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Conor McGregor rallied to stop Chad Mendes at UFC 189 on Saturday night, and for a few glorious moments nobody knew what to make of it.Then it all started again.
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Conor McGregor rallied to stop Chad Mendes at UFC 189 on Saturday night, and for a few glorious moments nobody knew what to make of it.Then it all started again.
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When discussing possibilities for my last Bleacher Report piece, the idea which I was most taken by was that of my favorite fight. It surprised me because I reference dozens of fights in each piece I write as great examples of whatever we’re talking ab…
When discussing possibilities for my last Bleacher Report piece, the idea which I was most taken by was that of my favorite fight. It surprised me because I reference dozens of fights in each piece I write as great examples of whatever we’re talking about, but I have never actually talked about the fight which entertained me the most.
I took a good deal of time to think about this and I’m pretty confident that my favorite MMA fight is not going to be one which you would perhaps associate with my opinions. Indeed, my editor expected Fedor Emelianenko vs. Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic.
That was an incredible fight. The years of anticipation, Fedor using pressure to negate Cro Cop’s kicking game, and flowing body shots in there to tire the Croat out. But it wasn’t my favourite.
I work entirely in the reasoned, the calculated and the scientific—z happened because x and y preceded it—but I think that a person’s favourite fight can never be reduced to a series of checked boxes. A fight is just two people having at it for money. What makes a favorite fight is the experience. I can’t rationalize my favourite fight, I can only tell you how I felt when it happened.
So I would like to take you back to PRIDE Bushido 9. The fight is Takanori Gomi versus Tatsuya Kawajiri, and for me it was the most electrifying bout I have ever seen.
21st Century Boys
PRIDE’s Bushido banner was designed to show off the lighter weight classes who were often overshadowed by the Japanese organization’s heavyweight and light heavyweight roster. No-one stood out quite so much for the Bushido events as Japan’s own Takanori Gomi.
The Fireball Kid had gone 14-0 as a thunderous ground and pounder before meeting the well-rounded Joachim Hansen and B.J. Penn. Following losses to those two men, Gomi rebounded as well as anyone could have hoped, becoming one of the best all-around fighters in the game.
Gomi had always been a numbing puncher, but from his loss to Penn onward, his boxing sharpened up tremendously. It was not in line with the best boxing in MMA today, but it was almost unparalleled at lightweight for power. More importantly, he began using body shots.
From Bushido 2, Gomi racked up a streak of seven wins over respectable lightweights, and was held in great regard by the time that the PRIDE lightweight tournament rolled around to crown a champion.
Tatsuya Kawajiri, meanwhile, was on nine-fight unbeaten streak and had captured the 154-pound Shooto title which Gomi had lost to Joachim Hansen. Kawajiri had only lost two matches in his career, the first in his professional debut, and the second a decision loss to Vitor “Shaolin”‘ Ribeiro. Kawajiri avenged that loss with a brutal TKO stoppage of Ribeiro in 2004.
The way that most tournaments unfold, the two favourites are placed in opposite brackets and hopefully meet in the final. Of course it never, ever happens that way as someone gets upset, or injures themselves in the course of winning a match. Occasionally, however, the opening match of a tournament could also be the final.
Gomi and Kawajiri were scheduled to meet in the first round of the tournament. The math was billed as the 21st century boys, implying that whoever won would be the future of lightweight MMA.
Kawajiri entered the ring to his trademark Water Pow by B-Dash, and the crowd erupted as Gomi entered to the Mad Capsule Market’s Scary which had become his theme song. The two met in the middle of the ring for the referees instructions, Kawajiri staring Gomi down and Gomi (as was his custom) looking at the floor. The anticipation could not have been any higher.
10 Minute Attrition
The fight began and the hard-hitting Kawajiri immediately threw an overhand at Gomi, who let it fall short. Kawajiri stepped in as if to throw the overhand again but immediately shot. Gomi stuffed the shot and they returned to the centre of the ring.
Gomi found moderate success early by throwing combinations and moving into a clinch along the ropes. From here he would drive one hand into Kawajiri‘s hips (preventing Kawajiri from returning fire with knees) and begin striking away at Kawajiri‘s legs and midsection.
Something which had been noticeable throughout Gomi‘s entire career (and became more noticeable once he began to decline into a sloppy brawler) was his tendency to let his feet slide all over the place as he swung as hard as he could. That night, at Bushido 9, however, Gomi‘s feet were as good as they had ever been.
Throughout the entire fight Kawajiri was being backed into corners before being hit with combinations. More noticeable than anything were Gomi‘s wilting body punches in between stance switches.
Gomi would start southpaw and either come in behind a straight left and a right hook to the kidney, or counter Kawajiri with a nice southpaw right hook.
Gomi would switch to orthodox and come in behind a left hook to the body and a straight right to the head – a classic from Roberto Duran’s arsenal.
Towards the end of the first round (ten minutes in PRIDE), Kawajiri got clipped with a hard counter right hook. Kawajiri immediately shot but Gomi was able to stuff it. From there on Gomi repeatedly pushed Kawajiri to the ropes and teed off with combinations.
Finally after a series of brutal body shots, Kawajiri fell (or tried to shoot) on his front and Gomi moved to the back. From here Gomi hammered Kawajiri behind the ears with short hook punches and finished with the rear-naked choke.
The Aftermath
When reminiscing about this fight it is easy to forget that it was only the first of two which Gomi fought that evening. He went on to dominate his old nemesis Luiz Azeredo with the same body punching and ring-cutting which did Kawajiri in. A few months later he met Hayato Sakurai in the tournament final and knocked the Shooto legend out to become PRIDE’s first lightweight champion.
So why is it my favourite fight? Well, in addition to the pace that both men fought at, and arguably the first effective use of attrition body work in MMA, it was simply so significant. Gomi cleared out the top ten at one point in the lightweight division and only Shinya Aoki and B.J. Penn come close to him for top ten wins at lightweight.
Gomi has had his ups and downs. He forgets that it is not how hard he throws the shots, but the fact that he lands them which makes the difference. Often he will swing like a bum nowadays. But this fight, and the Azeredo fight in the same night, secured me as a Gomi fan for life. He doesn’t always fight smart, but when he does it’s something to behold.
PRIDE Bushido 9 is regularly short listed as one of the greatest MMA events of all time. If you haven’t seen it it is well worth the price of a PRIDE Bushido box set.
Pick up Jack’s e-books Advanced Striking and Elementary Striking from his blog, Fights Gone By. Jack can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com
I want to take a look at something that is both painfully absent from most fights and very much in vogue at the moment following Dan Henderson vs. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua II: striking out of the clinch.
I said on Monday that body work is criminally under…
I want to take a look at something that is both painfully absent from most fights and very much in vogue at the moment following Dan Henderson vs. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua II: striking out of the clinch.
I said on Monday that body work is criminally underused in MMA, but striking on the exit from the clinch is underused everywhere.
First, let’s take a look at how the knockout came about. Henderson was getting worked over handily by Rua, who was actually looking like he understood his striking advantages. He refused to trade Henderson right for right.
Henderson looks bad at distance. He is slow and cumbersome in closing the gap, and it served to make Shogun look like the much better fighter and help him evade punishment. If an opponent is standing in front of Henderson, he’ll uproot the lead leg with the inside low kick and then drop the hammer with his right hand.
If an opponent isn’t within distance to do that, though? Hendo will clumsily run across the ring, miss his target and keep running past. He never looks more like a 40-year-old man than when he is fighting an opponent who keeps his distance.
Henderson’s squatting stance and tendency to stand almost side on—loading up his right hand and taking almost all the power out of his left—also make him susceptible to low kicks. Rua’s better connections were nothing like the kicks of his heyday, but they buckled Hendo’s legs, and the American MMA legend struggled to come back with anything while recovering his stance.
One thing that looked brilliant throughout the fight was Shogun’s jab. In the first match, when all he threw were right hands, Henderson answered with a right hand each time that consistently landed. But the jab cuts so tightly inside an opponent’s right hand that it will beat it 90 percent of the time.
Additionally Henderson keeps his head so far off line to his right that to slip inside Shogun’s jab and throw the right hand over the top (in a cross counter) would be a large movement and far too slow to beat the jab.
Shogun’s jab cut Henderson in half and left Hendo’s big weapon (his right hand) on the outside of Shogun’s shoulder, behind which he tucked his chin.
The jab stopped Henderson from throwing counter rights, which allowed Shogun to have success with his own right hands when he sprinkled them in occasionally. In the first fight, he tried to take advantage of Henderson’s bent-over posture, but because he never set his punches up, it worked out like this:
In this match, Shogun’s jab and low kicks had Hendo worrying and holding back his right, which allowed Rua to land a headache-making uppercut according to plan.
Henderson knew that he had to close the distance to be effective, but his standard setup (inside low kick to right hand) wasn’t cutting the mustard. So he started trying to duck in on Shogun’s hips. Here’s an attempt in the first round:
And here’s a horrible attempt in the second:
In the third, Henderson ducked under as Shogun moved in and stuck to him. Turning Shogun around as he looked to break free, Henderson landed his money punch.
The Sneaker is a punch described by Jack Dempsey in his classic Championship Fighting. In boxing, punching on the break is illegal if the referee does the breaking. But many boxers forget that if the clinch is broken by the participants, it is entirely legal to punch on the break.
Some savvier boxers (Roberto Duran especially) would body punch their way into a clinch a few times, each time going limp as if to say, “OK, we’ll break.” As soon as the opponent broke without the referee actually saying anything, bam!—in would come the right hand or the left hook.
It’s essentially a sucker punch—hitting the opponent when he isn’t thinking about fighting—but the results can be remarkable.
Henderson also turned Shogun around to meet his right hand, and boxing has similar examples of fighters doing the same thing. Georges Carpentier famously used to “waltz” his opponents into punches. Here’s a nice example of Gerald McClellan throwing his right hand, acting as if to enter a clinch, and then turning his opponent and coming up with a left hook. He puts the exact same principles in action, and they work wonderfully:
Striking out of the clinch has always been undervalued, and it saved Henderson’s bacon in this match. The flagrant hammerfists to the back of Shogun’s head as he turtled probably finished the fight (which is a shame; it seems like anything is legal if the other guy is already hurt), but without the clinch, turn and right hand, Henderson would have likely been diced up at range all night and gassed by the end of the third as he always is.
I’ll leave you with another beautiful example of striking out of the clinch in MMA. Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic defends Fedor Emelianenko‘s judo and feels pretty good about it until he gets his bell rung by a hook on the exit:
Pick up Jack’s e-books Advanced Striking and Elementary Striking from his blog, Fights Gone By. Jack can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com
Body work (the act of hitting the midsection) is severely underused in mixed martial arts. That much is no secret. In fact, I’m one of the people who appreciate body work so much that I consider it underused in many pure boxing matches as wel…
Body work (the act of hitting the midsection) is severely underused in mixed martial arts. That much is no secret. In fact, I’m one of the people who appreciate body work so much that I consider it underused in many pure boxing matches as well.
The value of attacking the opponent’s body can not be overstated. Whether it be a pistonlike jab to the solar plexus, sharp hooks and uppercuts in close, or knees and kicks: Attacking the body breaks men.
The problem with the majority of striking contests in MMA is that both fighters will head hunt with the occasional low kick. That’s great, but it is essentially saying, “Let’s both throw punches and see who gets tired first.” The beauty of body work is that it snatches the breath from a fighter’s lungs, the strength from his arms, and it can crumble the desire to fight in even the toughest of men.
Today, rather than looking at the best single body shots, I wanted to look at some of the best instances of fighters going consistently to the body. So no Melvin Guillard or Anderson Silva here, but read on anyway.
Everyone and their mother is doing roadwork. Pounding their feet on the asphalt in order to have the gas to go the three or five rounds. Nobody is running a couple of miles while getting punched and kneed in the gut.
The true beauty of body work is that if you start early (i.e., while you can still avoid getting hit in the head too much), by the time it gets to the third round, you don’t even need to worry about stuff coming back. Nowhere was that more obvious than in our first example.
Fabio Maldonado vs Gian Villante
This fight took place Sunday night, so it’s still fresh in many of our readers’ minds. What really stood out in the contest (as with any Maldonado fight) was how terrible Maldonado’s defense is. He walks into punches constantly out in the open. The thing is that every time he gets close, he sinks in two or three good, well-targeted body shots.
By the second round Villante was sucking air, and by the third Villante could barely defend himself. It’s almost surreal to watch a fighter tire so quickly and drop their hands even though they know they will be punched in the face for it. If you hadn’t seen it or felt it before, you would hardly believe the toll that effective body work can take.
Maldonado’s horrible defense didn’t even matter in the third round because Villante was exhausted, hurting and in survival mode. So Round 3 became Maldonado walking down his man with tasty five- or six-punch combinations and the less experienced fans in the audience wondering where on earth that came from.
It was always there, he just turned his opponent from a willing combatant into a sheepish punching bag.
Katsunori Kikuno vs. Eddie Alvarez
This time, an example of the role that body kicks can play. Traditionally, kicking the body has left you the most exposed for a takedown. Throwing a traditional round kick to the body will, more often than not, connect with an arm.
What Katsunori Kikuno does so well is throw peculiar snap kicks with the ball of the foot. Sometimes they come out straight, other times they look straight and come around. The most important point is that they sneak inside of, or around, elbows.
Nowhere was Kikuno‘s powerful body work more obvious than against Eddie Alvarez. Alvarez is, to my mind, one of the best strikers in the lightweight division. He’s known for his exceptionally powerful and fluid hands. Yet he struggled for much of the fight to get close enough to Kikuno. Each time Alvarez stepped in to punch, the ball of Kikuno‘s foot was slamming into his hip or stomach or chest.
Alvarez took the fight to the ground and showed that his game was (as most of us knew) much better all around than Kikuno‘s. But that one technique, because of its unusual execution and relatively uncommon targets (in MMA at least), caused Alvarez a whole heap of trouble that more rounded fighters couldn’t.
Nick Diaz vs. B.J. Penn
B.J. Penn has a hell of a chin. We’ve known this for years. What only a few had picked up on was the fact that Penn struggles to take a body shot. It was shown for the first time in his second bout with Matt Hughes, where Hughes kicked the body, then targeted it with elbows from inside the guard. Penn gassed out and Hughes picked up the stoppage, but it was glossed over with the idea that Penn somehow injured himself in transition to Hughes’ back.
It was exploited again by Georges St-Pierre, who tattooed the Hawaiian with jabs to the body and had him dropping his hands and eating punches to the face by Round 3. Each time St. Pierre landed in guard, he focused many of his strikes on Penn’s midsection as well. But fans overlooked that. They wanted to blame Penn’s gas tank or put it all down to St-Pierre’s exhausting wrestling game.
What finally drove the point home was when Penn met Nick Diaz. Diaz is very hittable, Penn has some of the best head movement in the game. So the early going looked like Penn could get the better of the Stockton native. Yet as the rounds wore on, Penn’s punches to the head had achieved little, and Diaz‘s well-placed, half-power body shots had exhausted Penn.
When fighters get tired against the Diaz brothers, they are in a bad spot. The Diaz brothers want their opponent on the fence, but when both fighters are fresh the Diaz‘s lack the ringcraft to get that done. As soon as their opponents start getting tired, the fight moves to the fence and it’s all one-way traffic from there.
No one had ever beaten Penn so savagely, and it was all the result of Diaz‘s volume-based body punching.
Alistair Overeem vs. Travis Browne
Alistair Overeem had always liked knees. There was a time when throwing knee strikes was about all he could do. Watch back to his Pride bouts and he opens nearly every fight with a running knee or a flying knee. What he didn’t really show appreciation of until later in his career was the attrition effect that knee strikes can have if you take them a little lower.
When you’re constantly looking for the stepping knee or jumping knee to the head in hopes of a highlight-reel knockout, you’re exerting a lot of energy on what is really quite a low percentage technique. If you throw it when it’s not expected, you’ve got a good chance, but if it’s all you do and you become known for that, you’re going to have trouble getting it to stick.
Then Overeem made Paul Buentello tap to knee strikes. Throughout the fight, Overeem had been straining to land high knees in the clinch, yet as he caught Buentello in a scramble with a couple of knees to the midsection, all the fight left Buentello.
Since then, Overeem has had some of the finest body work I have ever seen in MMA. Against Travis Browne, Overeem used body punches to get into the clinch along the fence, then worked his man over with knees to the legs and body.
What that fight really illustrated (aside from Overeem’s capacity to throw away any fight) is that the important point isn’t always to hit the body hard, but if you hit consistently, you will eventually catch the opponent in an off-moment. When he is breathing in, or focusing on something else like pummeling an arm in, or raising his hands to protect his head.
And that’s it. You only need to catch them unaware to send even the toughest guys out there into the fetal position. Browne showed incredible grit to get back into the fight, and even went on to win it, but the effect of just a few good knees and one sneaking through unguarded was obvious to all.
Pick up Jack’s e-books Advanced Striking and Elementary Striking from his blog, Fights Gone By. Jack can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com
I’m going to talk briefly today about something which you will see over and over again. A fighter wins or loses and the forums are flooded with posts about how he has bad footwork. Simultaneously, I see fighters praised for having good footwork who dis…
I’m going to talk briefly today about something which you will see over and over again. A fighter wins or loses and the forums are flooded with posts about how he has bad footwork. Simultaneously, I see fighters praised for having good footwork who display obvious flaws.
Here’s the problem: There isn’t just one method of footwork for everyone.
There are certain things which everyone should be doing. For instance, crossing the feet should be avoided at all costs. But to say that a fighter has horrible footwork just because his doesn’t look like another fighter’s—whom you decree to have good footwork—is just not a great way to go about things.
Where does this come from? Well, when Muhammad Ali hit the boxing scene he was something to behold. He moved like no-one had ever moved at heavyweight and it attracted a great deal of attention. In talking himself up, Ali also talked down the likes of Joe Louis for what he perceived to be slow, shoddy footwork.
Check out this charming scene between Muhammad Ali and the late, great Cus D’amato (trainer of Mike Tyson, Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres).
Hold on a minute though. Freddie Roach and many others consider Joe Louis to be one of the finest technical boxers of all time. Yet he had terrible footwork? Well, no. He didn’t.
Louis’ footwork suited Louis’ needs and Louis’ style. He was a heavy hitter who liked to stay in range for counters. He stayed in his stance with his head off line, and shuffled towards his opponent. Sometimes he would take a slight step back to see if he could bait his opponent in, and eventually they would fall for it and he would hammer them with the big shots. I talk often about creating collisions and Louis is a beautiful case study.
Ali’s footwork, meanwhile, was a means to his end. He too wanted his opponents walking into his punches, but he accomplished this by being elusive and providing a great deal of hyper active movement, punctuated by flicking jabs. When he had his opponent annoyed enough to be reaching at him, he’d lower the boom with his favorite right hand counter, commonly called the Anchor Punch (something which I shall discuss more in my upcoming print book, which is a technical biography of Ali).
Another fighter who was excellent at creating the chase was Willie Pep. It was the same move over and over and over again. He would step his foot back and begin circling with his feet level. As his opponent either turned to face him or moved to cut him off, Pep would step in with his right foot and nail them with a southpaw left straight.
Count how many times Pep does it. It’s remarkable.
Sound familiar? Holly Holm does exactly the same thing. And there are plenty of fighters out there who have picked up on baiting the chase. Lyoto Machida is a master of a very karate-esque version of it.
So we have the shuffling footwork and the dancing footwork but there’s more.
A fighter whom Ali also mocked for his footwork was George Foreman. Here’s the thing, Foreman (at his best) was considered one of the best ring cutters in the sport. He had bad performances where he got wild, but against Ken Norton and Muhammad Ali, his feet were looking brilliant. To recall that massively overused phrase in any English football broadcast: Foreman had “neat feet for a big man”.
Here’s Ali’s usual eloquent salesmanship, spliced in with George Plimpton and Norman Mailer’s more sobering assessment of Foreman, from the film When We Were Kings. If you have an hour and a half, watch the whole movie because it’s easily the best fight film ever made.
Remember the Rumble in the Jungle? Why do you think Ali went to the ropes? He didn’t have a choice. Foreman could take a shot with the best of them, his hands were always all over his opponent’s hands and checking punches preemptively—something we saw a little of in Lawler versus Hendricks)—and when he got near enough the ropes he would often just push his opponent into them.
The aforementioned Willie Pep had the exact same trouble in his incredible quartet of bouts with Sandy Saddler. Saddler also adopted the hands out in front “mummy” style of fighting, and cut off the ring with the best of them. He also butted, elbowed and generally fought dirtier than Foreman. A couple of decades later, he taught a young George Foreman the same style.
Let’s not forget the greatest of ring cutters, Julio Cesar Chavez. He too squared up to his opponents, offering more of a target, but moved them to the ropes anyway.
Louis wanted to waltz his opponent into punches, Ali wanted to peck and bait the chase, and Foreman wanted to push his way to the ropes and then get to work. So which one had the bad footwork?
None of them. Refusal to dance is not bad footwork. Shuffling is not bad footwork. Squaring up and plodding in is not bad footwork—If you use that footwork to achieve your ends.
A quick example would be how the Diaz brothers and Fabio Maldonado love to fight against the fence, and are brilliant once they get there, but cannot follow an opponent who uses lateral movement. Their long, side on stance does not fit well with cutting off the cage. Even in a ring, with lovely 90 degree corners, it is necessary to square up a little in order to trap someone there.
My purpose in this short piece is not to point to examples of bad footwork, however. I intended to highlight that a fighter’s footwork is not about looking like another fighter’s. There were plenty of people who—before Muhammad Ali won his first world title—said that Ali’s footwork was horrible because it didn’t look like Louis’. And there are plenty today who think that dancing is the pinnacle of footwork.
The truth is that different strokes work for different folks. If a fighter’s footwork is conducive to their best fighting method, it is good. If it is letting a fighter escape as they try to cut off the ring, or it is running them onto the fence too often, or it is leaving them off balance so that they fall each time they are clipped, then it is problematic. But whether it’s beautiful or ugly, it is results that matter, not looks.
Pick up Jack’s eBooks Advanced Striking and Elementary Striking from his blog, Fights Gone By. Jack can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com
Johny Hendricks vs. Robbie Lawler, at UFC 171 in Dallas on Saturday night, was one of the strangest fights I’ve ever seen. It was also easily my favourite fight of the year so far.
Strange how? Well, almost the entire fight took place at trap…
Johny Hendricks vs. Robbie Lawler, at UFC 171 in Dallas on Saturday night, was one of the strangest fights I’ve ever seen. It was also easily my favourite fight of the year so far.
Strange how? Well, almost the entire fight took place at trapping range. The range wherein both fighters are touching hands. This is the range that Wing Chun, Kali and other old, traditional martial arts focus on, and the range that George Foreman and Sandy Saddler loved, but a range which is traditionally neutralized in MMA by the clinch.
Yet both men stood directly in front of each other, close enough to hit each other at all times, trying to work punches through or around the other man’s hands.
It was the fight the UFC has wanted for years. A competitive, hard-hitting war for the welterweight belt. Yet no matter which great striker was pushed, they just couldn’t stand up (literally) to Georges St. Pierre’s unparalleled MMA wrestling.
So, let us take a look at the technical details of the bout.
Rolling with the Punches
Something which MMA fans, judges and even commentators are guilty of is getting excited by activity rather than effectiveness. It’s the reason that Diego Sanchez and Leonard Garcia can win rounds while swinging at air, and it’s the reason that one idiot was able to score Round 2 (one of the least decisive rounds of the fight) 10-8 for Hendricks but gave no other 10-8 rounds despite the third round being a great deal more lop-sided for Lawler and the fifth round being all Hendricks.
Seriously…why do these people even work in this business?
But back on point—there was a lot of excitement because of Hendricks’ activity rather than his effectiveness in the early rounds. In Rounds 1 through 4, most of what Hendricks was throwing was either missing or being rolled off by Lawler.
Notice this sequence, which was treated as one of the more effective moments for Hendricks in the bout, reveals no clean connections except the kick. Moving targets are damn hard to hit, and as much as we like to praise Hendricks’ striking improvement, he was still struggling against Lawler‘s basic, but constant head movement.
That, more than anything else, was the most noticeable point about this fight. Lawler‘s upper body was in constant motion, while Hendricks stood almost perfectly still, waiting to fire. It made Lawler hard to hit clean, it made Hendricks easier to hit with the jab and it also telegraphed when Hendricks was going to move because it came out of a completely static posture.
The fascination in this fight was with the punching power of both men. But punching power is just momentum, and consistent knockout power is just the ability to create collisions. You can throw your hands as hard as you like against something that is moving away from you, and you’ll accomplish very little.
If you have a heavy bag, start it swinging back and forth, then try throwing some hard punches at it while it’s swinging away. It’s irritating, right? All right, now treat yourself to a few whacks on it as it swings back at you.
No, there is nothing magical about punching power whereby you only need to touch someone (no matter how many times you hear that line rehashed in black-and-white promo movies). You need a clean connection to impart that kinetic energy, and that can’t happen if your fist is always sliding off or the target is always moving away.
What Hendricks did have effect with, and what became incredibly significant to the fight later on, was low kicks. You can roll and slip punches all day, but if your upper body is moving, you are not in good position to be checking low kicks. There is a reason that so many Thai boxers fight upright after all—it fits the established meta of their sport because they have to check kicks or push kick so often.
Hendricks started the kicking early, and later on it really paid dividends and, in my opinion, won him the fight.
In the final seconds of Round 2, the fight began to move toward the craziness which would follow. With Hendricks’ back to the fence, Lawler began touching Hendricks’ hands and forearms at every opportunity. Frank Shamrock described Lawler on a Strikeforce broadcast back in the day as a “feeling” striker, and this sort of stuff demonstrates exactly why. Lawler loves to do the George Foreman, to check the hands and only release them when he wants to counter.
Rounds 3 and 4
The next 10 minutes were the reason that my Twitter is still heaped with incoming requests to analyse this fight. To put it in the simplest terms, Lawler boxed Hendricks’ face off.
Opening the third round with some surprising low kicks (which he unfortunately did not return to at any point in the bout), Lawler put Hendricks on the fence from the start. He began connecting with his jabs, which chipped away at Hendricks throughout the bout and which Hendricks’ lack of head movement only made into harder connections that they should have been.
Lawler continued to roll off the flurries (but eat the low kicks) and walk Hendricks down. Every time they reached the fence, he put Hendricks on the pressure cooker. When Hendricks wasn’t attacking, he was eating jabs, and when he did attack, Lawler would cover, roll and come back with a punch. Halfway through the third round, he connected a good left hook which wobbled Hendricks.
Now, there has been something of a consensus in the media that Lawler should have stepped it up and got the finish right there. I disagree. I believe that what Lawler did next showed the real improvement in him since 10 years ago: He has learned some patience.
There is no sense ever chasing a puncher. If a fighter is hurt, you put them under pressure, you expect them to swing back and you rack up some free punches and easy counters when they swing. You accumulate free damage; you don’t run in and try to finish them, only to get tied up, taken down or knocked out by a Hail Mary punch.
Yes, Lawler lost the fight, but by no means did he do the wrong thing in sitting back once he had Hendricks hurt. The only thing that I would have liked to see more, and which could have changed the way the fight continued, was if Lawler had used the opportunity to land some free shots to Hendricks’ body. You can recover from getting cracked over the head in a few minutes, but body work stays with you until the morning after.
Once Hendricks recovered, Lawler continued to use his hands to harass him. Slapping at Hendricks’ guard he would get Hendricks reaching or bracing and then fire around it or inside it. When Hendricks was worrying about the right hook—Lawler‘s money punch—Lawler was firing jabs inside of his guard.
Round 4 was all Lawler as well, but this time it wasn’t the big counters as much as it was the jab. You will remember that Hendricks, the southpaw, easily shut down Georges St. Pierre’s orthodox jab with his lead hand. Well against another southpaw, it wasn’t that easy. Lawler connected time and time again with hard jabs and opened Hendricks’ nose and right eye up.
Furthermore, Lawler threw hooks to the body throughout Round 4, something which could have changed the complexion of the fifth round if he had started earlier. Round 4 demonstrated the best technical Lawler we have seen to date. There’s a lot to a jab. Hiding the motion of it is everything, and Lawler used all manner of shoulder feints, slaps and pats to Hendricks’ arms to hide his jabs throughout the round.
If you want to learn about landing the jab in MMA and you don’t have GSP-like genes, this round is a good one to watch.
Round 5
Round 5 was where the low kicks paid off. If you can’t move your weight quickly and effectively, you can’t get out of the way of punches and you can’t shrug off the connections that wouldn’t bother you in Round 1.
Two things can get someone to stand still in front of you: fatigue and low kicks. And Lawler was suffering from them both. By Round 5, he couldn’t get away from the punches, and Hendricks started to have a field day. Lawler couldn’t get away from the lefts quick enough and stopped being that heavy bag swinging away from Hendricks…and became just a heavy bag.
Hendricks landed hard shots on Lawler, and Lawler was sucking wind and eating punches in the last minute along the fence. Here, Hendricks opted to take the fight to the ground and adopt what I call “Josh Thomson position.”
Anyone who remembers Thomson’s terrible fight with K.J. Noons, or Jason Miller’s terrible fights with Michael Bisping and Jake Shields, will know this position all too well. The last thing you want when you get a takedown is the opponent walking up the wall, getting their hooks in or hitting a technical stand-up (and there was an awesome one of those earlier in the night by Raquel Pennington).
So what Hendricks did was to grapevine the legs and stretch Lawler out. What can you accomplish from here? If you’re not Shinya Aoki, nothing. But the fight was already done. Hendricks had dominated the round, and secured a takedown, so why let Lawler swing in the last 30 seconds like everyone knew he was going to?
The bout was the most exciting welterweight title fight in years, which is no slur on St. Pierre; it was simply a brilliant contest. Both men had moments of absolute, one-sided dominance and moments of being on the wrong end of a butt-kicking. They both displayed that much-touted “heart of a champion,” and it was a little disappointing to see one man walk away the loser.
If you haven’t watched it, what the hell are you waiting for? Easily the best title fight since Jones vs. Gustafsson and well worth your time and money.
Pick up Jack’s eBooks Advanced Striking and Elementary Striking from his blog, Fights Gone By. Jack can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.
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