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.

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.

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!

Ronda Rousey might not be very good for MMA's image

For my own part, I don't care if she's good for MMA's image.  For crying out loud, it's a semi-legal fistfight in a cage.  Pretending that sports in general and MMA in particular encourage good, upstanding people is an exercise in futility.  They are people looking for a legal way to beat the shit out of other human beings.

That said, the UFC is pretty interested in creating a good image for MMA.  Which is why they are forced, against their personal preferences, to support a fighter like Georges St-Pierre.  He's so wholesome, amirite?  They initially tried to pitch John Jones like that, a good Christian family man, but he turned out to be too weird.

I think they're making a slightly different, but related, mistake with Rousey.  Unlike Jones, who is hard to like because he's weird, Rousey is hard to like because she's so petty and mean.

So, recently, she said she would love to "beat the shit" out of Brian Caraway, Miesha Tate's boyfriend, because of stuff he said on Twitter.  She won't because she thinks he's the kind of "bitch" who would "sue". (Perhaps she doesn't understand that assault is generally charged under criminal statues and the real risk is prison.)

She is hardly, of course, the first fighter to hate another fighter.  (Though it is, perhaps, the first time a championship fighter has had such a public fight with two other fighters who are a couple.)  And it's interesting to see such an aggressive woman (though, let's be fair, she's doing something I find pretty chickenshit - she's the one hiding, saying she'd beat up so-and-so if not for the law . . . . I mean, I feel the same way, I'd totally beat the shit out of John Jones except it's against the law; that's what's stopping me, the law, really, I swear) but the more she opens her mouth, the more shallow, petty and mean she comes off.

Seriously, you'd beat a guy up because of what he says on Twitter?  Ronda, grow up.  It's fucking Twitter.  You don't want to get bent out of shape?  Stop going on Twitter.  Or use some sort of filter so you never see or hear what Tate and Caraway say.  It's not that hard.

But, no, she's the kind of person who gets bent out of shape over Twitter and then says she'd beat someone up if the law didn't stop her.  Ugh.  That's so . . . thirteen year old asshole on the Internet.  The faux bravery ("I'd beat them up IF . . .") combined with the juvenile rationale for the problem.  Rousey ends up looking, to me, like a twerp, a childish Internet bully who just happens to know how to armbar people.

I suspect there's going to be a Frank Shamrock thing going on.  Sure, she's the baddest woman in the world - well, except when she dodges fights with Cris Cyborg, so the second baddest woman in the world, let's be honest - but, like Shamrock, she's a not-too-bright bullying asshole.  She is going to remind people that MMA is a sport of brutal jerks.  For a bit, little girls will go, "I want to be like her!"  But, like Shamrock, as time goes on and she becomes absurd, those same people will sigh and shake their heads, reminding themselves that they were children when they admired her.