Author: Jack Slack

Does Ryan Bader Really Have a Glass Jaw?

Let’s talk about chins.
We all have one; it’s on the front of your head. It drops down when you need to stuff something into your mouth. Sometimes, hair grows out of it, and when you shave it for that big date, you gouge a chasm into it. Other times yo…

Let’s talk about chins.

We all have one; it’s on the front of your head. It drops down when you need to stuff something into your mouth. Sometimes, hair grows out of it, and when you shave it for that big date, you gouge a chasm into it. Other times you dribble mustard down it, and occasionally you fall asleep while resting it on your palm and leave a big handprint on your cheek for an hour.

If you’re self-conscious about that kind of thing, be glad you’re not a fighter.

Nothing is more critiqued in the fight game than your chin. If you can’t take a good shot on the chin, everyone is going to be waiting until you lose, so they can tell their friends, “I told you so.”

I am willing to bet that this site has had at least five lists about the best and worst chins in MMA just this year.

Few men in the UFC have had their chin questioned quite as much as Ryan Bader has. Today, we’re going to talk about why he seems to have trouble taking punches, and we will muse on the idea of “chin” in general.

 

The Inconvenient Truth

The truth is that every fighter will get hit. Even the most evasive fighters in the world—Lyoto Machida, Kyotaro, Wilfredo Benitez, Nicolino Locche—have been hit. It is an inescapable part of the game.

A fighter doesn’t have to like getting hit. One of the silliest phrases used in combat sports circles is “he doesn’t like getting hit.” Who does? The important part is that a fighter cannot emotionally crumble when he is hit.

Of course, that’s something a fighter can will himself through. Crumbling under fire is a flaw in attitude, not in form.

Getting physically shaken up by a punch is another thing entirely. Bader‘s problem isn’t fear of taking a punch or shelling up once hit. It’s that he cannot physically withstand punches that he routinely exposes himself to.

 

“Chin Down, Chin Down”

Reportedly in the days of bare-knuckle pugilism, the most common targets were the sensory organs (nose and eyes) and the solar plexus (or “the mark”). A great many overhand blows were thrown, and so the temple was the main target of these.

John L. Sullivan is credited with popularizing the knockout blow on the chin after a physician explained to him the anatomy of the jaw.

There are a few things that a fighter can do to stop himself from getting put on Queer Street by a punch. The foremost among them is to keep his chin tucked. This cannot be stressed enough, and you will hear it constantly in any boxing or kickboxing gym.

Bader and his team know this. You could hear his cornermen shouting it to him throughout the Tito Ortiz fight, and yet he never actually heeded them.

Some insist that it is the bobbling around of the head on a relaxed neck when hit that causes a knockout, which is why many fighters strengthen their neck. It is true that there is a difference in the impact felt with the chin up and with the chin down. Tucking the chin essentially takes away a link in the chain and stops the head from being shaken around so much by blows.

But more than that, the chin contains some significant nerve endings. It is sensitive to trauma. Even if a fighter has his chin tucked when he gets nailed right on the point of the chin, he’s going to feel it and perhaps be shaken up by it. This means that the other significant role of tucking the chin is to place it below the line of the shoulders and hide it from easy punches.

While everyone gets hit, the best fighters at least make an effort to hide all of the good stuff like the chin, ribs and temples.

Now watch a Bader fight. Not only is his chin up throughout, but when he steps in with punches, he raises it further.

This was extremely noticeable against Ortiz. Each time that Bader jabbed, he raised his jaw as if he were in a towel-whipping match and trying to shield his eyes. When Ortiz bum-rushed him, Bader stood his ground and tried to punch back—again with his chin right up in the air.

Ortiz saw it, and he hit it. You can see what happened here.

 

Bum Rushing

The standard of striking in MMA has not always been great, but it is rapidly improving. Bum rushing still works against many opponents, but it does not cut the mustard against top-flight fighters. Going all in, gritting your teeth and running at an opponent is not a good idea at any point until perhaps the last seconds of a losing fight.

Yet Bader can easily get drawn into overextending. He was a perfect opponent for Machida because as soon as Bader became frustrated that he couldn’t get close enough to land a good blow, he attempted to bum-rush one of the best counter fighters in MMA. 

Take a look at the result here.

As a general rule, if a fighter must run to catch an opponent, he should stop right there and not follow through with that thought. When forced to run at an opponent, a fighter’s stance squares, his chin comes up, and he creates a big, flat surface with a chin at the centre for the opponent to target.

Machida could have closed his eyes and still knocked Bader out.

Which brings us to our next point.

 

Head Movement

This is an obvious one, but moving your head makes it harder to hit. Traditionally, you throw a combination, and then you move your head before you reset and try something else. Good boxers incorporate evasive head movement mid-combination.

What should be avoided at all costs is squaring up to an opponent, throwing everything at him and taking no evasive action during the breaks. Anyone who is a little wily will do exactly what Glover Teixeira did when he was under Bader‘s assault: Cover, wait for a break and then immediately fire back.

After throwing three or four overhands against Glover’s guard along the fence, Bader paused without moving his head or his feet and then launched a long lead right uppercut (which is also not good form—never lead with a long uppercut.)

He was directly in front of Glover with nothing in the way when that same overhand that Glover always throws put him flat on his back.

Check it out and see for yourself.

 

Conclusions

The jury is out on the idea of the glass jaw. It’s vague and lacks science. Boxing technique, however, is a scientific approach to not being knocked out. What we do know is that it is a lot more likely that a fighter will be knocked out if:

  • He fails to tuck his chin down and hide it.
  • He rushes in on predictable, straight lines.
  • He never takes evasive actions in between his offence.

Bader has been the focus of so much criticism because he is extremely gifted. He’s a stellar wrestler and has the kind of punching power that other fighters in his division would pay through the nose to obtain. If he could create collisions with the subtlety and guile of Machida, he would ruin careers with one punch.

Unfortunately, at least for now, he lacks the concern for self-preservation that every great fighter should have.

Bader has a chance to be great. He’s still young, and the UFC is more than happy to feed him guys like Anthony Perosh, but he needs to stop attempting to overwhelm opponents with rushes and start working toward landing his incredible power while avoiding blows.

 

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

10 Years On: Mark Hunt’s Greatest Rivalry

Mark Hunt has been around a long time, and we as fans are incredibly lucky to have him. Not only has he shown great career longevity, but he has looked like a better fighter in his last four fights than in the decade leading up to them. 
Mark Hunt…

Mark Hunt has been around a long time, and we as fans are incredibly lucky to have him. Not only has he shown great career longevity, but he has looked like a better fighter in his last four fights than in the decade leading up to them. 

Mark Hunt began his career as a kickboxer in the Japanese kickboxing organization K-1, and like many kickboxers, Hunt’s record has a few names appearing more than once. The kickboxing world, at the elite level at least, is not a large one.

Everything about Hunt’s kickboxing career was a little unusual, though. He won the K-1 Grand Prix in Fukuoka tournament by getting to the final despite losing his previous match, and despite his legendary fight with Ray Sefo, the two men only met once. Furthermore, Hunt’s entire career (save his ill-fated return to K-1 in 2008 against Semmy Schilt) took place between 1998 and 2002. In that time, Hunt shoehorned in 43 bouts!

In just four years in kickboxing, Hunt had repeat bouts with Peter Graham and Stefan Leko, but by far the most frequently appearing name on Hunt’s record was his greatest rival, Jerome Le Banner.

Mark Hunt met the colossal Frenchman four times over the course of his kickboxing career and dropped three fights to “Geronimo.” Le Banner effectively highlighted some flaws in Hunt’s early game and today I’d like to talk about the quartet and how Hunt has grown as a fighter.

 

The Hercules of K-1

Many in the MMA community may not be familiar with Jerome Le Banner. In fact, many who have followed kickboxing religiously for the last five years still won’t get what the all the fuss is about. I watched from ringside as Le Banner wheezed his way through a bout with Koichi Watanabe and almost forgot how good Le Banner once was myself.

While not one of the taller fighters in the K-1 and Glory heavyweight ranks, Le Banner at 6’3″ is almost as wide as he is tall. Even at 40 years old, he packs a walloping punch, and in his prime he looked like he could have been formed from granite.

Le Banner was also a pioneer of leading with the strong hand. He was kickboxing’s highest-profile southpaw for quite some time despite being right handed. Le Banner’s choice of stance meant that his power hand and leg were the closest to his opponent while his weaker hand and leg had the distance to travel to the target which would allow them to build force. 

Le Banner’s right low kick was his bread and butter. The power he could get in it over a short distance was incredible, and he specialized in catching opponents just as they punched or while they were recovering, ensuring that he buckled their leg. Just take a look at his quick knockout of Mike Bernardo.

A classic example of Le Banner 101 is his bout against Francisco Filho. Using low kicks with his lead leg (also his power leg) Le Banner was able to get Filho flinching, then as he stepped up to throw a lead-leg kick, he pushed through with an overhand left instead. The resulting one-punch knockout became known as the Millenium KO.

 

The Hunt-Le Banner Quartet

Like everything in Hunt’s kickboxing career, this series of fights happened over a remarkably short period of time. The two fighters met for the first time in July of 2000, then in December of 2001, then in May of 2002 and finally in December of 2002. 

In their first bout, Hunt was clearly concerned with kickboxing relatively cleanly. He stood at range with Le Banner for much of the bout and traded low kicks, which he inevitably did not get the better of. His lack of ringcraft also allowed Le Banner to corner him several times and simply tee off while Hunt looked to cover and get to the clinch.

Hunt had his moments, though. He succeeded in executing a cut kick on the vastly more experienced kickboxer. As Le Banner lifted his leg to check a low kick, Hunt ran through and kicked out Le Banner’s standing leg, dropping his 120 kg frame to the mat. 

Hunt repeatedly attempted to enter with a right straight, then look for a right uppercut or overhand from almost chest to chest with Le Banner, but he failed on every attempt to make anything happen. Le Banner took the decision and moved on in the Grand Prix. This was just Hunt’s first fight outside of Australia, and it was by far the stiffest test of his career to that date.

 

Take 2

Hunt improved rapidly with his mix of brawling and sharp punching technique, and when he qualified for the following year’s K-1 Grand Prix, he opted to be matched against Le Banner in the quarterfinals. It was here that Hunt showed the intelligence for which he is so rarely credited.

Knowing that he wasn’t going to out-strike Le Banner in a technical kickboxing match, when Hunt did get trapped on the ropes, he opted to swing back instead of simply covering and holding. Hunt’s finest moment in the quadrology came when Le Banner cornered him two minutes into the second round. 

Hunt had been swinging back each time Le Banner stepped in with punches, so he was naturally reluctant to do so here. Hunt played on this, stuck his chin out and called Le Banner on. Le Banner hesitated, and Hunt came in with the one-two he had been attempting all fight. Now just as in the previous fight, Hunt got close off of his right straight and looked to land another right hand from the new distance.

Le Banner wasn’t quick enough to react and caught a right hook right on the dome. Hunt turned him onto the ropes and threw one of the most impressive flurries in K-1 history to finish the bout. Unlike their previous bout where Hunt had looked uncomfortable, Hunt was now able to find Le Banner. Through their next two fights, Le Banner would hit the mat off of punches in both.

 

Le Banner Rallies

The third fight of the series proved that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Since their previous meeting, Hunt had won the K-1 Grand Prix and appeared to be working a great deal on his boxing. Hunt was coming off a match against Mirko ‘Cro Cop’ Filipovic wherein his improved head movement had led him to duck directly into a high kick. The same attention to head movement would get him in trouble in this bout.

From the beginning, Hunt was struggling to get close to Le Banner on his own terms. Le Banner was naturally reluctant to charge Hunt, so he stayed on the outside, throwing one-twos into lead low kicks and waiting for Hunt to charge him.

When Hunt inevitably did, Le Banner found a home for his counter right hook. Remember that Le Banner’s lead hand was also his power hand. Often he could get more power on this short, chopping counter punch than he could on his rear-handed power punches.

Throughout the entire fight, Hunt threw himself off balance with power punches, ducked into high kicks and ran onto right hooks. It was Le Banner’s most aggressive showing of the four bouts and undoubtedly Hunt’s worst. Throughout the bout, Hunt’s corner could be heard yelling “stay inside” every time the two came together, but Le Banner made sure to push Hunt away from him each time they came close.

Hunt’s hands looked fast and crisp, but he simply couldn’t get close enough to make use of his flurries. At the start of the second round, Hunt came out and immediately looked to get in close, eating another counter right hook and being sent to the canvas. Hunt’s chin is well known to be one of the best in combat sports history—to see him dropped with a short counter was a shock to many.

Hunt took a beating throughout the second round but came back from that position in which he did so well in the second bout. As Le Banner teed off with Hunt against the ropes, Hunt absorbed the shots and came back with a flurry, putting Le Banner on wobbly legs and catching him with an uppercut, which sent him face-first to the mat.

At the end of the second, Hunt got in close again, and as Le Banner pushed Hunt away, he threw a high kick. This is a classic technique, heavily utilized by Peter Aerts. If you forcibly push an opponent backward, their hands are more than likely to drop away from the kind of solid guard needed to absorb a high kick. Hunt took the kick across the chin and was sent to the canvas again.

The round ended before the count, but Hunt was unable to come out for the final round. In their most entertaining bout, Hunt had shown that he simply couldn’t close the distance well on his own terms. Le Banner, meanwhile, had won by the skin of his teeth. As one-sided as the bout was, he engaged with Hunt on the inside far too frequently for his own good.

 

The Final Match and How Hunt Has Changed

Just a few months later, the two men met for their final match, and it was as though they had come full circle. Le Banner stayed outside and landed brutal right low kicks. Hunt did little to force the action.

Hunt was hurt with a right low kick which it looked as though he checked early in the fight, and it was downhill from there. Le Banner was able to drop Hunt with low kicks and pick up a convincing decision.

Looking at these four matches, it is hard to believe that we’re watching the same Mark Hunt who has appeared in his previous five UFC dates. Where the Hunt who fought Le Banner was about bull-rushing his opponents and throwing relatively inaccurate flurries in hopes of knocking his opponent out, the Hunt of today is far more of a technician.

Hunt has realized that backward movement, especially for strikers in MMA, is incredibly important. Now he glides around the Octagon looking for accurate, heavy counters as his opponents timidly look to close the distance without giving him chase to smash them with his cinder block hands. 

A quick look at his bouts with Ben Rothwell and Cheick Kongo confirm an older, wiser Hunt. He could have run in and swarmed on them in hopes of a knockout, but he sat back and let them stress about the action. Rothwell could get nothing going and got bludgeoned for three rounds. Kongo, meanwhile, came in behind his hands and gave Hunt the opportunity to drop him with a perfect left hook.

I’ve spoken at length on the technical changes in Hunt before, but watching his four bouts with Jerome Le Banner it is as if we’re watching two different people. Where Hunt was an inaccurate, right-handed swinger, he is now a counter-puncher with dynamite in both hands but preferring to use his left. Where he won his K-1 bouts in rushes, he wins his UFC bouts on the back foot with patience.

Few men get the chance to fight for more than a decade, and Hunt is one of the extremely rare ones who keeps looking better.

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

The Finest Striker on the Planet: Giorgio Petrosyan

In the world of combat sports, the term ‘elite striker’ is thrown around a lot. Often it is simply to hype fights. But in the case of Giorgio Petrosyan, his flawless record and largely untouched features speak for themselves.
Ahead of his appearance at…

In the world of combat sports, the term ‘elite striker’ is thrown around a lot. Often it is simply to hype fights. But in the case of Giorgio Petrosyan, his flawless record and largely untouched features speak for themselves.

Ahead of his appearance at this weekend’s Glory 12 card, we examine some of the finer points in his incredible and diverse striking game.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

Peter Aerts: Master of the Head Kick

Elite kickboxers have few things in common, but almost none of them are easy to kick in the head. Not getting kicked in the head is day one stuff.
What made Peter Aerts so special was that he could take high level competition, and get them to…

Elite kickboxers have few things in common, but almost none of them are easy to kick in the head. Not getting kicked in the head is day one stuff.

What made Peter Aerts so special was that he could take high level competition, and get them to drop their hands for long enough that he could clap a shin bone across their skull. Whether it be pushing them off balance, driving down one of their hands, forcing them to react to jabs or palming their head off with one extended hand, Aerts had a trick for all occasions.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

UFC 167: How Johny Hendricks ‘Killed the King’

Whether you think Georges St-Pierre deserved his decision victory, or you believe Johny Hendricks was robbed, it’s hard to argue that Hendricks didn’t take it to the champion on the feet like no man before him.
A few hours before UFC 167 began, I publ…

Whether you think Georges St-Pierre deserved his decision victory, or you believe Johny Hendricks was robbed, it’s hard to argue that Hendricks didn’t take it to the champion on the feet like no man before him.

A few hours before UFC 167 began, I published a short breakdown entitled “Johny Hendricks: A Real and Unique Threat” in which I talked about the entirely unique matchup which Hendricks brought. In this piece, I discussed the difficulty which a traditional southpaw provides for a jab-centric orthodox fighter.

Both St-Pierre and his teammate Rory MacDonald are excellent at using their jab to hurt opponents but struggled to get much going at UFC 167.

Johny Hendricks and Robbie Lawler showed that you don’t need to be a better or more rounded fighter. You just need to be the right fighter. They were stylistic nightmares for their opponents and put on great showings as a result.

In his last two fights, St-Pierre has met two southpaws after a significant length of time without meeting one. In that time, he had learned to box—and particularly to jab—with great effectiveness and venom.

The first southpaw whom St-Pierre met was Nick Diaz. Diaz is a southpaw but not in the conventional mould. Diaz’s focus is on lead-hand punches just as any orthodox boxer is taught. He opened himself up to St-Pierre’s jab often and really had nothing for the champion.

 

The Traditional Southpaw

Hendricks, however, is far more like a traditional southpaw—the kind of southpaw whom great orthodox boxers would avoid in the golden days of boxing. Were he fighting in another time, Hendricks would likely be forced out of the fight game due to a lack of fighters wanting to match up with a dangerous left-hander.

A traditional southpaw barely jabs at all, his lead hand exists entirely to eliminate the orthodox boxer’s jab. This makes everything the orthodox fighter usually does nearly worthless. He cannot lead with his jab anymore so he must throw his rear hand, which is further away, slower and unnatural to him.

Meanwhile, the southpaw has likely always been sparring and fighting against orthodox fighters; there are just so many more of them. He is used to using his lead hand to check and throwing his rear hand as a lead.

In both the main event and the MacDonald vs. Lawler bout, we were treated to these southpaw versus orthodox matchups. Both MacDonald and St-Pierre have previously demonstrated brilliant, fight-changing jabs, and at UFC 167, neither could get his jab going with any consistency. 

 

Robbie Lawler vs. Rory MacDonald

I used the phrase “traditional southpaw,” but Lawler does a lot of weird things. His lead counter-uppercut is one of his favourite punches, and it certainly isn’t a conventional one. But what he does excellently, which MacDonald has not encountered before, is control the lead hand.

With his lead (right) hand extended, Lawler keeps his palm in the path of MacDonald’s jab. Nobody (certainly not if they’re fighting an opponent in their own weight class) can vaporize an opponent’s hand with their jab in this sort of position. 

This match was billed as a technician, MacDonald, against an instinctive power-puncher, Lawler. In actuality, what it was was a good southpaw versus a fighter who hasn’t ever fought a good, experienced southpaw. 

Lawler controlled MacDonald’s lead hand, grabbed at his wrist, slapped his hand down and generally harassed the jab into impotence. MacDonald’s unfamiliarity with the position showed when he dropped his hand to escape from Lawler’s hand control but remained in range. 

This allowed Lawler to capitalize with lead elbows and jabs of his own.

What Lawler also did well, and has always done, was give MacDonald the opportunity to punch and then throw his lead (right) hook over the top of it. It was this punch which caused MacDonald so much trouble at the start of the third round.

Deny the opponent an opening all fight then show it and you can almost guarantee their response. Lawler is known as a wild man, but he’s one of the savviest counterpunchers (particularly southpaw counterpunches) in MMA.

MacDonald’s wrestling looked as good as ever, but Lawler used butterfly hooks on the ground to neutralize MacDonald’s dangerous ground-and-pound.

 

Georges St-Pierre vs. Johny Hendricks

The problems which I suggested could exist for St-Pierre affected him to a greater degree than I could have ever predicted. St-Pierre’s jab was completely neutralized for large portions of the bout, leaving him to essentially lead with other, less reliable techniques or to wrestle against a stronger wrestler. 

Today the forums are filled with questions about why GSP didn’t jab more and what could he have done better. It wasn’t that GSP didn’t feel like jabbing, it was that he couldn’t for the most part. Hendricks’ lead hand prevented St-Pierre from firing straight to the target for the most part.

Now St-Pierre did land some nice hooks around Hendricks’ extended lead hand, which is a danger if you get into hand fighting too far from your body. St-Pierre also landed his jab very effectively as a response to Hendricks’ misses, which in any Hendricks match are many. 

Hendricks’ habit of diving forward behind his face, then leaving his face out after he is done punching, is appearing less frequently in his fights but still more than it should. If Hendricks missed with one of his bull rushes, or even after he connected, he would eat a stiff jab on the snout while his hands dangled.

St-Pierre is the greatest mixed martial artist fighting today because, obviously enough, he is the greatest in mixing his skills. In terms of pure wrestling, he is not on the level of many of the accomplished wrestlers he fights, but his excellent striking game upsets them so much that he can get easy takedowns on them.

By effectively removing St-Pierre’s striking game (which is very one-dimensional at this point), Hendricks forced St-Pierre into an awkward stand-up match or a pure wrestling match against a stronger pure wrestler.

 

How Can St-Pierre Take the Rematch?

So what are St-Pierre’s option in a rematch? How can he stop the next southpaw he fights simply coming along, focusing on checking his lead hand and making him fight with techniques which hold a fraction of the effectiveness?

Well to start he could learn to lead with his right hand. He threw the occasional superman punch, rather than superman jab, against Hendricks in order to lead with his right hand, but aside from that, most of his offence which wasn’t jabbing proved as ineffective as jabbing into Hendricks’ outstretched palm.

Against southpaws, when hand fighting, it is best to look to get your lead hand outside of theirs, then pull it toward you and across yourself as you step your lead foot outside of theirs and throw a right straight.

Getting the lead foot outside the opponent’s and throwing the power hand simply places a fighter in such a dominating position. Rear-hand punches, lead-hand punches, kicks and even trips and sweeps are available from there.

Check out Hendricks’ awesome trip off one such flurry.

Having your lead leg on the outside makes life hellish for the other man.

Leading with the rear hand is so very important against a traditional southpaw. Jabbing only really becomes more important when opponents begin retracting their lead hand to avoid the hand fight.

Of course if a fighter still wants to jab against a southpaw who is hand fighting with him, he can still make it happen. The skipping stone jab is where a fighter uses his lead hand to slap or pull the opponent’s lead hand just below the line of his shoulder, before stepping in and jabbing with the same hand.

It isn’t a power technique, but by targeting the opponent’s eye on his lead side, it is effective in getting a reaction out of him. He will pull back, square up and avoid the hand fight, allowing the orthodox fighter to open up with jabs again, or the southpaw will simply attempt to react each time his lead hand is slapped down. This means the skipping stone jab leads perfectly into the right straight.

St-Pierre actually used the skipping stone jab numerous times throughout the bout, but being St-Pierre, he never threw a right hand after it and never made use of the openings exposed by Hendricks’ flustered defence. 

A master of the skipping stone jab was Benny Leonard. Leonard is considered one of the greatest boxers of all time, but curiously enough, the only footage which exists of him is against Lew Tendler, the era’s premier southpaw. 

An additional avenue to explore is the use of the left hook as Hendricks comes in. He often leaves himself completely exposed and ends up getting dropped to his knees as he did against Carlos Condit at the end of their first round by means of a left hook. St-Pierre found this counter numerous times throughout the bout but put little on it as he was so flustered by the attacks coming at him.

If St-Pierre can start hitting Hendricks, I have little doubt he can open up the opportunities for his legendary double leg and snowball from there. Hendricks’ defensive skills on the feet aren’t great; it is simply that St-Pierre only has one technique which really needs defending on the feet.

There are lead-handed options, but to be frank, that shouldn’t be the attitude which St-Pierre takes. It would be taking pot shots on occasions when Hendricks is open to the left hand, when Josh Koscheck amply proved that Hendricks is almost always open to the right hand.

 

Conclusions

Johny Hendricks is not as good a fighter all around as Georges St-Pierre; I think that goes without saying. Robbie Lawler might not be as skilled all around as Rory MacDonald. But fights aren’t about skills, they’re about matchups, and both Tristar representatives met nightmare matchups at UFC 167.

St-Pierre and MacDonald are both skilled in all areas of the game, but they rely so heavily on a minimalist toolkit. If you only need a jab on the feet with some kicks interspersed, as soon as that jab is gone, you have nothing. That is what we saw from both men at UFC 167.

In their next matches, they could meet orthodox fighters or southpaws who don’t fight like southpaws (such as Nick Diaz) and look incredible. They could jab their next opponents’ faces into corned beef hash. Fight fans have a way of saying fighters are “back” without them proving that they have addressed the issues which cause them to lose in the first place.

Both St-Pierre and MacDonald need to go back to the drawing board and admit that having a completely one-sided offence is not going to cut it against every opponent.

 

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

Twenty Years of UFC: The Changes, the Styles and the Future

An awful lot has changed in 20 years.
Twenty years ago, Royce Gracie swept through the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in what was essentially an extended advertisement for Gracie Jiu Jitsu. How did we get from Royce Gracie’s basic methods to…

An awful lot has changed in 20 years.

Twenty years ago, Royce Gracie swept through the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in what was essentially an extended advertisement for Gracie Jiu Jitsu. How did we get from Royce Gracie’s basic methods to the rounded skill set employed by Cain Velasquez or Jose Aldo? 

When I was asked to write this piece, I thought that it would be fairly easy. I was obviously not thinking. This is a subject to which we could devote a sizable tome, but I will here attempt to do it in a few thousand words.

Today we will take a brief look at the development of mixed martial arts strategy from UFC 1 onward.

 

Royce Gracie and the Grappler’s Dominance

UFC 1 confirmed that in a bout of pure grappler against pure striker, more often than not the grappler will win. Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie had easily submitted their opponents while the rest of the tournament was made up of ugly, clumsy brawls. 

If UFC 1 didn’t fix this idea in the minds of viewers, UFC 2, 3 (though Gracie dropped out before the final), and 4 certainly did, as Royce Gracie swept through the competition time and again and remained undefeated.

Gracie’s success was due to two factors. 

Firstly, almost no-one was familiar with the ground game; even those who were had not trained it in as methodical an environment as Gracie had with his family. Ken Shamrock leaping back on a leg from Gracie’s guard and allowing Gracie to come up on top of him is the perfect example of this.

The second factor was that almost no-one in the tournament had any idea of how to prevent or break away from the clinch or to stuff a shot. Knowing that Royce Gracie wanted to clinch, most went in expecting to have to knock him out before he did so.

The most important point that these early UFC bouts proved was that if a man doesn’t want to throw strikes with you, and instead wants to grab ahold of you, you have a very small window in which to knock him out. If you can’t break the clinch or stuff the takedown, you have almost no chance.

The Gracie method was pretty well expected by UFC 4, but nobody found a counter to it. He would throw that bizarre push kick to the knee or a front kick to the face, then charge in behind it and duck into the clinch or a takedown. In the event of a real struggle, Gracie would pull guard.

At UFC 5, Gracie’s involvement in a superfight with Ken Shamrock and not being entered into the tournament gave Dan Severn chance to shine. The great wrestler was able to manhandle his way to the final, where he won by an Americana.

 

The Rise of the Wrestler

It was now that the UFC, and mixed martial arts competition, began to resemble in many ways what we see today. As wrestlers began to learn to defend submissions from the top, and even apply a few of their own, they became the dominant force in mixed martial arts.

Gracie excelled because almost no-one he fought knew how to stop him taking them down, and the ones who did (Ken Shamrock, Dan Severn) struggled to deal with his skill from the bottom. From UFC 5 onward, the list of tournament winners reads like an amateur wrestling scrapbook.

Dan Severn, Don Frye, Mark Coleman and Mark Kerr each won the UFC tournament twice. The superfights were almost exclusively contested between grapplers who had succeeded in previous tournaments.

There were successes who weren’t wrestlers, such as the sambo master, Oleg Taktarov, and arguably the first complete mixed martial artist, Marco Ruas, but the trend was overwhelmingly in favor of the wrestler.

This era continued to impress that one great truth in mixed martial arts and set it in stone:

Whoever can control where the fight takes place owns the fight.

Even between wrestlers there was of course a great deal of variation. Some liked to shoot and others preferred the clinch. Mark Coleman could double-leg a horse, Dan Severn did a better job once he had a hold on his opponent.

 

The Ground-and-Pound Game

Not having the submission savvy of men like Royce Gracie or Ken Shamrock, the great wrestlers of the UFC tournaments primarily relied on hitting their opponent while they held them down. No-one was quite as frightening in the early days as Mark Coleman. 

Coleman could hit hard. He didn’t have much of a gas tank, but he could hit often enough and with enough authority that he could grind his opponents down on the mat. Dan Severn was always a terrifying specimen, but he seemed reluctant to hit hard when on the mat. Coleman was a better wrestler, with none of these scruples.

When Coleman’s victim tried to stop him punching them, by reaching for his hands, Coleman would start butting them with his head. We often forget just how effective butting is, but a quick review of Coleman’s bouts will remind you why it remains such a dangerous technique.

A perfect example is that of Brian Johnston, who was doing an excellent job of holding Coleman close and smothering his offense. All it took was a couple of butts by Coleman, and he was released back up to punching range, whereupon he pounded out his man.

At UFC 15, head butts (along with a host of other activities) were banned in an effort to make the UFC less controversial and more along the lines of an actual sport. Coinciding with an ACL replacement, Coleman’s success rapidly dropped off in the UFC, but on moving to PRIDE FC, where knees to the head of a downed opponent were legal. He enjoyed a career resurgence and provided some brutal knockouts from the front headlock and north-south positions.

 

The Defensive Guard

Before strikers began learning to sprawl, something which took a long time, the guard took on the role of the most important position in the bout. For the men who couldn’t out grapple on the feet with the great wrestlers, the guard was the equalizer.

Around the same time that Mark Coleman was dominating the UFC, a Dutch kickboxer named Bas Rutten was ruling over the competition in Pancrase, a Japanese promotion.

Rutten had entered the organization with little submission experience and had faltered against submission fighters such as Masakatsu Funaki and Ken Shamrock. While Rutten was able to starch the lesser wrestlers in the organization, his realization that the guard was his most important tool turned his career around rapidly.

Rutten eventually came to the UFC, but one of his Pancrase stable mates found success with similar tactics before Rutten made the move.

Maurice Smith is one of the truly remarkable success stories in MMA. Arguably the best kickboxer that the US has ever produced, there was still nothing to suggest that he could beat Mark Coleman in an MMA match. Smith’s 5-7 record in MMA was particularly discouraging.

Meeting Coleman at UFC 14, at the height of Coleman’s headbutting, double legging, face pounding powers, Smith had a huge task ahead of him. What Smith did have, and Coleman had shown to lack, was cardio. 

Through the first round, Smith weathered the storm. From his guard he effectively shut down Coleman’s strikes and used the lock down from half guard to keep Coleman’s weight off of him and out of the head butts. Controlling Coleman’s head and posture masterfully, Smith avoided the soul-sapping beating which Don Frye had suffered from his own closed guard. 

Smith threw up no submission attempts—he simply controlled and exhausted Coleman, and scrambled when he was in a bad spot. In the two extension rounds, Coleman could hardly stand, while Smith was breathing hard but was more than happy to open up with his jabs and low kicks. Smith won the decision and momentarily bucked the great trend of grapplers beating strikers. But he had done so as a rounded mixed martial artist. 

Bas Rutten was able to exhaust Tsuyoshi Kohsaka and Kevin Randleman from underneath shortly afterward. Similarly, Frank Shamrock was able to do the same against a much bigger, strong Tito Ortiz in arguably the best fight in UFC history, TKOing Tito in the fourth round.

This was an incredible step forward from the days of fighters simply holding closed guard and hoping for a referee to insist on a stand up as Igor Vovchanchyn and other non-wrestlers did.

 

Sprawl and Brawl

The more popular method of dealing with wrestlers was to face them head on. Many strikers tried to pick up the wrestling game to the extent where they could stuff a good wrestler’s takedown attempts, and most utterly failed.

In PRIDE FC Mirko Cro Cop Filipovic had great success, but in the UFC the man to watch was Chuck Liddell. 

We began the article, and indeed the UFC, with the rule that it is extremely hard to knock a man out before he clinches you. What Liddell and other successful strikers have done so well in recent years is force an opponent to keep attempting the clinch or shot. 

The more times an opponent is forced to attempt a shot or clinch, the more they exhaust themselves and the better you can come to know their timing and habits. 

Liddell could stuff the best of them, and when that failed he didn’t simply hold his guard, he worked his way up. A pioneer of the wall walk, Liddell would seemingly ignore his opponent’s offense on the ground and begin wriggling his way toward and then up the fence.

Nowadays, the successful strikers have realized that actively trying to stuff takedowns is an awfully exhausting process. Some fighters will feed the single-leg takedown and hop to the cage for balance such as Jose Aldo and B.J. Penn. Others will use space and backpedal, avoiding engaging at all and baiting their opponent to rush in and be countered, such as Lyoto Machida and Anderson Silva.

Of course, the truly wonderful thing about MMA is that there still exist the simple ground-and-pounders. The strikers with a great guard, and the striker who wades forward and hopes to sprawl in time. The process of evolution in mixed martial arts has not been about shedding layers, but of accumulating them. 

 

The Fighters of Today and Tomorrow

Bill Bryson observed that it is a common misconception that biological evolution marches toward a pinnacle such as man. The evolution of the fight game is not dissimilar. It is not working toward a final point or peak. There is no final form or perfect fighter. 

As fighters learn new techniques, older ones get neglected or forgotten and then return with as much efficacy as they had on the day they were invented.

I am often asked what direction I think the fight game will take in years to come, and I have no answer for that. I don’t think there is one. What is so exciting about mixed martial arts now, 20 years after the first UFC event, is that there still exists a vast number of styles and strategies.

We have takedown artists and ground-and-pounders. We have guard passers and guard pullers. We have runners and ring cutters, clinch fighters and wall walkers. We have guys who jump off of the fence as if it were the floor, and we have stallers. We have exciting fighters, and we have guys who you hope to see lose more than anything.

The side kick we laughed at when recalling Royce Gracie two years ago is now a commonplace technique in the arsenals of Jon Jones and Anderson Silva. Keith Hackney’s rolling axe kick attempt has been replicated numerous times in the cage (though no knockouts yet). We even had a 205-pound champion who was using karate to fluster people.

After 20 years of constant evolution, you cannot point to any one factor that combines the current crop of the UFC champions except that they are good in every area. Each has his own approach and methods. This is not art versus art but fighter versus fighter and preparation versus preparation.

The UFC and MMA have been through a lot in two decades, and there’s a hell of a lot more on the way.

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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