The mixed martial arts are constantly evolving, techniques coming in and out of favor as fighters discover what works and what doesn’t in the world’s most demented scientific laboratory—the UFC’s Octagon. But sometimes it’s the old standbys that …
The mixed martial arts are constantly evolving, techniques coming in and out of favor as fighters discover what works and what doesn’t in the world’s most demented scientific laboratory—the UFC’s Octagon. But sometimes it’s the old standbys that work best, as Max “Blessed” Holloway proved Saturday night in Brazil, dropping legendary featherweight Jose Aldo with the oldest trick in the book, the old one-two.
A jab opened his defenses. The subsequent right hand dropped him on his backside. The rest was just a matter of time. With his win, Holloway ascended the throne as the top featherweight in the world, perhaps relegating the great Aldo to the history books.
“He had everything I wanted,” Holloway told Fox Sports 1. “But his time is over. Welcome to the Blessed era…The man is the GOAT, but this is my reign now.”
With Aldo’s decline has come an increased focus on his legacy. For six long years after winning the WEC championship from Mike Brown in 2009, he dominated everyone in his path at 145 pounds. As champion of the WEC and later the UFC, Aldo won nine consecutive fights against some of the best competitors in the sport.
While his title reign was defined by the numerous fights he didn’t show up for as much as it was his eventual victories, his exploits when he managed to make it to the cage will live forever with the sport’s hardcore fans. The spectacular eight-second knockout win over Cub Swanson, the brutal destruction of Urijah Faber’s leg and the casual way he wrecked refugees from lightweight like Frankie Edgar and Kenny Florian more than establish his bona fides.
Aldo is without a doubt the most accomplished fighter his weight class has ever known and a first ballot Hall of Famer. His cumulative success cannot be denied, his long reign atop the division proving his greatness to even the most hardened skeptics. But, at the peak of his powers, Aldo was not the best featherweight of all time.
That honor belongs to ConorMcGregor.
You remember ConorMcGregor right? Before devoting his life to auditioning for a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather, he was the most popular fighter in UFC history, exploding the dubious, long-held belief that smaller fighters couldn’t draw in mixed martial arts.
As he becomes more caricature than man, it will be harder and harder to recall a time when McGregor was just an athlete. Lost in the snap of paparazzi cameras and the absurdities of his burgeoning celebrity is the key to his considerable appeal—McGregor is an amazing fighter.
In two short years, he wiped out the featherweight division, dropping contender after contender to the mat with his deadly left hand. While Aldo seemed content to outpoint everyone he fought, winning five of his seven title bouts in the UFC by decision, McGregor displayed a killer instinct the likes of which the sport has rarely seen.
Six men entered the cage against him en route to the championship. Five didn’t survive to hear the final bell—only Holloway managed that honor, in part because McGregortore his left ACL during that fight.
Despite the injury, he beat the man who is now champion decisively.
McGregor‘s featherweight journey culminated in an epic fight against Aldo for the championship of the world. Before the bout, the two men toured the world, creating unprecedented interest for a division that had consistently failed at the box office during Aldo’s time on top.
It was here, in front of an adoring press and enraptured fans, that McGregor truly established the persona that would drive his rise to the top of the sport. He was in his element the moment the cameras came on, emasculating Aldo over and over again, his silver tongue turning out to be every bit the weapon his left hand is.
Eventually, however, a prize fight moves from behind the microphone to the center of the Octagon. But the change of venue did little to change the outcome. McGregor remained dominant, knocking Aldo cold in just 13 seconds, a devastating loss that will always linger over any discussion of the Brazilian’s otherwise brilliant career.
McGregor, once champion, never fought at featherweight again. Why bother with a draining weight cut when the 155 pound division was ripe for the taking? The Irishman would go on to take UFC gold in there too, looking even stronger, fresher and healthier than he had at featherweight.
The brevity of his time in the division means McGregor can never be considered the greatest fighter in featherweight history. That remains Aldo until Holloway builds a competing claim of his own.
But, at his apex, McGregor was the absolute best, a brief flicker of light in a division that desperately needed a star’s shine.
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
The hints kept coming, week after week, battering fans like a classic Chuck Liddell combination. First it was a video of the 47-year-old former UFC champion pounding poor Jay Glazer with elbows that sent the NFL insider reeling, despite hitti…
The hints kept coming, week after week, battering fans like a classic Chuck Liddell combination. First it was a video of the 47-year-old former UFC champion pounding poor Jay Glazer with elbows that sent the NFL insider reeling, despite hitting nothing but his heavily padded hands. A week later Liddell posted a photo of himself with sculpted abs and his trademark mohawk, looking very Octagon-ready and “in deep thought.”
Finally, early in May, Liddell’s longtime coach, John Hackleman, threw gas on the flames. Was Liddell coming back to the cage? Hackleman told the Anik and Florian podcast that he didn’t see why not.
“Like I always said, it’s whatever is in his heart,” Hackleman said (transcription by MMAjunkie). “And plus, three million bucks? Who is gonna tell someone, ‘No. I’m not going to allow you to make $3 million?’ Which is more than most people make in three lifetimes.”
The whole thing made Liddell laugh, something Hackleman is good at accomplishing. He had gotten in shape to film a television commercial, not to prepare for a return to the cage. But Hackleman was happy to get people in the MMA world riled up if he could.
“Let me tell you about Hackleman,” Liddell told Bleacher Report in an exclusive interview. “The first time we ever had a big television network come out to cover one of our fights, it was CNBC. It was a big deal to be on a show like that because UFC was first becoming mainstream.
“They talked to Hackleman first and then they came to me all excited. ‘He said you got so scared before a fight that you have to crawl into bed and cuddle with him the night before.’ And they were serious. He made them believe it. I just started laughing. Hackleman is nuts. My favorite kind of nuts. He likes to mess with people.”
In the journalism business, that’s what’s known as a “non-denial denial.” You’ll note that Liddell, in sharing this anecdote, didn’t confirm or reject the rumor of his return.
“Someone said Anderson Silva and GSP would be a $12 million fight,” Liddell said of Georges St-Pierre. “I told people that for $12 million, I’d fight them both right now. At the same time. People took that as ‘He’s going to fight again.’ It was a joke. But if you came up with $12 million, yeah, of course I will fight again. I’ve got a puncher’s chance against anybody.”
Fighter retirements are rarely written in ink, and few in the new sport of mixed martial arts have given up fighting entirely. Liddell, however, looked to be one of the few to make it stick. An early client of UFC President Dana White back in the days when White was a manager, Liddell was offered a plum job as the UFC’s vice president of business development after losing five of his final six fights.
“I went to a lot of places, especially new markets. If it was a place that wasn’t real familiar with the UFC, I was one of the names they knew,” Liddell said. “Here’s an example—we were trying to get on one of the Air Force bases for a show to benefit the troops and were having trouble getting on there. I went out there and met the troops with the base commander the first day I was there.
“The second day he told me, ‘I had no idea who you were when you came, but after I saw how all my guys reacted to you, now I get it.’ Three months later, we fought on that base. That’s the kind of thing I was doing, just trying to help the brand grow.”
That all changed when WME-IMG bought the promotion for $4 billion last year and purged much of the senior management staff—including Liddell.
“When I heard rumors they were selling the company, I asked Dana about it and he said ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. You’ve got nothing to worry about.’ I was cut on the third round of cuts,” Liddell said. “It was disappointing. Really disappointing for sure.
“I was told it was a lifetime job. Dana called me personally and told me the morning before they announced it. I understand. It’s business. They paid a lot for UFC and need to make some of that money back. They didn’t think I could help them with that, I guess.”
In the seven years since Liddell stepped into the UFC’s Octagon, a new option for aging fighters has emerged in the form of Viacom’s Bellator MMA. Many of Liddell’s former rivals like Quinton Jackson and Tito Ortiz have competed for Bellator on Spike TV, often drawing huge numbers on Friday night. It’s a development Liddell has been watching closely.
“I saw Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock fight last year and said, ‘I haven’t sparred in six months and haven’t fought in seven years. I could get up off the couch and beat both of those guys right now.’ It was terrible. I would be embarrassed to fight those guys.”
You can be forgiven if you think Liddell sounds like a man gearing himself up for a return to action. Again, he doesn’t reject the notion out of hand.
“It’s a risk/reward thing. Someone would have to make it worth fighting,” Liddell said. “If someone came to me with crazy numbers, I can’t say I wouldn’t do it. But I don’t see anybody coming up with those numbers.
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
Thirty seconds into his fight with Demian Maia, it’s already over for Carlos Condit. He may not know it yet, but the end is approaching; unflappable, unyielding, the ancient art of jiu-jitsu given new life by a man who’s devoted himself to the religion…
Thirty seconds into his fight with Demian Maia, it’s already over for Carlos Condit. He may not know it yet, but the end is approaching; unflappable, unyielding, the ancient art of jiu-jitsu given new life by a man who’s devoted himself to the religion of martial arts.
Condit had prepared for this moment for two months. He knew Maia would try to push him into the cage. He knew he’d use a single leg takedown attempt to do it. He knew once he was on the ground that Maia would overwhelm and envelop—a human ocean seemingly covering every inch of his body, impossible to escape.
He practiced studiously to avoid it, every day an emotional battle, with frustration boiling over every time his back touched the mat. Once he was there, Condit knew it was a matter of waiting Maia out, battering him from the bottom and hoping the referee stood the two men up.
Getting up against a man like Maia was out of the question. The trick was not going to the ground in the first place.
“The best fighters make their opponents fight their fight,” Condit‘s coach Brandon Gibson said. “You know Maia wants to go to the ground. You know he wants to advance position. You know he wants to be in mount or take the back. And he just gets there.
“There’s no secret to what he does. He’s just the best at it. Our first job was to highlight how he gets to the position where he controls the back. How does he get to that position and how can we stop him? We looked for glimpses of success against him and created a plan to minimize what he does well and concentrate on what Carlos does best.”
A plan is a good start. Intellectually, that all makes sense. But, against a man like Maia, nothing can prepare you for the experience of actually being there. For former opponents like Matt Brown, watching Condit struggle was all too familiar.
“The one thing different I felt from him, different than every person I’ve ever fought or even trained with, was he didn’t seem interested in chaining things together or transitioning from one technique to the next,” Brown said. “He had an idea of what he wanted and he was going to go for that with a single-minded purpose until he got. He was willing to live or die based on getting what he wanted.
“You don’t really train with guys like that. I’d never competed against anyone like that before. Yes, I trained for the moment. But there are levels. And it’s hard to find a guy as good as Demian Maia to train with.”
Within a single minute, 60 ticks of the second hand, Condit found Maia on his back. Less than two minutes after the ringing of a bell kicked off the contest, Condit was giving in to Maia’s pressure, turning his head to escape a wicked neck crank, accepting the inevitable rear naked choke that he knew must surely follow.
“What can I say? Opponents, they know the techniques, but they don’t know the details,” Maia said. “They know that I like to do a certain kind of sweep and that I like to do submissions from the back. It’s hard for them, though—because it’s not just the basic technique, it’s what is hiding behind the technique. Those are the details I work on and am learning every day.”
It was low-key one of the most dominating performances the sport had seen in years, one elite athlete in complete control of another. And Maia did it all without throwing a single punch with bad intentions.
Carlos Condit was born to fight. A whirling dervish of kicks, punches and elbows, he’s a non-stop cacophony of violence, good enough at one point to claim the honor of being the best welterweight on the planet. He’s been in the cage with fighters who will be first ballot Hall of Famers, men like the incomparable Georges St-Pierre.
In that time he’d never looked out of place—until he found himself face to face with Demian Maia.
The most intimidating man in the UFC’s welterweight division hardly looks the part. In a sport filled with tattooed wild men and muscle-bound s–t talkers, he barely makes a peep, visually or sonically.
It’s why, despite six consecutive wins agains the best competition the welterweight division can offer, you’ve likely never heard of him unless you count yourself among the sport’s hardcore fans. It’s why he’s fighting on the undercard of UFC 211 against Jorge Masvidal instead of against champion TyronWoodley as athletic norms would suggest.
Talking with Bleacher Report as he drove through the Brazilian countryside, this seeming rejection did little to raise Maia’s blood pressure. He understands that ConorMcGregor has lit a fire under the sport, overnight becoming the most popular attraction in UFC history. The result has been an endless stream of copycats. But, while he doesn’t believe that’s the only personality a promoter can sell to the public, he can accept UFC’s decision to prioritize others over him.
“UFC may be this giant company, but it is made up of people,” Maia said in his heavily accented but pristine English. “And people have their preferences. You change people and the preferences change. For now, most people making decisions in UFC like standup fighting. That’s a personal taste. Just like if I was the owner or made all the decisions for UFC, I would reward a lot of ground fighters. That’s normal. People are biased towards what they like. It’s a human being being a human being.”
It’s hard to imagine, as the conversation journeys from his early life as a martial arts obsessed kid to his current life as a martial arts obsessed adult, Maia getting too upset about anything. The closest he comes is when I ask him about the psychic and karmic results of possibly hurting an opponent in the cage, and he gently admonishes me for bringing up such a taboo subject in the days before he must fight.
“I cannot have these thoughts when I’m fighting,” he said, simply but emphatically. “The style of jiu-jitsu I do isn’t likely to lead to injury. It shouldn’t lead to hurting your opponent, but sometimes that is a consequence. As an athlete, I cannot think about that.”
Other than that, Maia is entirely composed, calm, polite and thoughtful. This, he says, is the product of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and why, at the age of 39, he’s still willing to step into a steel cage to pit his will against another man’s.
“I have a mission to share jiu-jitsu with the world,” he said. “I have something beautiful to share with people and a big platform, which is the UFC. I know that when I am fighting, there are many people who are influenced by me. So, I’ve got to use that to bring what I love to everyone.
“It’s a way to discover self consciousness and to understand yourself better, to learn how to control yourself under pressure. All of these values, the things that are important in jiu jitsu, are just as important in every day life. This is something I can help give to other people.”
To Maia, fighting is just something he does to support his real passion, a martial arts journey that started when he was four years old and discovered judo for the first time. Kungfu and other arts would follow. Brazilian jiu-jitsu, too expensive for his parents to afford, remained just out of reach, tantalizing and intriguing him from a distance.
By the time he started college, everything changed. After watching a local competition in Sao Paulo, Brazil, that saw jiu-jitsu players destroy traditional martial artists of all disciplines, Maia found a new meaning and purpose in life.
Jiu-jitsu had taken the martial arts world by storm a few years earlier as Brazilian brothers Royce and Rickson Gracie dominated no-holds-barred competitions in America and Japan, and Maia was swept up in the excitement of it all. Inspired by the Gracies, the 19-year-old found his way to world champion Fabio Gurgel‘s gym and made the decision to devote himself to the most efficient and beautiful art he’d ever seen.
“Rickson was a guy who really influenced me, because of his mindset and his way of seeing things,” Maia says. “I feel like I know Rickson, not personally, but through his approach. I admire his way and his belief in jiu-jitsu as an art where you can win without getting hurt or hurting your opponent. In terms of philosophy, I follow the mindset of Rickson and his belief in the strength of jiu-jitsu.”
Every morning Maia got up and went to work. Later in the day, he’d attend class en route to a degree in journalism. In between he trained at least twice a day. At night he studied videos of the Gracies and other grappling greats and dreamed about jiu-jitsu.
Others his age had been in the sport for years before Maia had even begun. There was a lot of catching up to do. He was in a hurry to absorb it all, to learn everything there was to know, to become the very best in the world.
“Training with Fabio Gurgel was like going to college for jiu-jitsu,” Maia says. “A lot of athletes aren’t great teachers. I was very lucky to find one who was. What really helped me advance quickly was teaching. That helped me jump ahead of many people because I was thrown into it. I was teaching sometimes five classes a day. It was like a private class for myself as well. I was training and teaching and in love. I was thinking about jiu-jitsu all day.”
In less than five years Maia had earned a black belt from Gurgel, something that would normally take even the most promising student double that amount of time. But Maia was more than promising. He won world championships as both a purple and brown belt, and after just six years into training, he won the prestigious World Cup two years in a row.
“Just like anybody who excels in their craft, whether it’s a musician or an artist, I think the beauty is in the details,” Gibson said. “What makes Maia so good is that everything he does is perfect. The way he floats is perfect. The way he posts is perfect. He’s always balanced, he’s always in control. Jiu-jitsu is physics and geometry and he understands it. Mentally, he’s a master.”
The key to Maia’s success is not just the details—it’s that they are ever-changing. In some ways, in fact, Condit was a victim of Maia’s obsession with incremental improvements. And he has Brown to blame for it.
Though Maia eventually finished Brown with a choke in their 2016 bout, his early struggles to do so bothered him, lingering in his mind long after the fight was over. Brown had bested him in what is typically Maia’s best position until a last-second, desperate attempt to pull victory from defeat led to a mistake.
That wasn’t good enough.
“I needed to understand some more details and studied it more and more,” Maia said. “I did things differently and I worked and worked and soon I was submitting everyone from the back in training. By the time I fought Carlos Condit, I was in the same position I was in against Matt Brown but was able to submit him much faster.”
In grappling, details are everything. And you can see it in the Condit fight. Instead of simply going for a choke, Maia grabbed a hold of Condit‘s shoulder with his left hand. This grip allowed him to crush Condit‘s face with a brutal neck crank, forcing him to choose between an agonizing hold and the danger of the choke, a hold Maia had previously used six times to secure a submission.
Condit turned his head to take his chances with the choke. Seconds later it was over. The difference was in the details.
“For people watching, it looks the same. It is hard to see,” Maia said. “The pressure of my body. How I move my head. The angle I chose. These are small details. For the opponent, these things are hard to prepare for.
“Even though it looks like the same technique I used to do, it is not the same anymore. I added some details or I took some things away. I am in love with the technique because it is always changing. I am never the same. I do a different thing every time, even when it doesn’t always look like it.”
It’s this passion for perfection that has kept Maia from settling into the comfortable role as an established veteran, comfortable in the skill sets he brings to the cage. That’s why he sought out Wanderlei Silva to improve his striking game and coach Dave Esposito to perfect his wrestling game, making it impossible for opponents to avoid going to the mat with him.
“His takedowns and his ability to take the back so quickly really threw me off,” Brown said. “We knew his jiu-jitsu was as good as anyone’s and I was prepared for that. But his wrestling was much better than I thought it would be.
“His takedowns and transitions took me by surprise. And once he got a hold of me, it felt like I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d never trained with anyone at the gym who was able to hold a position so well for so long. He’s at the highest level. And you know that if you make one mistake, that’s going to be it.”
These are the little things that keeps Maia coming to the gym every morning, personally teaching students at least once a week in the traditional gi of his art and perfecting his own craft every day with burgeoning professionals. He’s a scientist studying pain, his own Academy in Sao Paulo a laboratory covered in blue mats.
“I just love martial arts. I love the discoveries you make in training. I love to be ahead of the other fighters, using techniques they aren’t ready to defend,” Maia said in a voice that leaves no doubt that he means it. “I fight to pay for my passion. I love to train more than I love to fight.”
It’s this spirit of adventure, this drive to discover new ways to push both his opponents and himself that will propel Maia into the cage with Masvidal on Saturday, the latest step on a journey that has spanned a lifetime. Should he win, Maia is prepared for an opportunity to prove he’s the best in the world. Just don’t expect the same man from the fight before to enter the cage.
“This sport is still so new that we have this opportunity to create new strategies and techniques,” he said. “This is what I do everyday at the academy to stay ahead of my opponents. I am not stronger than them, I am not better at standup. My difference is that I train every day to bring things to the table my opponent will not be used to. When the chance comes, I will be ready.”
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
There’s something special about the heavyweights. Just ask the 90,000 fans who packed Wembley Stadium to see boxing’s Anthony Joshua stake his claim to the crown in April.
The heavyweight kingpin isn’t just one champion among many—he’s the most d…
There’s something special about the heavyweights. Just ask the 90,000 fans who packed Wembley Stadium to see boxing’s Anthony Joshua stake his claim to the crown in April.
The heavyweight kingpin isn’t just one champion among many—he’s the most dangerous unarmed combatant on the planet. Bigger, badder and tougher than his peers.
In the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the title of “world’s most dangerous man” has come with a curse of sorts. In the 20 years since Mark Coleman won the inaugural heavyweight championship, no one has managed to defend the title more than twice in a single reign.
That lack of exceptionalism makes parsing any best-of list an extraordinarily subjective undertaking. With no dominant runs inside the promotion, a look beyond the Octagon is in order. So is an analysis of a fighter’s career both before and after sitting on the throne.
On Saturday, Stipe Miocic will attempt to defend his UFC championship for a second time against former champion Junior dos Santos. The stakes are high—historical legacy up for grabs along with a title belt. Where do the two men rank among the best ever? Read on to find out!
There was a distinct crack a moment before Jake Ellenberger fell—this past weekend at UFC Fight Night 108 in Nashville—a sound very much like a tree makes an instant prior to toppling to the ground. It’s fitting, then, that Ellenberger coll…
There was a distinct crack a moment before Jake Ellenberger fell—this past weekend at UFC Fight Night 108 in Nashville—a sound very much like a tree makes an instant prior to toppling to the ground. It’s fitting, then, that Ellenberger collapsed in much the same way, stiff and wooden, his arms reaching up like he was trying to hug God, desperately grabbing for something that wasn’t there.
He would find no solace, though, divine or otherwise. Mike Perry’s elbow had seen to that, sending Ellenberger to the land between this life and the next, making many watching wonder if the worst had happened, if we had all just witnessed a legal execution inside the UFC’s hallowed Octagon, the perpetrator still break-dancing as medical personnel rushed to his victim’s aid.
For many, it was a nauseating experience. Some, I’m sure, turned their televisions off, unable to process the gruesome harm one man is capable of doing to another.
I’m built a little differently. More than a decade covering prize fighting has left me immune to all but the most extreme violence. Perry’s step-in elbow didn’t turn me off. It woke me up.
Ellenberger’s slow motion plummet to the mat wasn’t just the likely knockout of the year, not to me. To me it was something more—the moment I knew that Mike Perry had the chance to be one of my guys.
Every sports fan has athletes that belong to them, proprietary favorites who make the drudgery of sports something more than a grind. There are hundreds of televised mixed martial arts bouts a year. Many of them are staggeringly dull, talented athletes doing little more than leaning against each other against a fence, animated it seems by all the urgency of an employee slowly walking back from a smoke break.
In the face of that ubiquity we need something, someone to embrace. It’s what makes you leap from your seat, celebrating a magical moment like you were part of it, not a mere spectator.
Although it’s frowned on in the journalism world, I’ve always picked favorites. It’s what has kept me interested in the sport as grizzled street toughs gave way to athletes who sometimes feel more commodity than man.
So why not Mike Perry, an angry YouTube comment brought to life?
When I expressed this passing thought on Twitter, I could practically hear the collective gasp. I quickly found out that Mike Perry is reviled by all of the sport’s most righteous fans—and with good reason.
Now, it goes without saying that none of the above even passes for acceptable behavior. Frankly, it’s more than a little disgusting. Perry is gross, unstable and probably not fit for polite company. If you wanted to picket UFC for employing a man like this, no matter how good he is at his job, I wouldn’t be opposed.
As a human being, Perry is an anathema, rightly shunned by decent folks. As the purveyor of violence inside a steel cage, however, he’s exactly what I want to see. That’s a thought that troubles me.
Then again, in some ways, Perry’s colossal ignorance makes him the perfect proxy for his sport. Other fighters disguise MMA‘s inherent ugliness behind a facade of sportsmanship and the architecture of athletics. Perry, with his utter lack of moral decency, lays it all bare. His job is to bludgeon, strangle or twist another man’s body until a representative of the state tells him he has to stop.
And he’s good at it.
While many MMA fans pretend to be engrossed in nuance, analyzing footwork and the intricate dance on the mat, in our hearts we know the truth. People watch MMA to see one fighter smash the other one in their stupid effing face. Put bluntly, fans tune in to watch people try to hurt each other. In the darkest recesses of our primal minds, we crave the extreme, the gory, the unspeakable.
And fighting delivers.
It’s why, after a night of bouts that really shakes you to the core, it’s hard for even the spectators to sleep peacefully. Watching a fight is like nothing else, a personal, intimate and painful pantomime of actual combat. The stakes are high and so are the emotions.
Very few things in life can make you really feel. Only the very best artists can deliver a portrait displaying man at his most vulnerable, stripped to the waist and thrust into battle with another snarling savage. Only a handful of fighters can deliver that glimpse into the human soul, dirty and foul as it might be.
Mike Perry, flawed as he is, can do that. God help me, he’s appointment television—whether I like it or not.
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
On Friday in Budapest, Hungary, Leandro Higo will challenge Bellator bantamweight champion Eduardo Dantas in front of a worldwide audience in the millions on Spike TV and around the world. It’s a fighter’s dream—the main event for a major promoti…
On Friday in Budapest, Hungary, Leandro Higo will challenge Bellator bantamweight champion Eduardo Dantas in front of a worldwide audience in the millions on Spike TV and around the world. It’s a fighter’s dream—the main event for a major promotion, the very definition of making it.
You’ll excuse Higo if that doesn’t quite feel true yet.
The fight game is all smoke and mirrors, illusions on top of deceptions, each misdirection shrouded in a golden haze and the promise of money. For Higo, the glamour is all there as promised. There are photo shoots, his face on a poster, attention every time he enters a room. Fans will scream as he and Dantas pit will against will, punches will land, someone will walk away the victor.
And, when it’s all over, when the cameras turn off, fans go out into the night to relive the drama and promoters move on to the next fight, he’ll return to the apartment in Natal, Brazil, he shares with three other men and a job that pays less than $100 a month. His wife and son will still be more than 150 miles away in Mossoro. The future he’s dreamed of will still be just a wavy oasis on the horizon.
“Sometimes I ask myself if it’s really worth it,” Higo told Bleacher Report through a translator. “I gave up of several years of my life, I had to be away from my son through lots of parts of his life, my wife, my family, left my city. Leaving my family and my city to pursue my dream was the hardest thing. To give up on what you love to get into a lion’s den. But I saw that was the moment to take a step forward and get closer to giving them a better life.”
It’s this dream of a better life that has kept him moving forward as the MMA treadmill has increased its pace to keep him standing in place. Even the explosion of popularity that followed the UFC’s debut on Globo TV in Brazil did little to hasten Higo’s rise.
“With the UFC doing so many shows and so many cards needing to be filled, Brazilian fighters started ducking him,” manager Matheus Aquino said. “This went on for almost two years. He had seven fights canceled, five of them on fight week or fight day.”
Higo (17-2) has been considered one of the sport’s top prospects since 2012, but a series of unfortunate events, everything from injuries to visa to immigration disasters, have prevented him from ever showcasing his talent on the big stage.
“Things took too long to happen for him and it was very frustrating and even infuriating to see,” training partner and friend Patricky “Pitbull” Freire said. “He’s the hardest-working and most dedicated fighter I know. He should have gotten an opportunity in a major organization for years now. … No one deserves it more. He shouldn’t have to go through half of the things he did as a fighter, let alone as a person. But the fact he’s here now speaks volumes about his dedication and strength.”
There are thousands of Leandro Higos who never make it even this far. The odds, after all, are stacked high against someone ever escaping the kind of desperate poverty he faced. After his father was electrocuted just days before his birth, trying to earn extra money to support his new son, the Higo family struggled. As a kid his mother often went hungry to allow Higo and his sisters to eat. It’s what drives him to push on, to help his own son catapult out of a system seemingly designed for him to fail.
“I come from a poor family and didn’t have structure to invest on my training” he said. “There are several would-be champions in Brazil that stop due to lack of support, especially in my region.”
Little things help—a sponsorship here and there, a bit of money from UFC fighter Bethe Correia after he helped train her for a fight with Jessica Eye. But even today, on the eve of his breakout moment, economics affects everything.
Almost all of his potential Bellator opponents, from former champion Joe Warren to Dantas, have resources he can’t match—specialists and supplements that cost more than Higo makes in months. He’s never made more than $4,000 for a fight—and even that purse required him to make his own travel arrangements.
“Some guys live to train, can hire every professional they need, supplementation, sponsorships and all that,” Higo said. “And here I have my team’s full support, but I still can’t afford as much dedication because I teach classes to help pay the bills. It helps very little, and I’m still missing some of the things other top fighters have.”
Higo could have quit a million times. He almost did, over and over again. When he couldn’t afford a gi to practice jiu-jitsu as a kid. When, still a teenager, his own son was born and he suddenly had a family to support. When, despite a name that drew shivers in Brazil, he still couldn’t find a way into the MMA mainstream, fracturing his relationship with his wife and forcing him to part from his son.
But something kept him going, that spark that distinguishes an athlete with promise from a fighter. Higo is a fighter. It’s why, when Aquino and the late Bruno Gouvea, the Freire brothers’ mentor, went to see the young prospect for the first time they found him training by himself, beating regional competition with his wits and will alone.
“At most there was someone to hold pads for him,” Aquino remembered. “The team there was more focused on jiu-jitsu or just didn’t take the MMA practices seriously. He’d tied mitts at pillars to hit when there wasn’t anyone to hold it for him.”
In Higo, the two men saw a reflection of the Pitbull brothers, future Bellator stars who were just coming into their own as fighters. Ironically, Higo had already earned that nickname for himself due to his dogged pursuit of submissions anytime he hit the mat.
“Watch me and my brother fighting, and that’s Leandro. He’s complete, he’s aggressive, he has finishing skills and instinct,” said Patricio “Pitbull” Freire, a former Bellator featherweight champion. “When he wants something nothing stops him. Everything that I see for his future has the color of gold.”
Aquino and Gouvea saw so much in Higo that day in 2012 that they invited him back to Natal, offering him a place to live and train. A month later, Gouvea was dead, victim of a tragic car accident on his birthday.
“Bruno was the person that opened the doors of the team to me,” Higo said. “Brought me to live in his place. Believed in me and treated me really well the first day we met. After he died, Patricio kind of adopted me. I can’t really put into words how much this means.”
Gouvea promised Higo that if he came with him to Natal, he would one day be world champion. That won’t happen in Budapest. Because he took this fight on short notice, trading a normal training camp for the kind of opportunity that has been all too scarce, Higo missed weight for the bout, making it a non-title fight. He won’t return with the championship win or lose, won’t present it to his son Mateus as he planned.
But, in some ways, this fight is about more than championship gold. It’s about opportunity, a chance to enter a brand new socio-economic class and bring his family, separated by circumstance, back together.
“When I think of where I’m headed and that through this I’ll be able to provide them a healthy and happy life, I know it’s worth it,” Higo said. “I don’t know how I could provide them that if it wasn’t through this. It will all start with this fight. After this win, my life will change and I will have my family back with me for good.”
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
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