With so much talk of which fighter will be the next pay-per-view superstar of MMA and who is really the greatest of all time, people can forget even great fighters of the recent past—unless their name is Georges St-Pierre.
It’s been over 16 months since St-Pierre retired and left his championship in the cage.
Since that time, the sport that he served so well has been taxed to fill the void he left behind after his controversial victory over Johny Hendricks at UFC 167. As always, we are left wondering if he will ever come back because even GSP doesn‘t seem to know.
But it was clear that he needing something else and thus he stepped away, now a man of means, to embark on the next stage in his life.
Since then, the UFC has tried its best to forget or ignore the fact that the greatest welterweight in MMA history is no longer active. Pay-per-view sales have gone down significantly, and the next hope for a Canadian MMA champion—Rory MacDonald—seems like a long shot given how competitive the welterweight division is.
And that is when we appreciate just how great GSP was; the welterweight division was just as competitive when he was king, yet he was so damn consistent that he turned away even great fighters like Carlos Condit, time after time.
When GSP took the title from Matt Serra in their rematch in 2008, very few thought the Canadian king would ever control the throne like his predecessor, Matt Hughes. To think he would surpass one of the greatest fighters in MMA history in the welterweight division seemed like a pipe dream.
Very rarely does the fighter who ends the reign of a great champion become an even greater champion; it’s like lightning striking the same person twice in the same location.
Yet that was exactly what St-Pierre did, albeit after an initial stumble at UFC 69.
Like Hughes, GSP is a former two-time welterweight champion. Yet when looking at title reigns, St-Pierre stands alone as the only champion in UFC welterweight history to defend his title nine consecutive times, nearly doubling the record of Hughes.
Of course, he was also elevated by the company he kept during his time as the UFC welterweight king. He was mentioned frequently—often in the same breath as Anderson Silva—whenever talk began about the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport, and those debates were as heated then as they are now.
That kind of consideration speaks volumes for a fighter; detractors are not given credence in such conversations because the body of a fighter’s work is really the only thing that matters, especially to his peers. Fans of the sport may be quick to dismiss many of St-Pierre’s opponents for this reason or that, but his peers have never been of the same mind, which is important to note.
Fighters appreciate great accomplishments just as much as they covet them, and the fact that they regard St-Pierre with such respect is a clear sign that his accomplishments in the sport are significant.
If that is not enough, we need only look at the current title picture of the division to appreciate the consistency he was able to impose.
Hendricks, the man whom many St-Pierre detractors crowed so loudly about, lost the title almost as soon as he had won it. His successor, Robbie Lawler, is scheduled for first defense against MacDonald.
Will Lawler succeed? That is a serious question given the tools and styles of both fighters. But if either man was facing St-Pierre, his chances of victory would be greatly diminished and our excitement subdued due to the dominant nature of GSP‘s style in the later stage of his career.
And that is where we find the rub in our appreciation for such a man. No fighter is perfect, just as no title reign is breathtaking at all turns. The tale of St-Pierre has always seemed to be an epic saga of not one man, but two: Rush and GSP.
The former was a machine who ran over the opposition, crushing them underfoot in order to gain the crown. The latter was a machine of a different sort, intent of maximizing advantage and minimizing risk in order to keep what the former had earned.
Obviously, both were opposite sides of the same coin, but in retrospect, fans will no doubt be divided as to which side they miss most. Diehard fans will applaud both sides, and rightly so; however, just as a man is not the sum of his lesser parts, a champion is not the sum of his record alone—how a fighter wins is still an important consideration in the combative sports, and it always will be.
But while bickering will continue about the worth of Rush versus GSP, another fact seems to be lost.
St-Pierre brought true gravitas to the sport, his title and the division. He was an honest man in a sport that ridicules such honesty when it admits fear, yet St-Pierre was utterly fearless when confronting his own fears in the most public of ways.
He had no need of promotional bravado; he was able to draw large audiences without the inflammatory oratory style of men such as Conor McGregor or his predecessor, Chael Sonnen. He did this because he, like all of us, was vulnerable to defeat; it pained him greatly to lose, and in that pain we found a man we could identify with. After all, who among us could say that being crushed by an opponent wouldn’t affect us or how we saw ourselves in the eyes of the public?
If anything, examining the career of St-Pierre shows us that even the strongest must still remain human—and that the fears of the common man (or woman) exist on all levels and at all times yet are still subject to great desire and will yield to great courage and discipline.
No, he wasn’t perfect, but he was perfectly human and remains, to this day, an inspiration for many who want to accomplish great things in a sport that doesn’t seem designed to reward the better angels of the human spirit.
This is the career retrospective of St-Pierre, the greatest welterweight champion in the history of the sport.