Author: Erik Schmidt

From Button-Ups to Blood, Rory MacDonald Is UFC’s Most Confusing Fighter

At face value, Rory MacDonald seems like the world’s best-dressed serial killer. But maybe he’s just a man of glaring contradictions.
He speaks with a slow, hesitant drawl, as if every word coming out is scraping the roof of his mouth. His …

At face value, Rory MacDonald seems like the world’s best-dressed serial killer. But maybe he’s just a man of glaring contradictions.

He speaks with a slow, hesitant drawl, as if every word coming out is scraping the roof of his mouth. His eyes are permanently transfixed in an emotionless gaze that makes you wonder what on earth is going on in the brain that lies just behind them. The guy is so cold and distant in interviews, and so remorseless in his promises of blood and pain inside the Octagon, that I’m beginning to wonder if Dexter was based on a true story. While on a UFC media conference call (h/t MMA Mania), MacDonald said of opponent Jake Ellenberger:

I don’t really care. It doesn‘t really bother me either way, I don’t really care about the disrespect or whatever. I just get in there and fight my fight. If they suffer, they suffer. I don’t really care if they’re nice or if they’re an a–hole.

Creepy. MacDonald is the Albert Fish of mixed martial arts. And that’s not a compliment.

But then you see his full body of work as a human being and it’s obvious the 24-year-old Canadian is a man of layers. He has complexities and multitudes that could leave a FBI profiler running for cover. He dresses like an issue of GQ came to life and attacked him; his button-down shirts fit him a size too small, his ties are skinny and sleek, as if a silk snake was slithering down his chest, and he’s been known to rock knee-length raincoats when he’s already inside and decidedly dry.

Oh, and then there are the sweaters. Good lord, the sweaters. MacDonald has a million of them, each one flamboyantly fancier than the last—buttons and pockets and tassels galore over fabrics made from the finest cottons and wools. Then he tops the whole look off with some thick-framed shades and greased back hair ripped from Don Draper fantasy camp.

 If MacDonald is a monstrous killer, he sure is a fabulous one. And that’s the conundrum. What is this kid really about? Who is he? What does he want? And seriously, where does he buy those sweaters?

There have been other fighters with the same morbid demeanor and business-like approach to pounding plasma out of people’s foreheads. Fedor Emelianenko practically invented it. But, unlike MacDonald, Emelianenko actually played the part through and through. He lived in Russia’s distant wilderness and spent his free time smashing giant tires with a sledgehammer and beating up grizzly bears. He prayed to God for fashion advice. Everything about him made sense in a nonsensical way. He was a mystery mountain man who acted like every moment of his career was taking place in a molasses mudslide, and it worked.

MacDonald doesn’t make any sense. He’s all over the place. One minute he’s hanging with buddy Mike Ricci in high-priced designer jeans, the next he’s staring into an interviewer’s soul and pledging a slow-cooked slaying with fixings of broken bones.

I get it. People can have dichotomies. But metro and mental? It’s as jarring as Ray Lewis in a tutu. But it sure makes MacDonald intriguing.

Throw in his youth and elite fighting acumen, and this might just be the most interesting fighter in the UFC. Add his friendship and stout allegiance to Georges St-Pierre, the man standing between him and a sparkling new accessory (championship belts and cardigans complement each other perfectly), and all the pondering over whether he’ll fight him or move to middleweight, and you got a living, breathing question mark.

On Saturday, MacDonald faces Jake Ellenberger who is as single-minded and simple as MacDonald is confusing. Ellenberger, also known as “The Juggernaut”, runs over people like a big green tractor plows through open field in his home state of Nebraska. It will be a clash of a known commodity and a swirling abyss of uncertainty. Ellenberger has both beaten and lost to elite welterweights (Jake Shields, Carlos Condit, Martin Kampmann), while MacDonald’s biggest win is fittingly over B.J. Penn, who is also one giant head scratcher. The winner will be on the fast track to a title shot.

Or will he?

If Ellenberger wins, he’d be at most one more fight away from the title. He would be 9-2 in the UFC with consecutive wins over top-10 opponents and is one of the few welterweights left who hasn’t already been horizontally annihilated by GSP.

But MacDonald? An impressive victory here might force his hand. To do what, we can’t be sure, but topping the No. 4 fighter in the division doesn’t leave him anywhere to go but up.

And up is St-Pierre, MacDonald’s forbidden fruit. His last temptation. 

At that point it’s fight or flight. MacDonald will either have to flee the division or combat his friend, and something behind those dead eyes tells me that despite his promises, MacDonald will be doing the latter.

It all adds to the intrigue of what should make for the best—and most important—fight this Saturday. Another day, another layer to the confounding onion (or cake) that is Rory MacDonald. Maybe after he fights Ellenberger we’ll get a firmer grasp on what he’s really about.

Or maybe we’ll be that much further away.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

It’s Clear Georges St-Pierre Could Never Beat Anderson Silva

If Georges St-Pierre isn’t practicing the flying scissor heel hook religiously by now, perhaps he’d better start. The indomitable welterweight champ went out against Nick Diaz at UFC 158 and did what he always does, which is to say he was a…

If Georges St-Pierre isn’t practicing the flying scissor heel hook religiously by now, perhaps he’d better start.

The indomitable welterweight champ went out against Nick Diaz at UFC 158 and did what he always does, which is to say he was a wet blanket for five rounds. He grappled and jabbed and thoroughly controlled his opponent, but for the sixth straight time, it didn’t look like GSP even contemplated a finish.

It was wash, rinse, repeat. It was yet another title defense that—as only St-Pierre can accomplish—was totally impressive yet completely boring in its unoriginality. One has to believe that if GSP goes into a superfight with Anderson Silva with the same strategy for the seventh consecutive time, it will be one too many.

So Firas Zahabi may want to get Ryo Chonan on speed dial and start taking notes.

 

Striking against Silva is futile.

Let’s get this one out of the way: If St-Pierre tries to work the jab against Silva for even the briefest of moments, it could be all stars and chirping birds and ice-cold bags of peas.

St-Pierre is a fine striker; he’s simplistic and methodical, but that’s OK. There’s no doubt that his jab is the stuff of legends and one of the deadliest weapons in MMA. Just ask Josh Koscheck’s right eye. An enormous chunk of St-Pierre’s success (or all of it) can be attributed to his uncanny ability to keep the fight where he wants it. His jab is sharp, quick and makes people hesitant to attack first.

That’s great against most people. But if St-Pierre is going to rely on his jab to set up range against Silva, he’s in for a very short night. Silva’s head movement is absolutely magnificent; he shakes and shimmies and smiles as punches crawl past his face in slow motion. You’re not hitting him with a jab, especially when he’ll be spending an entire training camp learning how to defend it.

The hopelessness of it all for St-Pierre is that even if he can somehow land against the slippery cobra standing before him, it probably won’t faze Silva. Silva’s chin is criminally underrated, and if his ability to avoid taking damage wasn’t so legendary, we’d probably be talking about how amazing his ability to absorb it is.

If GSP can’t knock out Koscheck, Jake Shields or Dan Hardy, he’s not going to start with Silva. In theory, the striking game should be completely off limits to St-Pierre unless he wants to leave the arena in a coffin.

 

Surviving five full rounds may be impossible.

We all know what it looks like to beat Silva. We saw it at UFC 117.

That’s when Chael Sonnen dominated him nearly every second of the fight. Of course, this fight had a surprise ending, one with Silva somehow pulling off a Hail Mary in the 11th hour to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Any way you look at that fight, Silva should have lost. Every external and internal force in the universe was trying to make it happen. Sonnen had elevated testosterone, Silva had an injured rib, and Sonnen could not have possibly fought a more flawless fight with a more perfect game plan.

And yet Silva won.

So the question remains: How do you beat this guy? He’s lost four times in his career, one a disqualification to Yushin Okami that he easily avenged. He lost a decision in his third career fight almost thirteen years ago and another to Daiju Takase by triangle choke in 2003.

Then there’s the loss to Chonan in what was arguably the single greatest submission in MMA history. In retrospect, considering what Silva has gone on to accomplish, it’s even more preposterously audacious. It’s a move that only ever works in the movies, and yet it worked against the best fighter of all time. Which makes one wonder: In order to win, does GSP have to pull off his own “Chonan”?

That’s not to say it has to be a flying scissor heel hook, obviously, but it may take a move of similarly ridiculous origins in order to defeat Silva.

The logic says that if St-Pierre fights conventionally, he won’t win. He can’t win. The chances of him grinding out five rounds against a fighter who only needs the briefest of moments to knock an opponent out seem laughably minuscule, and the fact that GSP can’t finish fights has become almost as concrete as the law of gravity.

None of this makes me want to see this fight any less. Silva and St-Pierre are probably the two greatest fighters in MMA history at this point, and it would be a spectacle to just see them in the same ring together. But the odds of this being even remotely close to a competitive fight dwindle every time Silva delivers a stunning first-round KO and GSP goes to a decision.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Chonan? This is Georges. Let’s talk”

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Nick Diaz and the 10 Most Disrespectful Fighters Ever

Mixed martial arts is a place where all sorts of cultures clash.Traditionalists, brawlers, grapplers, wrestlers, boxers; every and any walk of life can be found between the eight caged corners of the Octagon. For the most part, fighters—no matter…

Mixed martial arts is a place where all sorts of cultures clash.

Traditionalists, brawlers, grapplers, wrestlers, boxers; every and any walk of life can be found between the eight caged corners of the Octagon. For the most part, fighters—no matter where they’ve come from—show mutual respect for their opponents. 

These are not those fighters. There are the guys who taunt and scream and bully. The fighters who can’t be bargained or reasoned with. The people who, to quote a particularly famous superhero, just want to watch the sport burn.

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Why Anderson Silva Deserved Better Than Chris Weidman

Anderson Silva’s web must be a lonely place. For over six years he’s sat there in desolation; a mysterious and misunderstood superstar patiently waiting for that right moment to fly by. Briefly, he ensnared the venomous Chael Sonnen, an…

Anderson Silva’s web must be a lonely place.

For over six years he’s sat there in desolation; a mysterious and misunderstood superstar patiently waiting for that right moment to fly by.

Briefly, he ensnared the venomous Chael Sonnen, and the two shared a spotlight brighter than any the UFC had ever seen. But after Sonnen was vanquished and discarded like the rest, Silva returned to his place of hiding, which for all intents and purposes, may as well be on the moon.

The sport’s greatest fighter is a rarely seen specter. When he does speak, his words are usually nonsensical prose that carry almost no validity. He calls out Cung Le and we laugh. He says his dream fight would be against himself and we scratch our heads.

Like it or not, Silva is a schemer, a jokester, a prankster. Nobody knows why he says what he says or does what he does (there still isn’t a firm truth behind his baffling performance against Demian Maia), but all of his quirks and oddities only add to his legend.

What we do know for sure is that he’s 16-0 in the UFC with a rolodex of spectacular moments. He’s everyone’s favorite arachnoid superhero come to life. His limbs fly and flow with chaotic purpose but pinpoint precision, locking onto opponent’s faces the way a jetfighter locks onto a rogue aircraft.

At this juncture in his MMA career, every time he fights, it’s a spectacle. He’s earned that right with bloodshed and magnificence. Plus, he’s earned a dance partner that is at least somewhat comparable to his splendor.

Which is why it may come as an enormous disappointment to Silva, way up out of reach in his web, that the fly headed toward him is Chris Weidman.

 

 

Weidman isn’t ready, nor worthy

When Weidman made his MMA debut in 2009, Silva had already been UFC champion for three years.

By the time Weidman arrived in the UFC in 2011, Silva had defended his title nine times and was just a month removed from kicking Vitor Belfort’s molars down his throat.

There isn’t just a gap in big fight experience between Silva and Weidman, there’s an endless gorge. Silva is the longest reigning champion in company history, and by any means or measure, Weidman is one of the least experienced title challengers.

There have only been a handful of fighters in the last decade who have received title shots with fewer fights, namely Cain Velasquez (eight fights) and Brock Lesnar (three fights), but those were drastically different circumstances. Heavyweight is—and always has been—the sport’s weakest division, and Lesnar was simply a media typhoon and an incomparable force when it came to sheer drawing power.

Weidman, we can all agree, is not Lesnar. He is undoubtedly a burgeoning talent, an athletic powerhouse with a penchant for submissions and an improving standup game. No one doubts he has tremendous physical tools. There’s a high chance that, at some point in his career, he will be the UFC middleweight champion. The problem is that right now we have no way to know exactly how good he is.

The measuring stick for the middleweight division is not Silva—that would be impossibly unfair. Instead, look to the three men who have beaten just about everyone else in the division since Silva has ruled: Belfort, Yushin Okami and Michael Bisping.

 

Along with the recently defected Sonnen, those three have been the clear next best at middleweight in the last five years. Weidman hasn’t fought any of them.

He does have two wins over top-10 talent; a sloppy, boring affair against Maia that he took on short notice, and a throttling of Mark Munoz.

The Munoz victory, in actuality, is almost the sole reason Weidman was thrown into the title discussion in the first place. To be sure, it was an impressive performance over a very good fighter. But Munoz himself is an unproven commodity, losing to arguably the two best fighters he ever fought in Okami and Matt Hamill.

That Munoz win could turn out to be an illusion or the moment a star was born. It’s impossible to say. When you look at Weidman’s lackluster resume and his extreme dearth of star power, his placement against the sport’s greatest fighter is startling.

 

Silva belongs in a superfight

MMA is infantile in comparison to baseball and basketball and boxing, and thus the present often gets confusingly intertwined with history. It’s often hard to decipher what fighters from the sport’s heyday are lasting legends and what current talents have already accomplished enough to be called one of the best ever.

What is not open for discussion is who the best fighter of all time is. Once upon a time, Fedor Emelianenko had a claim to throne. But, Silva’s seemingly endless brilliance in two different weight classes has helped distance “the Spider” in recent years.

Truth is, we’ve never seen anyone like Silva before. I’ve long become weary of the “ballet of violence” metaphor, but it’s so incredibly apt when it comes to Silva, it’s hard not to apply it. He doesn’t move around the octagon as much as he flows – slipping here, sliding there, as punches and kicks sail by harmlessly. He’s a magician; a spindly, glove-wearing arachnid. He doesn’t beat opponents, he routs them. In his last 16 fights, only one has been even remotely close, and it ended in one of the most spectacular submissions in MMA history.

 

Silva is so remarkable and historic in his greatness that it amazes me how many MMA fans dislike him. I suppose hatred comes with the territory of being great; you don’t have to look much further than the Yankees or Lakers or Duke basketball to see what happens when you win too much.

But Silva is of such great importance to MMA that he should be universally beloved at this point. We truly don’t know when we’ll see something like this again, and we should all be cherishing it while we have the chance.

Which is why, above all, it’s a bit preposterous to pit Silva against a young, hungry and yet largely anonymous fighter like Weidman when Silva has so openly campaigned to fight the like of Georges St-Pierre and other superstars.

Though it doesn’t seem like Silva has aged a day since his UFC debut, the truth is, he’ll one day be washed up. Every time he fights from now on should be the biggest moment of the year in MMA, just like how all eyes were on Michael Jordan in his final seasons.

Why then, waste one of Silva’s precious last fights on Weidman? The easiest answer, of course, is that there was no one else left. However, giving someone a title shot simply due to process of elimination seems to be a foolish and empty decision.

The UFC deemed Weidman unfit to fight Silva months ago, which is why it paired him with Tim Boetsch. Just because Bisping, Hector Lombard and Rashad Evans all lost doesn’t suddenly make Weidman more worthy.

As much as some fans hate the idea of a fighter picking his opponents, the simple truth is that it happens all the time—and if anyone deserves the right, it’s Silva. He fought everyone and beat everyone the UFC has ever put in front of him. He’s made them millions and accounts for a large percentage of the promotion’s most enduring moments.

If he wants GSP, shouldn’t he get it? If not him, why not a big name at light heavyweight, or Strikeforce champ Luke Rockhold? Weidman, meanwhile, could have fought Okami or Belfort and the UFC could have had a true number one contender.

Instead, we have a fight pitting the greatest ever against an unproven unknown, which just seems like a grievous mistake.

Silva, tucked away from the world on his lofty perch, has to think so. And come July 7, Weidman might come to regret he ever asked to enter the spider’s dangerous web.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

Rousey, Fedor and the 10 Most Overhyped Fighters Ever

Hype is a funny thing. It can hurt you. It can help you. It can build you up at breakneck speeds only to tear you down when it sees fit. It’s wild. It’s unpredictable.Sometimes it arrives precisely when you think it will, and sometimes it sidles up on …

Hype is a funny thing. It can hurt you. It can help you. It can build you up at breakneck speeds only to tear you down when it sees fit. It’s wild. It’s unpredictable.

Sometimes it arrives precisely when you think it will, and sometimes it sidles up on you and smiles. Some ask for it, others don’t. But no matter how you slice it, hype is what sustains a fighter.

This list consists of the 10 fighters who have suffered through a spectacular whirlwind of hype. A few were consumed by it, others thrived, and some’s fates are still at its whimsy. Here is hype’s most wanted list.

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Rousey, Fedor and the 10 Most Overhyped Fighters Ever

Hype is a funny thing. It can hurt you. It can help you. It can build you up at breakneck speeds only to tear you down when it sees fit. It’s wild. It’s unpredictable.Sometimes it arrives precisely when you think it will, and sometimes it sidles up on …

Hype is a funny thing. It can hurt you. It can help you. It can build you up at breakneck speeds only to tear you down when it sees fit. It’s wild. It’s unpredictable.

Sometimes it arrives precisely when you think it will, and sometimes it sidles up on you and smiles. Some ask for it, others don’t. But no matter how you slice it, hype is what sustains a fighter.

This list consists of the 10 fighters who have suffered through a spectacular whirlwind of hype. A few were consumed by it, others thrived, and some’s fates are still at its whimsy. Here is hype’s most wanted list.

Begin Slideshow