Steven Seagal is not one to rest on his almost US$775,000,000.00 lifetime box office laurels, as proven by his incursion into training teammates Anderson Silva and Lyoto Machida how to, ahem, kick lethally. (There would be no mention here on the exact kind of KO kick that the Black House fighters successfully executed as you must know it by now…Ok, for the less informed, it can be referenced from part one of a 1980s teen martial arts flick. Or from an aviary.)
It’s also true that Seagal is the first foreigner to run an Aikido dojo in Japan. To Americans, he is to traditional martial arts what Neil Armstrong is to space exploration.
So what if his expertise is sought by UFC’s current middleweight champion and MMA‘s pound-for-pound king? Along with the former light-heavyweight champion?
Jeff Wagenheim of Sports Illustrated‘s “Inside MMA” best articulates the contrary opinion:
I have nothing against Seagal’s martial arts background…although with him apparently having spent so much time in dojos over the years, I would have expected him to have learned a little humility. I didn’t miss his comment about Bones being “so much better” than what he showed, just as I didn’t miss his smirk when interviewer Ariel Helwani asked him about the Jones front kick that didn’t quite connect … whereupon Seagal suggested that it hadn’t landed because “I haven’t taught it [to Jones] yet.” Do you really, truly believe he taught Silva and Machida how to kick?
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Steven Seagal isn’t a laughable buffoon whose straight-to-video movie career is so feeble that he has to grab attention wherever he can find it, which unfortunately at the moment means sticking his nose into the UFC world. Maybe he truly is the sensei to whom Brazil’s greatest fighters bow down as teacher. If so, Jon Jones is in a whole lot of trouble, because he declined Seagal’s offer to visit before the Rampage fight, and his next bout is against Machida, one of Steven’s guys. Add a melodramatic score from Taiwan and some dubbed dialogue, and we have the makings of one heck of a martial arts action movie. Straight to video, naturally.
Here’s also an allegation from Portal do Vale-tudo, a magazine from Silva and Machida’s home country itself, stating that it could all be a public relations coup targeting North American fans:
The declaration of the champion Anderson Silva (Seagal helping him with the amazing kick) was contemplated with humor by the fans, who knows that the actor was at most twice with the Brazilian.
The approach between the two was actually a marketing maneuver planned by the agent of Anderson, Jorge Joinha, to give more visibility to its champion in the American media. The plan worked very well in the first stage, the problem was in the wrong dose and reached the absurdity of assigning a brilliant victory by the biggest name in MMA of all time to a “Master of Hollywood” who never climbed in the ring. The worst of all is that Seagal, perhaps influenced by some of his films, believed and even stated in several interviews after the fight that “He (Anderson) did everything the way I taught him and made me very proud”. For God’s sake…
And Aikido being a mostly “reactive” martial art with fantastic wrist throws, from my admittedly layman’s understanding (by “layman’s understanding” I mean unaided by Google), I find this to be a valid question: Just when, where and from whom did Seagal learn to strike effectively in the first place?
In any case, I don’t think we’ll find Jones’s top-of-the-line MMA trainer Greg Jackson frequenting cockfights anytime soon before UFC 140 (Jones vs. Machida), to discover a novel defense-and-counter-attack technique from another feathered species…
Or will he?
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