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.

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.

Prediction on Georges St-Pierre vs. Johny Hendricks in UFC 167

I'm going to make my prediction for Georges St-Pierre vs. Johny Hendricks in UFC 167.  I think Hendricks is going to lose and do so pretty badly.  Bearing in mind that fighters lie, I believe Hendricks when he says he's going to try to wade through GSP's punches.  It . . . is his style.  To the extent that he has a plan B, it will be ground and pound.

People mention the tough fight that Carlos Condit put on against GSP as evidence that Hendricks, who beat Condit, has a chance.  Of course he has a chance.  The guy throws with power.  But Condit isn't Hendricks.  One of the incredible advantages that Condit had that Hendricks doesn't have is the fact that Condit's coach, Greg Jackson, was also one of GSP's coaches for years.  Condit trained with guys who helped train GSP.  It is also worth mentioning that Condit was GSP's first opponent after his knee surgery and even then, well, despite Condit's spirited effort, on the majority of cards, Condit lost every round - even the one where he almost knocked out GSP.  Most significantly, though, is that Condit's weakness - wrestling - is Hendricks' strength.

Hendricks doesn't have Greg Jackson in his corner to give specific, detailed advice about GSP.  GSP will have no ring rust.

I also don't like Hendricks' camp, Team Takedown.  He seems to be the camp king and I don't think someone who is so much a prima donna in his own camp really has what it takes to beat GSP.  There's no one at Hendricks camp that will really push him because he's the big star, he's the chief guy.  Tristar, where GSP trains, would be one of the best camps in the world regardless of GSP.  They just have too many top guys.  Rory MacDonald, John Makdessi, Ivan Menjivar, Francis Carmont, Mark Bocek and Mike Ricci are a probably incomplete list of Tristar fighters currently in the UFC, not counting GSP.  They've also got people in pretty much every major promotion, including Rick Hawn who has won a couple of tournaments in Bellator.  Not only can I find no evidence that any of Team Takedown's fighters are in the UFC, I can't find any evidence of them in Bellator.  Maybe they are, but . . . it is far to say that the level of training that Hendricks is getting at Team Takedown isn't really up there with what GSP gets with dudes like Rory MacDonald and Francis Carmont.

Additionally, well, let us look at his record.  None of this is to say that Hendricks has fought cans, he hasn't, but here's my brief analysis of his most recent fights:

He got a decision win over Condit, who has a weakness for wrestling (one that GSP also exploited).  He knocked out Martin Kampmann in shortly in the first . . . I said before the fight that Kampmann chokes and I think that was part of it.  Kampmann is also a slow starter.  Hendricks got a split decision against the fading Josh Koscheck.  He knocked out Jon Fitch, who was fading even faster - Fitch never really recovered from his shoulder separation.  He had a split decision against Mike Pierce, knocked out the unremarkable TJ Waldburger and lost to Rick Story.

Yeah, lost to Rick Story.

I know it was three years ago and Hendricks isn't the same fighter as he was, but let's face it - when Hendricks fights dudes who can wrestle, his record isn't quite as impressive.  The loss to Story, a split decision over Mike Pierce, a split decision over Koscheck.  Sure, he knocked out an injured Fitch, who was already on the down side of his career, but take out that flash knockout, and Hendricks' record against skilled wrestlers is one loss and two split decisions in the past three years.  His dominate fighting style fades with guys who can resist the takedown or threaten him with a takedown, and even then he struggled really hard with Carlos Condit.

Georges St-Pierre is widely regarded to be the best MMA wrestler in the sport.  No, that's not right.  He is considered to be the best MMA wrestler to have thus far been in the sport.  But wait, that's not all!  He's also a quite talented striker!  He's a much better striker than, say, Josh Koscheck or Mike Pierce or Rick Story - in the same range as Carlos Condit, actually.

Which is where the whole "wade through the jab" particularly falls apart.  Wading through GSP's jab generally ends up with a guy looking like he's been hit with a truck.  It was what Koscheck tried to do in the first and GSP literally broke his skull - his orbital bone, to be precise.  It's what Fitch tried to do, back when Fitch was regarded a top ten pound-per-pound fighter.

This is a bad stylistic match-up for Hendricks.  I suspect the fight will expose Hendricks' limitations as a fighter, too.  While he absolutely, no doubt in my mind deserves a title shot, he's got flaws in his game.  His striking is crude.  He has no jujitsu to speak of.  He's a good wrestler with a good power shot - like Koscheck before him.  His training camp doesn't provide Hendricks with the best possible training - it's mediocre with one guy who's really good and it's been a while since a guy in a mediocre camp won a UFC strap.

I think it's going to be a hard night for Johny.  I think the cage door is going to close and he's going to realize he's trapped in there with GSP.  I hope Hendricks brings it hard.  But I suspect that he'll start to wilt, sooner rather than later.  He hasn't really ever fought anyone with a good, stiff jab combined with a superlative takedown defense - much less someone as good at sweeps as GSP.  Like . . . a number of fighters before him, he'll find that nothing he does works.  Most fighters, when this happens, start to turtle up and just try to survive.  Even Nick Diaz did it!  There is something so . . . crushing about GSP's fighting style that even Nick Diaz fought primarily to survive, particularly in ground fighting.  I don't know if Hendricks has the gumption to persevere in the face of that kind of style.  I hope so but suspect not, particularly because of his camp.  Mediocre camps don't do well with great fighters, they're not equipped to handle them on a lot of different levels and one of those levels is that they have no leverage with which to push the fighter.

Here's how I think the fight will go.

I think the most likely scenario is that GSP strikes from the outside with Hendricks and then when Hendricks tries to jump in to land a bomb, GSP takes him down where he will try to pass the guard.  GSP will almost certainly pursue a reactive shot - he won't want to be caught coming in by a counter left, as Hendricks did to Fitch.  He'll wait for Hendricks to throw bombs - which he always does - and then, when Hendricks is off-balance, hit the power double.  This will make Hendricks timid with striking, I should note, if he doesn't walk into the cage timid because he fears GSP's takedown.

(The defense against this is a more technical style of striking, one that won't put Hendricks off-balance when he uses it.  He has not been developing such a style and trying it in the cage with the champ is a bad place to start pursuing technical striking.  Even if that has been a priority in his camp, in the cage, what generally happens is they keep it tight for a round or so and then, when they start to get a little tired, their technique falls apart and leaves them vulnerable.)

If GSP passes the guard, he'll try to submit Hendricks with either a kimura at any time or an armbar late in the round.  I think if Hendricks tries to shrimp out, there's a very good chance that GSP will take his back and pursue the rear naked choke.  If GSP can't pass, he won't worry about Hendrinks' submission game and will use G&P in the guard.  If Hendricks can get up, wash, rinse, repeat.  GSP will confuse Hendricks by mixing up strikes and takedowns in that way he does that can lead to the total collapse of a fighter's offense.

Second most likely scenario, GSP commits to an outside striking game.  He's got a lot of reach on Hendricks and Hendricks striking is very Hendo-esque.  But GSP has such good headwork and footwork, the odds of Hendricks catching GSP are slight, especially fighting against what I think is an eight inch reach disadvantage.  When GSP gets the better of Hendricks in the striking, Hendricks will pursue the takedown, like he did with Condit.  He'll find that GSP has a very substantial takedown defense - even if he gets it, it will be hard and rare and he won't hold it.  Indeed, he might discover GSP's sweeps - but if GSP commits to striking, expect him to simply get up.  If it does get to the ground with Hendricks on top, GSP has such great wrist control that it wouldn't be wise to expect ground and pound from Hendricks, not in a serious sense.

In either case, expect head kicks.  GSP is a little taller than Hendricks - an advantage he hasn't had over another fighter in quite some time - so he'll try to pass over Hendricks shoulder with high kicks and even spinning high kicks.

So, really, I see GSP winning this fight everywhere.  I think that Hendricks one chance for victory is a lucky punch, like he got with Kampmann.  There, I said it.  Kampmann, who chokes and starts slow, got clobbered by a lucky punch from Hendricks.  GSP does neither and has better footwork and head motion than Kampmann, regardless.

(This is in contradistinction to Chris Weidman.  I thought Weidman had a good chance against Anderson Silva because Weidman has everything Hendricks has and then everything Hendricks doesn't have.  Weidman has a top rank camp lead by Ray Longo and Matt Serra but also including John Danaher and Renzo Gracie - top guys.  Weidman is also a much better striker than Hendricks and has excellent jujitsu to accompany his wrestling.  Chris Weidman isn't just a left hook and takedown, he's a well-rounded fighter who, as Anderson Silva learned, can't get you one way will catch you in another.  He's the total package.  He's the kind of guy who beats top talent because he is top talent.  Johny Hendricks is not a one trick pony, he's a two trick pony . . .  but let's be honest, that's not a lot of tricks.  Avoiding the left and stuffing the takedown isn't really advanced combat planning for people at GSP's level of the sport.  Johny Hendricks is no Chris Weidman.)

I'm curious to see what happens after the fight, win or lose, for GSP.  The truth is it's Rory MacDonald's time.  If MacDonald gets a good win, he's the obvious candidate for title shot and the two have said they will not fight.  People keep saying that GSP needs to move up in weight but I never liked that plan.  If anything, GSP has been growing progressively smaller relative to other fighters over the course of his career.  He would be downright tiny to modern middleweights.

When GSP started, he was quite a bit bigger than average, but now he's merely average in size and shrinking as weight cutting gets more and more extreme in MMA.  It has been said that he could get down to lightweight, which is quite possible.  He is about 185 and a lot of lightweights, nowadays, cut down from that much . . . and there isn't anyone at lightweight that GSP wouldn't really fight, whereas welterweight has MacDonald and middleweight has Weidman.

My prediction is GSP by unanimous and clear decision.  It think that somewhere in the late first or early second, Hendricks will have tried everything he's got - which isn't a long list - and find himself shut down, offensively.  Then he'll go almost totally on defense and lose badly.

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.

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.

Dana White is the UFC's big daddy, alright

One of the things I like the least about the UFC is how Dana White act the role of big daddy to all of the fighters.  Not only do I dislike that on a personal level and think it should be, well, illegal (and I think that many UFC fights have a real case to make for workplace harassment, which I believe is related), but it has hurt the career of fights I like, who have no interest in playing into Dana's daddy issues.  Fights like Jon Fitch and Roy Nelson have had their careers effected in large ways because of their unwillingness or inability to treat Dana White like their big daddy.

It can be hard to pin that down, though, that Dana sees himself as the patriarch to his fighter employees.  But, recently, he's showed his hand more than a little with Chris Leben.

Talking about Leben, Dana said, "His fight style isn't healthy for him, the way that he fights.  He's getting up there in age, and the big layoffs don't help him either.  I don't know. I've got to figure. I've got to figure out what I think will be best for him, which people hate when I say that and do that."

So, Dana has to figure out what's best for a 32 year old man, because White thinks that Leben's lifestyle isn't healthy for him?  Where does Dana White get the moral authority to make those kinds of decision for another adult?  Oh, he's the UFC's big daddy.

Look, Dana, I dig it that you love Chris Leben.  But you're not his father.  You're his boss.  And the right choice is easy.  Leben is shot.  He doesn't have what it takes to be in the UFC.  We all knew this day would come, and that it would come sooner rather than later because of his problems with substance abuse and his fighting style.  Yes, if you fire Leben, he'll have to cope with that, but he's an adult.  Yes, he has had problems with alcohol and drugs but there's nothing you can do to fix that.  Chris Leben has to fix it.  Like you, Dana, I wish him all the best, that he can find it inside of himself to stay away from booze and drugs.  I absolutely wish him the best and I recognize the road is long and hard.  But you're his boss. 

If you really want to be his friend and help him, fire him.  Then still be his friend, but don't expect it to be the same when you're not the guy signing his paychecks, when he's got no reason to think of you as an authority figure.  But it is cruel to keep him in the UFC to maintain your paternal hold over him.

Anyway, the idea that Dana White feels the moral authority to make decisions about Leben's health and well-being, rather than sticking to his fucking job as the president of the UFC, making decisions based on athletic and business criteria, is a pretty clear indication that Dana sees himself as more than his employee's boss - that he sees himself as a father figure to the fighters in his employee.

Chris Weidman does not need a rematch with Anderson Silva - that's absurd

Sometimes, it's vexing that only ten people read my posts, but I'll say it anyway: Chris Weidman does not need a rematch against Anderson Silva.  Weidmen, okay, I'm going to say this but it's true, Weidman dominated Silva.  When Anderson held up his hands, Chris took him down.  When Anderson kept his hands down, Weidman knocked him the fuck out.  I am not here to praise Silva but to bury him.

Silva is, without doubt, a great MMA fighter.  But let's face it, he's had just about as much luck as a man could have in his opponents.  Most of his opponents would have been gatekeepers, at best, in other weight classes - and we have examples of this, such as Demain Maia and Nate Marquart.  While Maia has done well at welterweight, Marquart has done less son; neither looks like championship material.  The subsequent careers of people like Patrick Cote and Thales Leites should indicate, as well, how absolutely mediocre many of Silva's opponents have been.  Travis Lutter didn't make weight for their championship tilt - he didn't make weight for a championship fight! - and he was weak and slow during the whole fight.  Yushin Okami has always been a C+ fighter, good at nothing in particular, but he's big and strong.

His notable wins are against Dan Henderson, a fighter whom I adore but has never been able to do as well in the Octogon as in other promotions, a pre-TRT Vitor Belfort and the workmanlike champion, Rich Franklin.  When one looks at the killer's row that every other champion (with the exception of heavyweight, which has always been the weakest division) has faced, Silva's opponents have been, generally, a sorry lot.

The only person who had Silva really threatened, before Weidman, was Chael Sonnen.  But Sonnen's contempt for Brazilian jiu jitsu cost him the first fight with a bare two minutes to go and Sonnen's mental collapse during their second fight lost him the battle, there.  Sonnen had all the physical skills to beat Silva but few of the mental ones.  Sonnen chokes at the highest levels of competition.

Silva's non-middleweight fights are worse.  James Irving?  Who cares?  Oh, then there is the mediocre Stephan Bonnar - an amusing fighter, at times, but why on earth was he in the same fucking cage as Anderson Silva?  Silva's luck abounds with his opponents.  (As it did with Forrest Griffin, too, who fought a stupid fight, winging shots, overreaching as Silva danced around him, rather than using his greater size and strength to take it to the ground where Griffin could have won the fight.  But, nope, Griffin dispensed with the kind of strategy that allowed him to beat Rampage and decided, instead, get into a fist fight with Silva!  If he'd fought that way against Rampage, the fight would have ended the same way.  Lucky, lucky Silva.)

Furthermore, what Silva did he did for a reason.  It was not hubris or arrogance.  In the first round, when Silva had his hands up, Weidman took him down and beat the shit out of him.  Silva has had, traditionally, good head movement, and with his hands down, he was in a much better position to stuff Weidman's takedowns.  Silva has won fights with shadow punches but it was clear Weidman had trained against that - he was not hurt by Silva at all.  But the strategy that Silva employed was out of necessity.  He needed his hands down to stay on his feet, which he needed to do to win, and he clowned around to try and get Weidman to charge in, swinging, so he could catch him with a shadow punch.  Alas, because for perhaps the first time in Silva's career, he fought a fighter who had actually prepared to fight him (including, apparently, dealing with Silva clowning him), one who had prepared to fight the fight that Silva fights . . . and he dominated.  Weidman dominated on the ground, he dominated standing up.  Weidman is the better fighter, or at least he was this time.

Rematch with Silva?  Yeah, Weidman beats Silva up in the first round, knocks him out in the second.  There is no need for a rematch.  Weidman ran away with it.

Facile reporting interpretations of Silva vs. Weidman

I also find it very interesting how superficial the fight analysis is - no one is really saying that Silva put his hands down for a reason, to help him sprawl out against Weidman's shot.  When Silva had his hands up, Weidman took him down.  When Silva had his hands down, he was able to sprawl out from the shot.  It's the dilemma that a striker fights a grappler.  If a striker unloads on the grappler, they've basically got one chance to win - a "puncher's chance".  Alternately, they can try to develop a strategy to stop the takedown from happening.  Silva did something he'd done before, something he did against Chael Sonnen and Forrest Griffin.  Put your hands down to push against the shoulders of a wrestler coming in for the shoot while trying to goad them into a fist fight.

They are also saying that Silva was arrogant (someone even used hubris) in the fight.  It wasn't arrogance on Silva's part.  He had done this very successfully in the past.  (And with middling results, too.  Demian Maia and Thales Leites refused to fall into the trap, which gave us weird, boring fights with Silva clowning to the point of absurdity.)  The difference between the clowning with Demian Maia, Thales Leites, Chael Sonnen and Forrest Griffin is that Chris Weidman has knockout power.  This dude hits hard, he can knock dudes out.  But the strategy Silva used he used against other fighter's, too, guys who definitely had the ability to beat him, like Sonnen.

Almost no one seems to have seen this.  It's the mystique of Silva.  The UFC has told us so often, it's been a constant loop, that Anderson Silva is an unbeatable killing machine, the greatest fighter of all time, blah, blah, blah.  This mystique has been a tremendous boon to Silva's career but as a result we don't really talk about the giant hole in Silva's game - wrestling - and how really good takedowns and a really good takedown defense change a fight.  We talk about it all the time with other fighters.  GSP fights a great striker, they frequently aren't that great because they're always worried about the takedown.  Or how Johny Hendricks can really swing bombs at dudes because he's so hard to take down.  Likewise, it is taken as normal when a very good striker fights a takedown artist that the striker's striking is going to be messed up.  This dilemma is well-known and well understood.  It's why Sonnen did as well with the striking as he did against Silva, it's why Weidman knocked Silva out, it's why Silva didn't put away Maia and Leites.  But to mention such things is to ice skate uphill against the UFC hype machine who has presented Silva as immune to the normal forces that shape fights.

Of course, it is no news to me that reporters suck.  Most of my posts are about how badly reporters suck, one way or the other.  You're probably not going to get very far as an MMA writer if you critique the UFC's hype machine.  Since almost no one wants to talk about the extent to which they are effected by advertising, to go against the UFC's hype machine is to align yourself against ideas that have been internalized not only by the audience but by other writers and editors of MMA journals.  You're stuck, like me, out here in the fringe.

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.

Afterword on UFC 143

I finally caught up on UFC 143 and I gotta say it was deeply satisfying to see Carlos Condit beat, and beat up, Nick Diaz. And while the fight was close - I scored it 49-46 though I admit the first round was close, and since two of the judges agreed with my scoring, and one gave the first to Diaz, I figure I was pretty spot on - it was definitely Condit's fight. Condit's striking was just too diverse, he was able to move and avoid Diaz's volume punching while connecting with his own strikes. At the end of the fifth round, Diaz was able to get him down and came quite close to submitting Condit with a rear naked choke - so Diaz stole that round, but even so at the very end Condit reversed it and was on top of Diaz. So, good fight, and a profound thank you to Carlos Condit for exposing the weaknesses in Diaz's game: that he fights every fight the same way and if you just plan for that, he can be beaten and, indeed, he can be caused to wilt (which definitely happened in the third and fourth rounds).

Bad news? Diaz won't get crushed by Georges St-Pierre. Instead, Condit will be crushed . . . though probably not as hard because Condit didn't call GSP a chicken. I almost wanted Diaz to win so GSP could beat him, but narrowly decided I'd rather see the Diaz hype train derailed sooner rather than later - and if Diaz lost to GSP, well, who in welterweight hasn't? But losing to Condit means that Diaz is just one of many contenders at welterweight, he isn't some dominant fighter.


The ridiculous news? Diaz is an ass. The first thing out of his mouth in the post-fight interview is how he didn't "accept" that Condit won. Diaz specifically said that he pushed forward the whole fight and landed the harder strikes. Diaz also disparaged Condit's brutal leg kicks that really slowed Diaz down in the later rounds. The first is true - Diaz did push forward. Into Condit's kicks again and again. But it a lie that Diaz landed the harder strikes. The hardest blows were definitely landed by Condit - a roundhouse kick to the face (well, he landed several, but one in particular) and a spinning forearm. And those leg kicks? Some of them were just savage. So, pathetic. Diaz lost, but he whined like a spoiled brat about it.

Then Diaz said he's going to leave MMA because . . . oh, Diaz mumbling BS. There's not enough in it for him or something. He has some fantasy that he can be a top level boxer which will earn him more money.

Which is sad. While Freddie Roach has said that Diaz is the best boxer in MMA - and who am I to disagree with Freddie Roach when it comes to judging a boxer's skill? - that's a far, far cry from saying that Diaz can be a successful professional boxer. Diaz's boxing is very good for MMA, that's undoubtedly true. But many of his fights in MMA he's won by submission. He's got top notch Brazilian jiu jitsu. You can't do that in boxing.

Not to mention the same weaknesses that Condit too advantage of - Diaz's basically lousy footwork - can also be taken advantage of in boxing. The same way Condit beat Diaz will work for any boxer. Diaz will come forward, so long as you disengage so he doesn't corner you and volume punch you into oblivion you'll do okay. And pro boxers, as a rule, have really great footwork. MMA guys? Not so much, because they've got to be canny about takedowns so they have a more square stance and don't move around as much. And Diaz has bad footwork for an MMA dude (which is why Condit landed so many leg kicks; Diaz is flat-footed and plodding).

My prediction if Diaz actually goes into boxing is that he'll get a couple of novelty fights. Oooooh, it's an MMA champion in a boxing ring! See the dog talk! Well, if they're low tier fighters, he'll win. If they're middle-tier fighters, he will lose. Diaz will never be a top level boxer getting the big paychecks he imagines he'll win - and in short order, he'll be getting smaller paychecks than he would be getting in MMA where he is a legitimate title contender. He'll never be that in boxing.

So, not only pathetic that he's leaving MMA with his tail between his legs because he got whipped by Condit (c'mon, man, learn to lose, it's part of all sports!), but it's stupid. And sad.

(It also makes me wonder what his manager, Cesar Gracie, is doing with his money. Diaz lives a very modest lifestyle. Last year, he earned at least $1.1 million in just paychecks for his fights. With promotions and such, it was probably at least twice as much. So, you've got this guy who lives with two other dudes in an apartment in Stockton - he doesn't even live there alone, he shares a place - he drives a crappy car, while I'm sure he spend a fair bit on weed it's not that expensive given his wealth. But he's always whining about how he doesn't have money. Diaz would hardly be the first fighter to be taken advantage of by his manager. But if that's the case, even if he could be a top flight boxer, he'll still be ripped off by Cesar Gracie.)

Next, someone will have to come in and stop the Nate Diaz hype train. Sure, he had a goon win over Cowboy Cerrone, but that's because Cerrone came out and fought an angry and stupid fight. I'm sure a disciplined Cerrone would have won that fight . . . and I think that everyone, from now on, will train not to fall for the Diaz brothers' cage tricks like the "Stockton slap" and the trash talk. Not to mention that from now on, Nate is deep in the shark pool of lightweight. It doesn't get easier from here, so, go Dan Miller, who is a legit contender.

Other noteworthy things? Hell, yeah, Dustin Poirier's mounted triangle armbar was wicked. And Stephen Thompson's karate KO was pretty nifty, too - and the announcing was great. It was Thompson's first UFC fight, and it didn't look like he was hitting with a lot of power, and Joe Rogan was walking about how Thompson was definitely hitting Stittgen and styming Stittgen's offense but it didn't look like he'd hurt Stittgen and as Joe was saying that Thompson laid out Stittgen. Hell, yeah, karate! So, that was cool.

I also think welterweight has turned over. Josh Koscheck won his fight by a razor's margin split decision and I agreed with the minority judge. But with Jon Fitch having been KO'd in his last fight, with Josh Koscheck's uninspired victory over a very modest fighter, Jake Shield's getting clobbered by Ellenburger and Thiago Alves having already self-destructed, I think that there's going to be a whole new cast at the top of welterweight - Carlos Condit, Jake Ellenburger, Diego Sanchez and before too long Rory MacDonald. I also think that Thiago Alves can go back up to the top if he overcomes his fear of wrestling. But a lot of the old guard the UFC wants to put aside because and they're largely at the end of their careers, anyway.

I was sad Ed Herman won because he's a jerk, but he's finally become the fighter everyone thought he was when he was on The Ultimate Fighter. He might be a force to deal since middleweight is going to turn over very soon - Anderson Silva only has a couple more fights in him, and he's got a really tough test against Chael Sonnen, who came within a hair's breadth of beating Silva last time they fought. And regardless if Silva wins (and I hope he does), he won't be fighting too much longer. He's thirty-six and he's got injuries. He's got maybe two more fights in him.

I think Renan Barão is going to be fighting Dominick Cruz very soon. I think it will be a good fight, judging how Barão fought against Scotty Jorgensen (who Cruz also fought, so there is some grounds for comparison). And I like Scotty Jorgensen, but I don't think he's going to be a top guy at 145 for much longer - he doesn't seem to be developing. Oh, well.

Georges St-Pierre, Fighting Safe and It Takes Two

Recently, Chris Lytle submitted Dan Hardy. Even more recently, Jake Ellenburger knocked out Jake Shields. In both instances, part of the story was that Georges St-Pierre did neither. The narrative rules thus, “Because inferior fighters like Chris Lytle and Jake Ellenburger finished Dan Hardy and Jake Shields, this is proof that GSP fights ‘safe’.”

It’s a very interesting narrative because I don’t think it has much basis in fact.

The first time I noticed it was after Matt Serra knocked out GSP. The rumors abounded that GSP had no heart to be punched, and his subsequent fights didn’t dispel this notion. He dominated Josh Koscheck and submitted Matt Hughes so completely that one might think it was true GSP didn't want to be punched - so, great performances by GSP, his incredible defense, were transformed into strikes against him. I found this very bizarre. Like getting punched was, somehow, a virtue in MMA.

Serra vs. GSP II was pretty interesting in the context of the narrative around GSP. When GSP immediately took Serra down, Eddie Bravo (filling in for Joe Rogan) talked about how that was a conservative strategy. In Eddie Bravo’s world, ground fighting with a high level Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt trained by Renzo Gracie is “conservative” instead of, oh, a demonstration of GSP’s utter confidence in his ability to dominate Serra on the ground. Which GSP then proceeds to do.

It gets worse in the second around. Even while GSP is destroying Serra’s internal organs in alphabetical order with some of the most brutal knee strikes seen in MMA, Eddie Bravo is talking about how conservative GSP is fighting. Even as GSP crushed Matt Serra, this was the narrative, even though the evidence against that narrative was literally happening in front of Bravo.

Since then, that narrative has taken on a life of it’s own because GSP hasn’t finished four opponents, though he has often dominated them. The idea that he's fighting safe has simply become accepted by large parts of the MMA community, even though the evidence against it right there. But, like Eddie Bravo, they refuse to see it.

When you look at GSP's fights, the truth is you find an extremely active fighter with an arsenal of diverse MMA techniques second to none. He throws many standing strikes, he has great takedowns and ground and pound, he's good at submissions. Indeed, one of the characteristic elements of GSP's style is he often goes after a fighter where he's strong - so he'll stand up with fighters like Thiago Alves, but take fighters like Jon Fitch to the ground.

Still, I think I do know why GSP doesn't finish more opponents. It's not because he doesn't fight - it's because they don't fight. GSP's opponents since Jon Fitch have not meaningfully tried to mount an offense against GSP. Even if they're aggressive against other opponents, against GSP they become timid, if not outright cowardly.

Really, if you look at GSP’s fights, he throws a lot of risky techniques and often meets fighters were they’re strongest in order to overwhelm them. This is not a particularly conservative strategy, it is not being risk adverse. You can’t throw a spinning high kick in a risk adverse way! But it’s one of GSP’s favorite techniques.

Well, my friends, it takes two to tango. It was almost a foregone conclusion that GSP vs. Fitch would go the distance. Fitch is a grinder with a really hard head and great submission defense. His entire fighting style is to neutralize his opponent’s offense . . . which he managed to do just barely enough to stop getting knocked out or submitted.

But things get really interesting when you look at GSP vs. BJ Penn II. Many people thought that Penn beat GSP in their first fight, and even GSP fans would generally concede that Penn got the better of GSP in striking. A lot of people thought that Penn was a bad stylistic match-up for GSP - Penn's got a great takedown defense and really fast hands with knockout power. Penn is also a notoriously aggressive fighter.

And let's look at Penn's offense. In four rounds, BJ Penn threw 37 significant strikes. Oh, sure, you might say, but most of the fight took place with Penn on the ground and GSP grinding him out. Yet, of standing strikes, GSP threw 47 strikes (landing 30) and Penn . . . threw 27 strikes (landing a mere 8). GSP launched almost twice as many attacks, standing, as BJ Penn.

Penn was supposed to want the fight standing, but even standing, GSP just tore him apart. And GSP was the clear aggressor. Penn was the person avoiding GSP, not GSP avoiding Penn. That's not even counting that all the takedowns (4 total) and seven of the eight takedown attempts were by GSP.

So, really, who fought the conservative fight there? The guy doing the punching, kicking and takedowns, or the guy who didn't do those things? BJ Penn is supposed to be one of those iron willed fighters who always goes forward - but that's just not true in his fight against GSP. He fought timidly, refusing to engage GSP both on the feet and on the ground.

In GSP’s fight with Thiago Alves, Alves was timid. I mean, I love Alves. He’s got shotgun shells for shins. He turns over a low kick like no one else. And if he’d been willing to use that against GSP. . . but, no, during the stand-up, Alves attacked GSP often, but timidly. Alves was so frightened of GSP’s various abilities that he landed only 19% of his blows - about half his average. Like with Penn, Alves was supposed to have the advantage in striking.

It was a pretty sad spectacle, watching the normally aggressive Alves unwilling to commit to attacks. He threw a fair number of blows, more than GSP, but GSP hit much, much more - almost three times as much - because one of them was committing to the attack. It wasn't Alves.

Worthy of note, Alves has some of the best leg kicks in MMA. He threw only fifteen significant leg strikes at GSP during the whole fight - even though it is one of this best attacks and was landing half of them.

(Of all the fights I'm going to talk about, this one is the hardest to say that Alves was timid. I've watched many Alves fights, most of them several times, and Alves was timid against GSP, and often against wrestlers. You can see this same timidity in the first two rounds of Alves' fight with Rick Story. Rather than throwing aggressive techniques, Alves was active on paper but when you watch the fight it's clear he's holding back. How much he was holding back became clearer in the third round when Alves tore Story apart. Alves can get timid around wrestlers, generally, failing to commit to attacks because he doesn't want to be taken down. This is a serious flaw in his fighting style and lost him title contention for the near future.)

Hardy wasn’t particularly timid, but let’s face it, we all know it, he had no right being in the same cage with GSP. People wonder why GSP didn’t finish him, they say his armbar technique was sloppy . . . but I’ll tell you what I think. GSP pitied Dan Hardy. Hardy was the opposite of a threat to GSP, so rather than cripple the man, GSP went light.

But still, Hardy was in a cage fight against GSP. To win, you’ve got to attack. How often did Hardy attack? In 25 minutes, Hardy attempted 27 significant strikes - that’s slightly more than one a minute - and connected with 4. He tried no takedowns, no submission attempts. Hardy’s entire offensive output was one punch a minute. At no point did the Outlaw try to seriously fight GSP.

(And against Chris Lytle, Hardy was not the same fighter. Against GSP, he was the spunky underdog that had, through highlight reel comebacks, had earned a title shot against GSP. Against Lytle, Hardy was 0-3, not having won since before GSP. Saying Hardy was beaten before he ever got into the cage is, I think, fair.)

Next up was Josh Koscheck. GSP “conservatively” punched Koscheck, punishing Kos with 110 significant blows, 70 to the head. But a clear part of that fight was Koscheck’s lack of meaningful offense. While GSP launched his 136 significant strikes, Koscheck only attempted 30 and landed only 16 - less than one a minute. Remember, almost all of this fight was standing. Unlike the Hardy fight, you can't actually say that GSP used his wrestling to neutralize Koscheck's offense. Koscheck had as many attempts to strike at GSP as GSP had to strike at Koscheck. It's just Koscheck didn't take them.

In the fourth and fifth rounds, Koscheck only attempted one significant strike. In ten minutes, he tried to punch GSP once. And takedowns? Koscheck tried only 4 times, all of them in the first round. Which means in rounds four and five, Koscheck’s entirely offensive activity consisted of one punch. But the whole fight was Koscheck tentatively approaching GSP, getting hit and backing off - pretty much the whole damn fight.

After that it was Jake Shields and Shields wasn’t timid. He just cheated. Gouging your opponent is a good way to win, but a serious part of Shield’s strategy was to keep GSP off of him. He fought with his hand out, his fingers out towards GSP’s eyes, making it hard for GSP to approach without getting gouged. And GSP did get gouged. Five times. This fight was a travesty, let’s face it. It should have been stopped and Shields disqualified for his repeated gouges and then kicked out of the UFC for willfully endangering another fight.

To sum up, it takes two to fight. GSP is an aggressive fighter. He throws a lot of strikes, he does a lot of takedowns - but what if the other fighter only wants to survive the fight? What if you’re Thiago Alves and you refuse to use your strongest weapon? Or you’re Dan Hardy or Josh Koscheck or BJ Penn and you’re barely in the fight at all? Or you’re Jake Shields who just cheats.

Oh, and what about GSP’s “heart”. Sure, he doesn’t get hit very often, because no one seriously attacks him. When one fighter refuses to attack another, it’s very hard for the aggressive fighter to knock his opponent out. A perfect example of this are Anderson Silva's fights against Demian Maia and Thales Leites. Silva couldn’t put either away - and both Leites and Demian Maia had a greater offensive output than Dan Hardy and Josh Koscheck. Or Nate Quarry vs. Kalib Starnes. There was no possible way that Quarry could have finished Starnes . . . but Starnes fought harder than Hardy and Koscheck, given the fight was three rounds.

GSP doesn’t finish guys because they do not, in general, fight him. They either fight him timidly, failing to commit to their attacks, which is how Alves fought. Or they don’t mount any serious offense at all, such as with Penn, Koscheck and Hardy. Or they fight dirty, like Shields did.

GSP has broken the will of the entire welterweight division. Since GSP brutally punished Jon Fitch, his opponents have gone into the cage trying to survive, that’s all.

Unlike a grinder, who takes an opponent down and uses top control wrestling to shut down their foe’s offense, GSP is quite willing to stand up and trade blows. He did it with Alves, he did it with Koscheck and Shields. But he’s usually the only guy seriously throwing. He’s trying to get into a fight, and he gets timidity, backpedalling and lack of any serious offense at all - or cheating.

So, a shadow of Dan Hardy got submitted by Chris Lytle. Yes. But Hardy fought a totally different fight against Lytle. To wit, Hardy fought it. Against GSP, Hardy threw a meager 27 significant strikes. Against Lytle, Hardy threw 238 significant strikes. Naturally, with Hardy winging blows with abandon, with no defense, it shouldn’t be surprising that Lytle was able to submit him. Hardy fought a stupid fight and he lost.

Likewise with Shields and Ellenburger. I’m guessing fighters and referees are now watching for the eye pokes. But instead of trying to keeping Ellenburger away, Shields instead charged in for takedowns with no attempt at defense. He fought stupid and got knocked out. How does that reflect on GSP? Shields fought a totally different fight - a cleaner, dumber fight - and got caught. (Not to mention that Shields’ dad died three weeks before. It is hard for me to count that loss too much against Shields, and I think the dude should have been kicked out of the UFC when the amount of cheating he performed against GSP became evident.)

Fighters fight timidly against GSP, so he can’t finish them. Just like Anderson Silva could not finish Thales Leites or Demian Maia and Nate Quarry could not finish Kalib Starnes; it’s hard to fight a guy running away from you. You watch Carlos Condit, next. Watch how he comes out. What he’s learning from Winklejohn, right now, is that there is nothing he does that GSP doesn’t do better. Condit will have to make a decision. He will have to decide either to fight GSP like he has fought everyone else, in which case we’ll see Condit go out on his shield, or he will spend the whole fight looking for a weak spot that simply is not there . . . the fight will go long, and Condit will probably see all five rounds. (I hope that doesn’t happen. I hope Condit tries to win, I seriously do, rather than meekly pressing the attack and hoping for GSP to make a mistake. But I believe that what we'll factually see is a timid, meek Condit.)

If you look at the numbers and kinds of attacks GSP uses, he is an extremely active fighter against unusually timid opponents. He does not grind. He throws a lot of leather, he does takedowns, he tries submissions. But when the other guy is focusing solely on surviving the fight, well, these are the best fighters in the world. They’re probably going to make it.

However, the narrative is that GSP is a conservative fighter. He’s a “safe” fighter. Perhaps so. I don’t think this is a slur. The guy is almost impossible to hit or take down and that’s a testament to his incredible skill. But if the other fighters don’t launch a sustained offense, how on earth can GSP finish them? It takes two to fight.

It also means that when someone else finishes a fighter GSP did not finish, it means nothing. The narrative that GSP is somehow a timid fighter is bizarre and absurd. It’s his opponents who are timid, when fighting him.

PS with Anderson Silva. And, in comparison, Anderson Silva is lucky in his opponents. Yushin Okami, after getting rocked twice by Anderson Silva, pressed ahead, anyway, winging clumsy blows at Silva. As one BEer said, the secret hero of UFC Rio was Okami. He decided to go out on his shield. Vitor Belfort stuck right in the pocket, right in front of Anderson Silva, and paid the price for his aggression.

You can even see it happen. In Silva’s fight with Forrest Griffin, Silva goaded Griffin into the attacks that allowed the counterpunch that drove Forrest’s will to fight right out of his body, never to return. Silva did the same thing against Hendo - instead of sticking to the gameplan, Dan Henderson decided to get into a punching match with Silva and paid the price.

Silva is an incredible fighter, but much of his legend must be attributed to the people he fights. As a rule, they are there to fight. The come forward, even when it’s foolish or even hopeless to do so.

But when faced with fighters who fight like the fighters GSP fights - people like Maia and Leites, except GSP's opponents are more generally skilled than Maia or Leites - Silva fares no better than GSP. Indeed, he fares worse because Silva is a more defensive fighter than GSP and, unlike many of his opponents, Silva can not be swayed from his game plan. Even if it makes him look ridiculous.

It really takes two to fight. Silva is fortunate that his weight class is filled with so many brawlers and tough guys. That Silva can get matched up against Rich Franklins and Forrest Griffins and and Dan Hendersons instead of Josh Koschecks, Dan Hardys and Thiago Alveses.

Which is why after GSP takes apart Condit, I hope he goes up in weight. I think Chris Leben would be a good first fight for GSP. It would draw an instant comparison with Anderson Silva, who’s first UFC fight was with Leben, it would be exciting because Leben is definitely a “go out on your shield” type of fighter, and we would get to see how GSP handles a brawler. My guess would be “easily”. I believe that GSP at middleweight would produce more interesting fights . . . until GSP crushed the division’s will to fight, too.