individual who commits the crime must be held accountable.

Which is all that bothers me about this - that sports organizations, among others, have been duped into support of war under the facile arguments demanding that everyone in the public give homage to "the troops".  That no one in any of these organizations goes, "Hey, wait a second, this is an overt political message and we avoid overt political messages organizationally."  That public support of the troops empowers the politicians who send them into foreign wars to keep doing it, so long as the troops are supported, the United States will have a large, standing army that itches to be used.  That, by its existence, almost demands to be used and is, in fact, being used - destructively, to the harm of us all (though, let's also be fair, moreso to the people being invaded).

The upshot is that we need to become more nuanced with the public discourse around supporting our troops.  We need to be more frank in acknowledging the actions of those troops, divorced from lore and hagiography.  We need to stop treating them like children incapable of making moral judgments about their orders and somehow, inexplicably, free from the moral, legal and ethical burdens carried by following those orders.

Doing so will, I think, among other things, give us a better military - one that more accurately reflects the actual values of the country, one that commits far fewer crimes, one that is used in far fewer wars.  In turn, I think that's a pretty good way of supporting our troops - to put them into fewer situations where they become murderers because of "orders" or because they participate in illegal foreign wars.

MMA journalism stinks - reflections after Bellator 106

As King Mo himself has noted, MMA journalism sucks.

After Bellator 106, which I found a quite entertaining card even without the incredible performances by Chandler and Alvarez, MMAJunkie.com's Ben Fowlkes gave us a post-fight breakdown of the card.

In it, he admits that he was surprised at Daniel Straus's performance.  He was about the only one.  Straus is a top ten ranked featherweight with a very dangerous style for a slow starter like Curran.  Curran's defensive, reactive style of fighting found a brick wall in Straus's minimalist, pressure-oriented approach.  I admit that I thought Curran would win . . . but I very much thought the tough, hard-nosed Straus was going to be a very stiff test for Curran.  Straus was and he picked up a clear decision.  So that's the first place that Fowlkes failed to understand what was going on.

The second was when he criticized King Mo as being a boxer who occasionally shoots for the takedown.  This . . . ignores the reality of King Mo's two fights prior to his second tilt with Emmanuel Newton where King Mo very much returned to the takedown and ground and pound style of his Strikeforce days.  It also ignores that in Mo-Newton 2, King Mo did take Newton down but was unsuccessful in holding Newton to the mat.  King Mo tried the takedown, G&P strategy but Newton showed great takedown defense and then great skill in getting the hell up.  Later on in the fight, when Mo was tired, yeah, he boxed with Newton - but I felt that was simply a realistic assessment of his cardio.  The first two rounds tired Mo more than Newton, so takedowns were going to be increasingly hard to get and of briefer duration . . . and since they were hard to get and didn't last long even when Mo was fresh, well, he decided to strike, or so it seemed to me.

It isn't that Mo has abandoned wrestling against Newton, but that Newton showed great takedown defense and superior cardio (the first surprised me a bit, the last did not - I knew that if it went long, it would favor Newton who has always kept up a very fast pace for a light-heavyweight).

But Fowlkes decided to ignore the evidence of his senses and Mo's last three fights to project a false and actually pretty weird narrative.

While doing this, he ignored what I think is the real point - King Mo needs to leave Las Vegas.  There was a time when a lot of top guys trained in Vegas - back in the heyday of Randy Couture and Forrest Griffin.  But in the past several years, Las Vegas has stopped looking a place that builds MMA champions.  King Mo entered with Roy Nelson, who has also underwhelmed in his last several performances.  I think that King Mo needs to bite down on his mouthpiece and see if AKA or the Blackzillians or Jackson-Winkeljohn or Alliance or Tristar or Roufusport will have him - a top-level camp where he can get comprehensive MMA training and training partners equal to his skills.  If he does this, I think that we could see a re-energized King Mo.  If he continues to squander his talents for lack of adequate training opportunities in Las Vegas, I think he's already on the backside of his MMA career.  To me, that's the real story, and consistent with fighters like Griffin, Nelson and even Frank Mir who were training or continue to train in Las Vegas far past the days when it is athletically justifiable.  It was easier to just say, "Oh, King Mo isn't doing what he's good at" when the problem is - and there are a lot of people who agree with me, I didn't invent this narrative I simply find it compelling - that Mo trains inappropriately for the sport as it exists today.

The third thing is a repetition of what Fowlkes has said about Bellator - that he considers the idea of a Bellator pay-per-view card to be somehow treacherous of Bellator.  Bellator, because they've given over a hundred cards that were on free TV, are somehow obligated to keep doing it.

Now, I think that there is a very good case to be made for keeping all Bellator events free.  The really big, money-making sports in America don't put their best events on PPV.  The World Series, the NBA Championships, the Super Bowl are all right there on network TV.  Ultimately, the money made by keeping things PPV doesn't match the potential revenue of corporate sponsorship and commercials for network TV spectacles, or one could reason.

That said, in the fight business, PPV cards are routine, not just for MMA but also for boxing.  The only reason kickboxing or muay Thai events don't go PPV is the same reason why Bellator has hesitated to do PPV events prior to now - they don't have a big enough audience to justify the expense.  It is possible that that, like boxing, MMA events are big enough to make bank for PPV but not so big as to get the kinds of corporate sponsorship money that one finds in basketball, baseball and football.  Indeed, it seems likely.  A lot of brands shy away from the brutality of boxing and MMA has a reputation for being more brutal, still.  Boxing has a good sized fan-base, yes, and they tend to be pretty dedicated - as opposed to the cultural affairs that the baseball, basketball and football championships are in the US.

Case in point - here in Miami, the NBA Championship over the last couple of years utterly dominated the city.  During the games, everywhere you go you find people talking about the games.  When the Heat won their most recent championship, my whole neighborhood erupted.  People were out in the streets hooping and hollering into the night.

Miami is also home to not one but two of the most important MMA camps in the world - the Blackzillians (I know, I know, I didn't name the team, though) and American Top Team.  When members of those teams fight on big cards in the UFC, such as Vitor Belfort's fight against Anderson Silva, the biggest Blackzillian name against one of the best MMA fighters of all time, there wasn't that kind of anticipation.  I've never seen Miami obsessed with MMA, even though there are a ton of South Florida fighters who are world class, the way they've been with basketball, it does not create the same buzz.

I think it is fair to say if it doesn't happen in Miami, it doesn't happen anywhere in America.  MMA isn't enough of a cultural event to justify the kind of corporate sponsorship one finds in the big three American sports (in the US) or, say, soccer (everywhere else).  MMA is a fairly niche sport - marginally mainstream, and I think with greater potential than boxing, but it's a far cry from being a cultural touchstone.

This drives boxing and MMA towards PPV events.  While fighting sports don't have the kind of cultural significance of other sports, their fans are well-known to be pretty dedicated.  To wit, if you tried showing the Super Bowl on PPV, you'd lose most of your viewers.  As you lost your viewers, it would become less of a cultural event, less a part of the American psyche, which would greatly diminish advertising revenues and even interest in the sport.  But the same number of people will watch a UFC card on PPV as will watch it on Fox TV.  It's just that in the PPV, the UFC gets a lot more money.  For those of us enthused about the fighting arts, it is likely that we'll be forced to obscure cable channels, the Internet and PPV events to get our fix.

But rather than write about that, Fowlkes goes for the lazy narrative that he would feel slighted by Bellator for engaging in a business model that is typical for combat sports.  Like his personal feelings should be taken into account!  Grow the fuck up.

The last bit of weirdness is his analysis of the Mike Bronzoulis-Joe Riggs fight.  Like with Straus and Newton, Fowlkes seems dismissive of the idea that Bronzoulis deserved to be in the fight at all and attributes Riggs' performance to simply wanting to collect his $100,000 payday and not to the fact that during Fight Master, Bronzoulis proved himself to be a really, really tough fighter with a really, really tough style.  Particularly against Eric Bradley, Bronzoulis was supposed to lose.  He didn't.  Bronzoulis showed that he was pure heart and he has an incredible gas tank, that even when you're beating him he's not going to make it easy - and there's a really good chance that you'll wear yourself out fighting him at which point he'll really turn on the heat.  That, in short, Riggs fought the fight he fought because Bronzoulis is a very good fighter with a style like quicksand - quicksand that Riggs didn't jump into for very good fight related reasons.  In particular, because if he did that, Riggs might lose.  The toughness and tenacity of Bronzoulis was very important to Riggs's approach, probably moreso than a big check at the end of the fight.

Today a couple of interesting things came out, too.  Particularly that Riggs has a broken hand and a broken orbital.  These might also have played a big role in why Riggs opted out of a striking contest where he wasn't doing so well for a jujitsu fight there he was pretty dominant.  But rather than doing any research, Fowlkes decided - for the third time in one card - to create a narrative where the abilities of the other fighter were simply irrelevant to the story he told.  It wasn't that Riggs was fighting a hard piece of iron shaped like a man and Riggs took that into account, it was that Riggs was merely collecting a paycheck - which is dismissive of both Riggs and Bronzoulis!

I want to say that this guy is terrible and should be fired, but the truth is that the guy that replaced him would probably be at least as bad.

Overall, it's a poor piece, but quite typical of the quality of journalism typical in MMA.  I suspect that fans of all second tier sports have equally bad journalism!

Ronda Rousey and fake nice vs. real mean - or why I stopped watching this season of The Ultimate Fighter

Over on MMAJunkie.com, Ben Fowkles wrote a bit on the realness of Ronda Rousey.  He rightly noticed that it's absurd to give Rousey's mean-spiritedness and pettiness a pass because it's "real".  It's a false dilemma between fake nice and real mean.  I would not take either.  How about real nice?

I don't even think that Rousey is "real mean".  That term, itself, actually elevates her behavior.  It's petty.  It's not even mean in an overly aggressive way, but mean in spirit.  Watching it, I am struck by what a spiritually small person she is.  It's quite marked.

In particular, Rousey has an inability to understand normal human social behavior.  Things that stood out in the episodes I saw, though not limited to them, are:

• Saying that Miesha Tate was celebrating Shayna Baszler's pain after Baszler lost to Juliana Pena.  That Rousey didn't understand that Tate was celebrating Pena's victory, not Baszler's loss, after Rousey's more than fifteen years of experience with competitive martial arts is baffling.  (And, of course, Rousey freely celebrates her own and her team's victories, even when someone is badly hurt.)

• Rousey telling Dennis Hallman that he shouldn't fight Edmond Tarverdyan while the show was filming - not that they shouldn't fight at all.  But that Tarverdyan, who challenged Hallman, should not suffer the consequences of his bad actions and that Hallman should be the one who backs down.  That's the bizarre part.  That Rousey was telling Hallman to back down after Tarverdyan challenged him, rather than trying to stop her coaching staff from challenging visitors to fights.

• Calling Tate a racist because of a couple of practical jokes that made fun of Tarverdyan's uni-brow - especially because these practical jokes were after Tarverdyan challenged Tate's friend Dennis Hallman to a fight.

• Rousey's inability to grasp that when Tate is nominally polite to Rousey in public, it isn't being two-faced.  Tate has been very clear, very directly to Rousey about the bad blood between them.  But because Tate maintains a small modicum of courtesy in necessary professional contact, Rousey creates the chimera of Tate being "fake nice".

• Rousey's inability to grasp that even if Tate is being fake nice that doesn't rationalize Rousey's bad behavior.

• Rousey giving Tate the bird after Rousey's fighter won and Tate attempted to congratulate her.  Rousey is graceless in both defeat and victory, particularly confounding given Rousey's long association with competitive martial arts.

It just goes on and on!  Rousey clearly has trouble grasping normal human social behaviors.  (I am biting my tongue to stop opinion as to the reasons why because armchair psychology is fraught with dangers.)  She acts strange and surrounds herself with people who validate her bad behavior, like Edmond Tarverdyan.

This is not to say that, for instance, her feelings aren't real.  I'm sure they are.  So what?  Part of growing up is learning the social rituals that grease the wheels of society.  You learn that it's uncool to challenge people to fights, even if you don't like them.  You learn that when someone is polite to you during work, it isn't treachery.  You learn that just because someone is mean to you doesn't justify bad behavior on your part.  When you're in the fight game, you also learn (or, rather, know, for Rousey certainly knows) that to celebrate in victory does not imply that they're celebrating the suffering of the loser.  You learn how to accept the accolades of the coaching staff that loses to you as being a sign of respect and not some kind of false emotion.

It doesn't mean that Rousey is not a charming person in the right circumstances.  I do not doubt she's loyal to her friends or a contentious coach.  But there are so many examples in just this one show where she has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding of normal social human situations.  It's petty and mean of spirit, even moreso than other rivalries on TUF, including Ken Shamrock and Tito Ortiz.  Justifying Rousey's own bad behavior by turning Tate into a bugbear just rubs salt into the wounds of bad behavior.

Rousey isn't "real mean".  She just petty and nasty.  I don't think that the show's portrayal is particularly biased, I don't think that they're taking things out of context.  It's hard to take flipping someone off out of context.  It's hard to take defending your thug friend's attempted assault on a visitor.  She's full of spite and bile.  Saying she's mean is too nice, I think, too big a term for Rousey's behavior.

Johny Hendricks plans to ignores laws of physics, GSP's fist

Johny Hendricks seems to believe that he can teleport through Georges St-Pierre's hand.  He says that he is willing to eat a jab to land a right hand.  I'm sure Ellenberger said the exact same thing.  "Oh, I'll just take the jab and . . . wait, he has longer arms than me?"

Georges St-Pierre's reach is around 77 inches.  Johny Hendricks reach is around 69 inches.  Break that down, each one of Georges St-Pierre's arms is around four inches longer than Hendricks arms.

Johny, you won't be able to phase through GSP's punches.  When you come forward into the jabs, your forward momentum will be neutralized by GSP's forward momentum, and your arm will still be four inches away from Georges' shoulder.  To "walk through" the jabs, you'll then have to reset and press forward, but by then, Georges will be doing something else - perhaps another jab, starting the whole process over, again.

But this is physics, dude.  Don't think that because you can press past guys in training, who neither have Georges' length, who are hitting you with sparring punches and wearing boxing gloves, that you'll be able to do it against GSP.  The energies involved will be totally different.  He'll be hitting you with literally 300% more power than those other dudes.  This will stall your forward motion.  Because it's physics and never try to win against physics.  You never, ever will.

I think that Weidman did Hendricks no favors.  I understand the boost in confidence that Silva's fall brought - a stark reminder that these people are mortals, after all.  But my mental telepathy is telling me that Hendricks sees himself in Weidman - which is awful, because not only is Weidman a different fighter from Hendricks but GSP is an altogether different fighter than Anderson Silva.  Weidman would never fight a fighter like GSP with such a crude strategy - Roy Longo and Matt Serra would not let him.

I also think I understand why fighters like Hendricks and Ellenberger, who have fundamentally crude striking games, got this far.  For years, welterweight in the UFC has been under the shadow of GSP.  The guys at the top - Fitch, Koscheck, poor Alves who was ruined by Georges, even Condit - have been planning to fight GSP, even when they fought each other.  Strong wrestlers who used it to stay up and throw heavy leather is something that people haven't seen in welterweight in a long time.  Guys who did it in the recent past - Melvin Guillard and Robbie Lawler - never went anywhere, being consistently beaten (in the past, I mean, the ruthless one looked like a far more mature fighter, recently) by technical strikers and wrestlers, meaning they never got to the top of the division (save flukes like Dan Hardy).  The division was surprised by Ellenberger and Hendricks.

But not GSP.  GSP is the one guy in the whole division who never worries about what GSP is doing.  And from his loft at the top of the division, by the time anyone gets to him, he's not surprised by whatever they're doing.  GSP - like Rory MacDonald against Ellenberger - will not be surprised.

But I hope Hendricks is lying.  I hope that his coaches have analyzed GSP's fights and come up with a better actual plan than "defy the laws of physics to hit Georges".

Dana White mouths off after MacDonald v. Ellenberger, pretending that winning and losing are the same

Dana White blasts MacDonald and Ellenberger because of their slow fight.

First, of course, since I am mentioning this, look, hostile workplace environment!  Your boss going out and calling you names in front of the press!  Jesus, someone sue this man.

Moreover, I dislike these simplistic analyses.  Sometime, even fights can be dull.  The styles of the fighters don't mesh very well.

But what mostly gets me is that Dana White pretends that winning a slow fight has the same consequences for the fighter as losing well.  Dana says that it isn't good for MacDonald to fight that way - but you know what's worse?  Losing.  Even Ellenberger admits he froze up (something I wish I had predicted on my blog so I could point and say, "I knew that would happen"; for the record, I think that MacDonald v. Ellenberger prefigures GSP v. Hendricks and I think there's a very good chance that Hendricks will freeze up in the same way).  But you know what would have unfrozen him?  If MacDonald had started charging in.  I bet that he would have perked right the fuck up.  He would have suddenly remembered how to throw bombs off of stuffing a takedown and the value of counterpunching, which are his usual strategies. 

But losing well doesn't match winning poorly.  When you win, you get double your base pay, for most fighters.  Even the UFC's morally and legally dubious undocumented discretionary bonuses don't do that.  Sure, while boring fights aren't likely to thrill sponsors, losses are worse.  A "bad" win might not get you much closer to the title, but a loss gets you further away from it (something that is certainly on Ellenberger's mind, right now, after losses to both MacDonald and Kampmann - his title dreams are shot until he can put together a decent winning streakk, again).

What about head trauma?  Careful fighters fight longer, they avoid injuries, they aren't laid up with long periods of time where they can't fight or train.  It is the difference between fighting until you're 40 or fighting until you're 32, it's the difference between three fights a year and two fights a year.

Let's face it, a "bad" win is just better than going out on your shield - except for the UFC, who knows that fans like dramatic finishes more than measured, tactical fighting.  A decent one time discretionary bonus isn't worth what you lose if you do lose - sponsors, greater distance from a title shot, your health.

So every time a tactical fighter wins tactically, Master of Hostile Workplaces, Dana White, goes to the press and bitches and moans about it.  That kind of win is bad for a fighter's career!  It's bad for the sport.  When the truth is, it's bad for Dana White's vision of how an MMA fight should look.  Only Dana, whose body and career aren't on the line, can pretend that losing well is the equivalent of winning badly.

I am not particularly defending MacDonald.  I think he could have been more aggressive, I think he could have hunted Ellenberger down more.  But I don't think he should have been too much more aggressive.  Ellenberger was clearly turtling up.  It's really hard to finish a fighter who is not engaging.  Dana White should know that.  It is not for MacDonald to try to get fighters to come out of their shell.  They should arrive physically and mentally prepared to fight.  Ellenberger wasn't.  But that isn't Rory's fault.  Dana should fucking know better, Dana should know it takes two to fight.

Johny Hendricks wants to make GSP "exciting", ignores reality

I know that the odds are with Hendricks in a way that they haven't been with a fighter, against GSP, since BJ Penn.  And with Weidman's victory over Silva, well, I'm sure that's added a heady air of optimism for Johny Hendricks and Alexander Gustafsson.  It's proof that these dudes aren't invincible.

That said, Hendricks has a big, big uphill battle.  The battle comes on two fronts.  The first is that he's fighting Georges St-Pierre and the second is that he's fighting Georges St-Pierre.

The problem is that GSP isn't like Hendricks other opponents in terms of technique.  There is probably no fighter in the UFC who is as technical in so many areas as GSP.  The guy has all the core strengths of MMA down at an expert level. 

I hope that Hendricks is spewing BS when he says stuff like all he wants to do against GSP is punch him in the face.  Because that's the plan of a moron and if he does that, GSP will handle him like a child.  Confidence is great, but taking your opponent's skills likely is just arrogance.

The second problem with fighting GSP will be when the cage door closes and he's in there against GSP.  I think the real difference between GSP and Hendricks is that GSP will fight a very smart fight.  You listen to one of his strategy guys, John Danaher, and he talks about how it's reductive to just say, "Oh, this guy's jujitsu is better than this other guy's, or his striking is better".  He talks about how they train for key transitional states and develop strategies for them.

Johny Hendricks has several key transitional states, shall we say.  Well, two.  In particular, he uses the threat of a takedown to cover for his crude striking technique.  This was in particular evidence in the Hendricks-Condit fight.  Pretty much every time Condit started to get off on his striking, Hendricks took the fight to the mat.  He couldn't hold it there, but he took Condit down time after time, which nerfed Condit's superior striking and opened the door for Hendricks to land strikes of his own - which he would not have otherwise been able to do.  The other key transitional state is Hendricks ability to cover distance to connect with an overhand right.

However, that's pretty much the catalog of his skills.  When being outstruck, take a person to the mat, and use the hesitation caused by his ability to take people down to use his ability to cover distance to connect with the right.

This is not a bad strategy.  It is, furthermore, a strategy that has been employed successfully by one of GSP's former opponents, Josh Koscheck.  It a great style . . . but styles make fights and Hendricks doesn't have a great track record against people with good takedown defenses.  He got a split decision against Koscheck and Mike Pierce and he lost to Rick Story.  Sure, he KO'd Fitch - but that has the air of a fluke, it happened in 12 seconds.  But, in general, he's struggled with wrestlers.

He has not, of course, fought an MMA wrestler of GSP's ability, because GSP has the best MMA wrestling skillset with the possible exception of Jon Jones.  GSP has a great takedown defense.  He's not going to be worried about Hendricks ability to take him down.  So one of the key transitional areas for Hendricks to win is going to be nullified by GSP's fantastic takedown defense.  Which leaves Hendricks ability to cover distance with the overhand right . . . and we know what GSP's defense against that is going to be.  He's going to jab.

If Hendricks goes in there thinking he can just re-fight the same fight he used against Condit, Koscheck, Pierce, etc., on GSP, that ignores the differences in the skillset that GSP has.  If he tries to fight the same fight - which, to be honest, he probably will because he always fights the same fight - he will likely find his offense stifled by GSP's command of those key transitional states, that GSP will have answers for the questions that Hendricks poses.

Which is the real crunch time for people who fight GSP.  It's the same dilemma that fighters have faced since GSP's striking has gotten really good, since after his defeat to Serra.  A fighter is very likely going to find themselves in a situation where the regular tools they use to win fights don't work.  Nick Diaz was not able to employ his rolling style of BJJ to grab an arm or leg to transition into a submission or sweep while GSP's control of distance nullified Diaz's boxing.  Condit was only briefly able to use his striking effectively against GSP.  Shields couldn't use his submission game and only showed as well as he did because of five pretty flagrant eye pokes that the ref did not see.  Koscheck could not close to land his overhand right or take GSP down.  Alves so feared GSP's shot that he did not aggressively pursue his leg kicks.

All of these fighters - with the momentary exception of Condit when he got the head kick against Georges - shut down when they realized how little they could do to him.  They withdrew into their shells and did not aggressively pursue an offensive strategy.  And waiting for GSP to make a mistake is, generally, an exercise in futility.

Hendricks is going to have to face that when the cage door closes.  He'll come at GSP for a little bit but he'll get his takedowns stuffed, he'll get jabbed when he tries to close the distance and there's a real good chance he will get taken down.  Then he will realize that nothing he has done in the past will work.  He needs to change things up, right then, right there.

A few fighters can do this - Jones showed it in his fights against both Machida and Evans.  I think Weidman has it, too, the ability to change the context of the fight into one that favors your abilities - Weidman headbutted Silva's hand!  How about that as a way to show your contempt for Anderson Silva's striking.  Dominick Cruz can do it, too.  But it's rare and Hendricks hasn't shown any abilities in that area.  He has one fight.  He fights that one fight.  And it's a good fight and if GSP wasn't there, it might be enough to make him a champion for a long time.  But the same could have been said of Jon Fitch.  Fitch fought a good fight and he was very good at fighting that fight.  He was on an 8 fight winning streak before GSP beat him, and then he had a five fight winning streak before his career kinna fell apart.  But since it was the same fight, when he got into the cage with Georges, Georges just hit him like a train.  There's a really good chance that Hendricks is going to be hit by a train, too, because a guy who fights one fight is like a gift to GSP.

And when Hendricks realizes this, there's a really good chance he won't "make GSP exciting" (though I would characterize it more as, "Hendricks won't make Hendricks exciting") as he clams up and his offense flags due to his inability to deal with the multifacted nature of GSP's skillset.  He'll stall and GSP will have to carry the fight and it's really hard to finish a guy when all he wants to do is make it out of the round standing.

MMA Junkie's "Twitter Mailbag" and the strategies of Anderson Silva

Ben Fowlkes over at hardly ever says anything even vaguely intelligent, but he brought up a point about the Silva-Weidman fight.  It's not a good point, but it is certainly a point.

People like me asserted that Silva held his hands down and clowned because Silva thought it was the best way to win.  It wasn't arrogance, but a strategem, one that Silva had used in the past quite successfully.

Fowlkes rejoinder was, on MMA Junkie's July 11th Twitter mailbag, is that it had to be arrogance because Silva could have no doubt employed other strategies against Weidman.  Silva tried this strategy, it didn't work, it clearly wasn't working, so to keep doing it was arrogance.

A few points.  The fight was barely six minutes long.  Something like two-and-a-half of those minutes were Weidman in total top domination.  Silva had barely three minutes of striking time.  My first rejoinder to Fowlkes would be that's not a lot of time to do something.  It isn't like Silva said, "Oh, this didn't work, I'll try this other thing, instead!"  It was more, like, "I'll clown him, HOLY SHIT I'M UNCONSCIOUS!"

Second, well, most fighters have only got a few effective strategies.  Silva has four.

1.  Striking from the outside.  Silva is a really good striker, very accurate and with KO power.  On the down side, he's not very aggressive and prefers to counterpunch.

2.  Striking from the outside plus clowning.  When a fighter won't engage aggressively, Silva taunts them into striking.

3.  Muay Thai clinch.  Silva had murderous knees.

4.  Bottom game Brazilian jiu jitsu that he employs when he's been taken down.

He has a fifth, ineffective strategy:

5. Jazz hands.

In his effective strategies, he tried three of them against Weidman.  He came out, in the first, in his usual stance.  He did not clown.  Weidman took him down.  Then Silva tried his bottom game BJJ.  Weidman was having none of that and utterly controlled Silva, passing his guard pretty easily.  Then, after Silva got out of a pretty rough spot with a kneebar, he got up and employed the striking plus clowning.

It's been a while since Silva has seriously gone for the plum clinch at all.  I'm not sure why he's gotten away from it, but he has.  However, it was the only common strategy Silva had left, though trying it with a wrestler wouldn't be the smartest move in his career, either.

I grant that the strategy that Silva committed the most to was the clowning.  But he did it for around three minutes.

The hands down strategy has the very good advantage for Silva of having his hands, right there, to push away an attempted takedown, too.  I think that was the primary reason Silva did it - because, no, he couldn't think of another way to win.  He has four effective strategies.  He tried outside striking but his raised hands left his legs too vulnerable to the shoot.  His BJJ was trivial compared to Weidman's top control.  Clinching with a wrestler is just asking to get taken down, and it isn't something Silva does, anymore.

I don't imagine that Fowlkes will read this, but I ask him: what is this magical new thing that Silva would do, that he hasn't done in 38 fights?  Is he really learning new techniques, especially when those four strategies have been enough for him to dominate middleweight?  I grant that his style has shifted, from the aggressive style typical of Chute Boxe fighters to one of the purest counterstrikers in MMA, but the development was reasonably slow.  It wasn't like he just tossed out the aggressive plum clinch and developed jazz hands, it was a progression, it was incremental.

In short, there was no reason to imagine that Silva would come into the Weidman fight with a hot new strategy.  He did come in with a modest revision of his hands down, clowning strategy - he's much better as using that to counter takedowns, which he also did against Sonnen in the second round of their second fight.  Part of that incremental change was an even more outrageous clowning than we've seen in the past, but it wasn't a tidal change in his style.  It was fairly vintage Silva, really.  I think it's facile to say that Silva had lots of options and it was his arrogance that made him choose that one.  I think he really thought it was the best way to win the fight, better than his other traditional strategies, because they had already failed.

I admit that Silva didn't test them very hard, but he tested none of them very hard, not even the clowning, because Weidman beat him so fast.

I suppose that is the structure of the piece, though.  "Twitter Mailbag".  What you do is take 300 characters that someone else has written and devote as much space as you want on a forum where you're the one in charge to refute those 300 characters.  It makes it very easy to appear clever when the person could neither fully develop their point in the first place due to Twitter's character limitations while you can respond at length in a forum where you're the authority figure.

Bad news story of the day: MMA Underground's "Is the outrage over Cyborg really about aesthetics?"

In just bad news reporting, MMA Underground has an article that is titled "Is the outrage over Cyborg really about aesthetics?"  It mentions how Cris Cyborg seems to be excortiated for steroid use in a way that many other male fighters aren't.  He mentions how the most popular women's fighters - Gina Carano and now Ronda Rousey - are attractive as if it's relevant.  It is not.

But . . . what makes the article horrible isn't that it wonders if Cris Cyborg is being discriminated due to comparisons with prettier fighters.  What the article does is talk about how, y'know, when men are caught for steroid use it doesn't effect their popularity.

The question asked isn't if Cyborg is being discriminated against because she's not pretty but if she's being discriminated against because she's a woman.  Not because she's a not a pretty woman, but more because she fails to satisfy the criteria that most men have for "womanhood".

The answer to that is, "Well, duh, yeah."

A deeper analysis would talk about how men like to define acceptable womanhood and Cyborg has always been a contentious fighter because she destroys male stereotypes about what a woman should look like and how a woman should be.  The idea that a woman should be as physically powerful as a man, more than most men, with the kind of aggression in a fight that one associates with someone like Wanderlei Silva . . . well, that's disturbing to a lot of men.  That she then totally fails to court any particular image of conventional womanhood is doubly troubling - which is why male fight fans embrace fighters like Rousey and Carano, because while they fight, they still "look like women".  They don't challenge as many stereotypes about what a woman should "be", or, more precisely, what a man thinks a woman should be.

So when this unrepentant physical woman fighter, incredibly strong, not just for a woman but period, who has the kind of aggression we associate with the most terrifying fighters, who then goes on to reject most of the forms of womanhood - she doesn't try to go around pretty, she walks around pretty much exactly like any elite male athlete might go, lots of t-shirts and comfortable shoes, sexist men look for a reason to hate her.  Her steriods bounce merely gave them that rationale.  They can say she's bad for the sport, she's a cheat, so forth and so on, even when they're far less interested in condemning male fighters for the same misdeeds (much less the discussion about testosterone replacement therapy, where men can legally acquire anabolic steroids!).

The question isn't if Cris Cyborg is discriminated vis-a-vis other women.  It's simply how much she's being discriminated due to sexist bullshit.  (Right answer: a lot.)

So, bad article!  Bad!

Little known and never enforced MMA rule against foul and abusive language

There's been a lot of hay made over whether Anderson Silva was "disrespectful" of Chris Weidman.  I've argued, and I think pretty well, that, yeah, that Silva disrespected Weidman but as an intentional ploy.  That his hands down wasn't so much a sign of arrogance, but an attempt to drawn Weidman into a striking match where Silva thought he'd have the advantage.  But, without doubt, mocking your opponent openly is pretty disrespectful and it isn't the first time that Silva has done it.

However, MMA's rules are not particularly well enforced.  Unknown to almost everyone, including, it appears, both MMA referees and the president of the UFC, is a rule that says, using abusive language in the fenced ring or fighting area is a foul. 

I don't know what Silva said.  Vitor Belfort didn't like it, but he didn't specify and I don't speak Portuguese.  I do, however, speak English and a bunch of fighters use abusive language in the cage.  I'm lookin' at you, Diaz brothers.  They do it openly.  Just watch their fights and even though you can't see them, it doesn't take that much lip reading to see them calling their opponents pussies, bitches, punks, faggots and various other swear words, like fuck, that are generally regarded as abusive.  I don't know if Silva used abusive language - though it certainly looked like he did - but I do know that MMA . . . ignores it's own rules in this regard with great regularity.

More importantly than the question of whether or not Silva was disrespectful of Weidman, there's the issue of whether his behavior in that fight, and fights past, qualifies as a foul.  I'm pretty sure that could be determined.

For my own part, I don't really care if fighters swear at each other.  I find it slightly distasteful but I don't think it's a big deal.  However, what I hate is when rules are enforced selectively and we have the idiocy of seeing the president of the biggest MMA organization in the world pretending he doesn't know what "respect" is in the context of martial arts.  If there's a rule, enforce it.  If you don't want it to be a rule, take it out.  While you're at it, allow knee strikes to the heads of downed opponents.  That'll also clear up a bunch of messes and be awesome.

No more MMA superfights! This is a good thing.

While I'm busy recapping my various feelings, Silva's loss means that all the nonsense around "superfights" is off. 

Mostly, superfights are a stupid idea.  If Silva wanted to fight at welterweight, he would have fought at welterweight.  If GSP wanted to fight at middleweight, he would . . . assuming either fighter could either cut the weight or gain it to meaningfully participate in the other weight class.  We will no longer be subjected to the spectacle of Anderson Silva wanting to fight GSP, while dodging Jon Jones.  We will no longer see GSP make excuses about why this isn't the time to fight Anderson Silva, where he'd probably have twenty or twenty-five pound weight disadvantage . . . which is, no doubt, the same reason why Silva wasn't so hot to fight the bigger Jon Jones.

Now that lynchpin is pulled.  Silva is no longer desireable as some sort of superfight contender.  GSP won't be dodging him, Silva won't be dodging Jones.  The fighters can fight at their own weight classes and I'm, generally, comfortable with that.

(Yes, I KNOW that boxers often fight above their weight classes.  But boxing isn't like MMA in some serious ways, in this regard.  In particular, there are several promotions that have a fair bit of credibility and because boxers have so much control over their opponents, they can sorta . . . pick and choose.  And they do.  Which has it's good points and bad points, but boxers fighting above their best weight is often akin to something that can never happen in MMA - it would be like GSP going over to Bellator and kicking Alexander Shlemenko's ass.  It changes the complexion of fighting at different weight classes entirely if that sort of thing was possible.  The UFC dominated top talent in MMA, so there's no fudging around the different promotional championships to look for different kinds of championship fights.  I'm not judging the way boxing does things, but boxers do have this privilege.  So when Manny Pacquiao goes up in weight, he decides, more or less, who he's going to fight, not the guys who run the promotion.  This is a huge difference between how fights are made in boxing and how they're made in MMA.)

So, now Silva can either focus on a rematch with Weidman or take other fights, almost certainly as a middleweight, GSP can worry about dudes like Hendricks, Ellenberger, MacDonald - he's got things to do at welterweight, which has a large talent pool.  Jon Jones can beat up more people at light heavyweight, if they can find them, or go up to heavyweight without the specter of a "superfight" looming.  Let's set about that business.

Anderson Silva did not fight most of the best middleweights

As part of my series about burying Anderson Silva, I think it is important to realize that Silva didn't fight many of the best middleweights in the world, because arrogance kept them up at light heavyweight.

Fighters who SHOULD have been fighting at middleweight but can't resist the allure of being one of the big guys include: Shogun Rua, Lyoto Machida and Rashad Evans.  All of these guys are about normal sized for middleweights.  Much of Silva's best competition never fought him because of, well, ego and an unwillingness to cut weight.

It's hard to emphasize enough how bad Anderson Silva's competition has been.  Even guys like Sonnen, who had the skillset to beat him, suffered this bizarre contempt for BJJ and a kind of mental weakness - watch the second fight, after Sonnen misses with the spinning backfist, he falls down and sits there.  Like you can take a break in a championship fight!  And even guys like Dan Henderson - I mean, I love you, Hendo, but I'm going to be frank, here - well, he's 6-4 in the UFC . . . and if you discount his UFC 17 wins, back in 1998, he's 4-4; that's not the profile of a great UFC fighter, Dan's best years were in Pride).  And so many of Silva's fights have been against downright bad fighters, because so many of the best middleweights weren't fighting middleweight.  Not just Shogun, Machida and Evans, but guys like Michael Bisping and Tim Boetsch were wasting their time at light heavyweight for far too long.  But when Yushin Okami or Thales Leites seems a convincing championship title fight choice, let's face it, your division sucks.

(Even Vitor Belfort, who has been looking like a beast in his last two fights, well, we should remember his pretty . . . mediocre UFC record.  If you look at his fights after his first run in the UFC (when the sport was almost nothing like what it is, now), he's 7-5 and has never had more than a two fight winning streak in the UFC.  Sure, he's a good fighter, but thinking of him as a great fighter requires a lot of slight of hand.)

Compare to, say, GSP's opponents.  Jon Fitch was 15-4-1 in the UFC.  Josh Koscheck is 15-7.  Matt Hughes is 16-6.  GSP's next opponent, Johny Hendricks, is 10-1 in the UFC.  But even when you compare the best fighters in Silva's fightography you find that . . . their records are pretty mediocre.

Compare THAT to the UFC records of Lyoto Machida (11-3 in the UFC) and Rashad Evans (13-3-1) - bearing in mind both fighters are fighting above their weight class!

Silva is a very good fighter.  But when you look at the relative level of his competition, it really stinks and, specifically, key fighters who should have been fighting at middleweight were fighting at light heavyweight.  This tendency for fighters who should fight at middleweight to fight at light heavyweight has made LHW a very interesting division, but drained MW of most of it's best talent.  In many ways, MW is where fighters who can't win at LHW go, since so many LHWs are small for the weight class.