When you watch Justin Gaethje (18-0, 15 KO) fight, the eyes tell the story. There are his, filled not with anger, but with nothing at all. A cold, deep void, bottomless and unyielding.
Then there are his opponent’s, wide, in awe, knowing they’ve stared…
When you watch Justin Gaethje (18-0, 15 KO) fight, the eyes tell the story. There are his, filled not with anger, but with nothing at all. A cold, deep void, bottomless and unyielding.
Then there are his opponent’s, wide, in awe, knowing they’ve stared into the soul of a predator and slightly uncomfortable with what that means. They are the eyes of a man who may have entered a steel cage expecting an athletic contest.
He will leave knowing he’s been in a fight instead.
Gaethje, who will face off with former lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez on Saturday at UFC 218, is violence personified. He’s what politicians feared when they banned the sport of mixed martial arts across the country in the 1990s, a man unafraid of his own potency and the potential consequences of his actions, comfortable with the problems his sledgehammer fists create every time he touches another man’s body.
Jack Slack, one of the sport’s great analysts, calls Gaethje “hypnotic.” A fighter who seeks out and thrives in the chaos many others spend their professional lives hoping to avoid:
“…He is always flirting with absolute disaster. He is an accomplished wrestler who can stuff the best shots from even bad positions, and yet he insists his fights be contested on the feet and takes great pride in his record there. But he also does a ton of things which get him into trouble and force him to fight uphill. A man of Gaethje‘s ability who fought more conservatively might not get the knockouts, but he would be cruising past the competition with little difficulty. It seems as though it is Gaethje who provides all of the back-and-forth in his fights.”
For years, MMA has been dominated by the absence of violence.The sport as it exists in 2017 is mostly a 25-minute exercise in avoiding problems. Only when an opponent gets tired, impatient or sloppy do the modern greats strike.
Many of the best UFC fighters are not the athletes most capable of dismantling and dispatching their foes. They are, instead, the men and women best able to mitigate the risks their opponents present. The one slick enough to avoid damage and danger.
A former NCAA All-American wrestler at the University of Northern Colorado, Gaethje could easily take that approach too. He could use his grappling acumen to ensure he remains in control, piling up points carefully, striking only when expedient and safe.
Instead, he’s a man on a mission to deliver violence in uncomfortable proximity, a fighter who starts in your face and makes a concerted effort to never allow you to be more than a couple of steps away.
His dad worked for decades in a copper mine. His twin brother does too. Gaethje himself spent a long summer there. He knows darkness and tight quarters; they’re ingrained in his soul. A fight is merely a way to celebrate it. A song of violence, of blood, of danger and despair.
A fight with Gaethje doesn’t look like anything else you’ll see on a UFC card. Perhaps that’s why he exploded as an underground, grassroots sensation on the independent circuit. Each of his World Series of Fighting bouts was a reunion of sorts for the sport’s hardcore fans who saw glimpses of the familiar in his uncomplicated approach.
Gaethje may be the future of the lightweight division. But he’s also the past. His are the blistering lowkicks of Marco Ruas, thrown with the confidence of a man with the wrestling chops to avoid all but the best takedown attempts. The kicks alone can end a fight, but their main purpose is to drive an opponent back into the cage.
That’s where Gaethje does the kind of work that can be uncomfortable, not only to receive, but even to bear witness to.
Some avoid it for a time, skirting around the cage in a desperate backwards race from a man who will never stop coming. Like a horror-movie villain, Gaethje thrives on this fear, stalking, ever stalking, until a man has no choice but to stand and fight.
“When you fight me, you aren’t going to be able to be so careful,” he told me in a 2015 interview. “They better block their face and knock me out. I’m going to hit them, kick them. I’m going to come forward. They’ll have to run, literally run, backwards. That’s the only way to get away from me. And eventually you’re going to run into the cage.”
Michael Johnson, Gaethje‘s opponent in his first UFC fight in July, saw all the flaws in his style.
“He hasn’t been at this level,” Johnson told Fight Society’s Damon Martin. “He hasn’t been with the bright lights, he’s great at what he does, but he might be out of his league on this one.”
In a sense, Johnson was exactly right. Gaethjeis a flawed, reckless fighter. He does take a lot of shots. Johnson did hit him with everything he had, wobbling him on multiple occasions.
It’s just didn’t matter. Gaethje survived all Johnson could offer. Johnson couldn’t say the same.
From such tactics, legends are born.
Gaethje accepts he’s going to get hit. His style demands it. He even accepts that one day he’s not going to get up from one of the many punches that finds its way to his chin. It’s from that acceptance that greatness springs, allowing him the freedom to throw himself into harm’s way, betting big that he will finish you before you can end him.
“A lot of people say I’m reckless and I take too many shots,” he told me. “I take shots on the forehead. There’s nothing wrong with that. It puts me in punching range.
“When I take a right hand, I roll with it. I don’t absorb every single bit of the punch. There’s different ways to alleviate some of the force of a punch besides just getting out of the way. When I take it, it’s on my gloves. I don’t get hit a ton on the button. When I do get hit, I feel like I’m setting myself up for big shots.”
Alvarez, Gaethje‘s opponent, is no stranger to this sort of battle. A former champion, he’s famous for his own back-and-forth contests, occasionally losing himself in a kind of bloodlust. In recent days, the two men have taken to arguing about who is the more violent fighter.
It’s the kind of conversation that should be music to a fight fan’s ears. Neither are articulate wordsmiths like ConorMcGregor. They don’t have the unhinged, oddly pure, anger that drives a Diaz brother. They are simply fighters.
Sometimes that’s enough.
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
Jake Hager can still remember the roar of the crowd, more than 80,000 strong, when he challenged Alberto Del Rio for the WWE championship at WrestleMania 29. As Jack Swagger, he had polarized the WWE audience with his strong anti-immigration views, emp…
Jake Hager can still remember the roar of the crowd, more than 80,000 strong, when he challenged Alberto Del Rio for the WWE championship at WrestleMania 29. As Jack Swagger, he had polarized the WWE audience with his strong anti-immigration views, employing the catchphrase “we the people” and eventually ending up in a brief online feud with political commentator Glenn Beck.
It was the most exciting time of his professional wrestling career, a time when all the pieces he’d carefully put together to form a fully realized character were paying off. It was, it seemed, the start of something special.
Unfortunately for Hager, that was back in 2013 and, in the world of wrestling, four years might as well be an eon. He’d spent most of his time since in seemingly pointless feuds or, worse in his mind, aimlessly drifting on WWE’s B-programming, present but not taking part.
“Toward the end, getting segments cut and having nothing really planned, it really starts to weigh on you,” Hager told Bleacher Report recently. “You put your body into it, you put your heart into it and you want to have an impact on the end product. And it’s frustrating when you don’t.
“You want to be in the main events. To be successful in WWE, you have to love what you do. You have to want to steal the show every time you go out. It’s also an opportunity to create a better life for your family. And when you’re up there doing what you feel is a better and better job over the years and you still don’t get the opportunity to earn more money and a better place on the card, it gets very frustrating.”
It was time for something new. But what? While trading wins back and forth on the deep undercard (Jack Swagger compiled a record of 63-62 in 2016, according to the Internet Wrestling Database), Hager found himself returning again and again to a fantasy he’d harbored for years. As a college wrestler at the University of Oklahoma, he’d competed against the likes of Cain Velasquez and Cole Konrad. Heck, he’d even beaten Velasquez, a future UFC champion, in a grueling overtime preseason match.
“It was quite the endurance test,” he remembers more than a decade later. “Cain is known for his gas tank, for not getting tired. But I was too stubborn to quit. Luckily, I caught a takedown on him at the end.”
Why couldn’t I, Hager wondered, have just as much success in the cage as my contemporaries? He’d been competitive against men who went on to championship glory in both Bellator and UFC and was even an NCAA All-American in his senior year back in 2006. His fiercest rival, Steve Mocco, had represented America in the Olympics. Why couldn’t he, even years removed from athletics, compete with just about anyone out there?
He pitched the idea to WWE, asking the company to allow Jack Swagger to strut his stuff in real competition, returning victorious the next Monday on Raw. It wasn’t really using him anyway, he reasoned. Why not take a chance and see what happened?
WWE wasn’t interested in such a scheme, especially after fellow WWE star Brock Lesnar was released for a UFC fight in 2016 only to fail a subsequent drug test. The company wasn’t interested, it seemed to him, in anything Hager pitched its way.
But the MMA dream refused to die. Much like fellow amateur standouts-turned-WWE stars such as Lesnar, Bobby Lashley and even Kurt Angle, it was hard for Hager to accept a career solely competing in staged fighting. In March 2017, he and WWE agreed to terms for his release. His MMA training, with former Ultimate Fighter cast member Josh Rafferty, began almost immediately. So did negotiations for his first MMA fight.
“When I heard he was seriously interested in competing in MMA and when you look at what he did at the collegiate level, I was very interested in having him on our roster,” Bellator President Scott Coker said in a statement to the press. “I think Jake will expose new fans to Bellator from his previous run with WWE, and he will be given every opportunity to prove that he’s the real deal inside the cage.”
Though Hager and manager Daniel Rubenstein had preliminary discussions with UFC, Bellator was the perfect, obvious fit. It’s an organization capable of both maximizing his pre-existing celebrity and finding him the right fights to thrive over a multiyear, six-bout deal, which starts in 2018.
“Bellator is usually good about building talent slowly,” FloSlam managing editor Brent Brookhouse said. “He has that strong wrestling base, which is still arguably the absolute best base to enter MMA with. If he can defend himself on the feet enough to close distance, put guys on their backs and knows how to keep himself out of bad positions on the ground, he can probably ground-and-pound his way through a lot of the chaff at the lower end of the roster.
“He’s huge. This is a guy who is 6’5″ and will likely have to cut weight to make the heavyweight limit. He’ll probably pick up a few wins over lower-tier opposition in his first 12-18 months in the cage. From there, it’s on him to learn and grow as a fighter.”
Last year, Hager’s former WWE colleague CM Punk made his UFC debut in a bout that ended disastrously for the former wrestling icon. Complete with a hefty price tag and even larger name, Punk was given no chance to test the waters gently. Thrown in the deep end, on pay-per-view, Punk suffered an embarrassing loss at UFC 203 that was as high-profile as they come.
Did Punk poison the well for the next wrestling star who’ll attempt to cross over? MMA Fighting deputy managing editor Marc Raimondi doesn’t think so.
“Wrestling fans won’t have to pay $60 to watch Hager scrap, so I’d suspect his initial offering will do fairly well on cable,” Raimondi said. “Unlike the UFC, Bellator is in a position where it can slowly build up prospects—even 35-year-old ones. A gigantic, all-American heavyweight who can talk, with a built-in fan following, will be given every chance to succeed in Bellator. They will not be sending him to the wolves.”
Hager is no CM Punk, something that’s both a blessing and bane for Bellator. Punk, Hager readily points out, was a much bigger star than he ever was. Punk also had no athletic pedigree of any kind outside of pro wrestling. It quickly showed in a one-sided bout with Mickey Gall, where he was immediately taken to the mat and decimated. He failed to land even a single blow, per FightMetric.
“I’m more Lesnar than Punk,” Hager said, careful not to criticize either man. “Punk was much more popular than I ever was. But I’ve been wrestling since I was five years old and [at] a very high level.
“The success that amateur wrestlers have had crossing into MMA—people from my era like Cain, Ryan Bader, Johny Hendricks and Ben Askren—gives me confidence, sure. A lot of great fighters were amateur wrestlers first and you can study them on film to see how they adapted the techniques. That’s a lot of help. But I have to keep it in perspective and remember that my last competitive match was more than 10 years ago.”
The building blocks, however, are clearly there, both for initial and long-term success.
Hager isn’t willing to proclaim himself a future world champion. Not yet. But his body feels good after months of training with Rafferty at the Ybor City Jiu-Jitsu Club in Tampa, Florida. He’s looking forward to testing himself again, in a venue where his own talents, and not a writers’ room or booker, will decide how far he can go.
“The level of difficulty in most areas of MMA is very high,” Hager said. “It’s a high learning curve. The footwork in boxing alone takes years to master. I will rely heavily on my amateur wrestling to get out of bad situations and take me from defense to offense. I’ll try to dictate the fight on my terms.
“People want to see fighters who can put on a little show and then back it up. Hopefully I can do both of those things. I look at my amateur wrestling career and then my time in the pros as being great training to become a professional fighter in this day and age. This isn’t the normal path. I went about it in a different way, but hopefully the end result is the same.”
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
Albuquerque, New Mexico — At the top of the Hill of Tears, the first Ultimate Fighter raised his hands in victory. A group of the top mixed martial artists in the world, athletes with nicknames like “The Karate Hottie” and “Big Rigg,” raced …
Albuquerque, New Mexico — At the top of the Hill of Tears, the first Ultimate Fighter raised his hands in victory. A group of the top mixed martial artists in the world, athletes with nicknames like “The Karate Hottie” and “Big Rigg,” raced to the top five times, simulating a five-round fight.
Each time, Diego Sanchez beat them to the summit, more than 9,000 feet above sea level.
“It’s a mental exercise,” head coach Greg Jackson says. “They were so exhausted. You can’t move. When they feel that feeling in the fight, people will panic. But after you do it a bunch, it’s not a big deal anymore. You’re just normalizing suffering, so when they feel that feeling in a fight, they are just like ‘Oh, we do that every week.'”
The fighters start at the bottom of a steep hill, high in the Sandia Mountains. Halfway up, Jackson lurks. Just as they begin to slow, lungs begging for air and muscles filling with acid, Jackson bursts onto the trail, chasing and cajoling them to the top.
“It’s just a job,” Jackson says once everyone has scrambled their way up. “We’re warriors. It’s our job to not break when we’re tired. That’s it. It’s just a job. Some people go and do computers. Some people pick up trash. Your job is to push to the limits and not break.”
At the peak, some fighters collapse. Others lose their lunch. Some barely make it at all.
Sanchez, well, Sanchez is different. At the top he shadow boxes—hard—or delivers long soliloquies filled with equal parts advice and anecdote.
“Tia,” he yells to a young fighter struggling to make her way up the hill, catching his breath after each word. “If you want to get up this mountain, you say, ‘My intention for this sprint is left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.’ No emotion. When you start putting emotion into it, you’re going to gas out way faster.
“There’s nothing like it,” Sanchez says. “No elevation mask. No strength and conditioning program. Nothing compares.”
After the final sprint, there’s time to relax and reminisce, as talk turns to other training camps and fights now just distant memories.
“Do you remember when I first met you, Diego?” Michelle Waterson, The Karate Hottie, asks. “You’re like, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I was like ‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’
“And you were like ‘You will soon.'”
Everyone laughs at that, both at the hubris of youth and the truth of it. Sanchez has written his name in MMA history in the years since. They both have.
“It was like 11 o’clock at night,” Waterson continues, every word torture on her taxed lungs but the story worth the struggle. “And he’s all, ‘You guys wanna go for a run?’
“I said ‘No! Who goes for a run at 11 o’clock at night?’ He goes, ‘Sometimes I like to pretend that monsters are chasing me.'”
Sanchez doesn’t remember their first meeting, but he has a theory about his impromptu invitation.
“I probably just thought you were hot.”
The ice bath that followed the run, at the University of New Mexico’s athletic facilities, was far from hot.
The fighters gathered in what is essentially a hot tub filled with ice cubes, keeping the temperature a steady 54 degrees.
“Every moment,” a University of New Mexico football coach tells me as the fighters slowly submerge themselves into the water, “is a misery.”
“Recovery is such a big deal,” Jackson says. “And it’s especially important for fighters. Their inclination is to say ‘F–k it.’ Get up and go train—that’s what they do. It takes discipline to say ‘No’ and accept the things you need to do to recover and have a great week. I see people do a hard workout and then have a terrible week. Because they didn’t do the things they needed to do to get the inflammation down.”
The old-school ice bath is one of many treatments the 35-year-old Sanchez uses to hold off Father Time. He has a chiropractor, an acupuncturist and a doctor who removes 30 milliliters of his blood, uses a centrifuge to isolate the platelets, and injects it back into his body.
When told about the “blood boy”—who transfused his young, healthy blood to rich tycoons in an episode of the HBO comedy Silicon Valley—Sanchez was immediately intrigued about real-life applications.
“That’s pretty smart,” he says. “Get some young blood in you. That’s interesting. Anything that’s legal and could help, I’d think about it. It’s like getting an oil change.”
Sanchez is a self-taught expert in many areas of natural healing, a proponent of the internet’s leveling power and the ability to study an issue without being limited to mere books. Cryotherapy mixes with hot yoga in Sanchez’s world, shots of alcohol replaced by gulps of turmeric and wheat grass. Acupuncture is everywhere, even to the head, all of it followed by pounding Alkaline water with pink Himalayan salts.
“All Diego is looking for is the edge, the new thing, and then he believes in it 100 percent,” Jackson says. “Sometimes it’s crazy. Sometimes you’re like ‘Nah, that’s not gonna work.’ But it doesn’t matter because so much of it is just the power of belief.”
After 20 minutes, the shivering athletes drag themselves out of the tub. Jackson, the first in, is also the last out. While everyone else hits the showers to warm up, Jackson prefers to live with the discomfort.
“That’s my head coach,” Sanchez whispers with awe. “A total badass.”
When we part ways, Jackson immediately asks if he can turn the heat up in his truck. Way up. It’s not that he wasn’t cold. Of course he was. But he wasn’t going to show any weakness in front of his team. It’s why, after more than 15 years, he can still demand Sanchez’s attention—and his respect.
The first time Sanchez stepped into Jackson’s dojo, a 19-year-old former state wrestling champion, Jackson already knew he was special. Sure, Sanchez didn’t have much formal training in hand-to-hand combat. But the streets had taught him he had a gift.
The first time Sanchez got in a real fight, he was in the fourth grade. Some kids in the mobile home park where he lived jumped him after he got the better of one of them.
“I remember an old lady saved me,” Sanchez says. It was the last fight he’d lose for some time. That wasn’t due to a lack of opportunities.
“There’s a reason Albuquerque develops such great fighters,” Jackson-Winkeljohn striking coach Brandon Gibson, a high school contemporary of Sanchez’s, remembers. “It’s almost culturally acceptable to be getting into fistfights on a weekly basis in this town.
“Diego was highly regarded and respected as a street fighter when we were in high school. Diego was one of those guys who would never back down. I remember one incident very vividly. We were in the parking lot of a pizza joint, and there was supposed to be like a rumble and everybody kind of backed down except for one guy. Diego went and handled that swiftly and decisively.
“Once he started building that reputation, he got that many more callouts from tougher guys, older guys, bigger guys. They always wanted to test themselves against Diego.”
His fighting future was sealed during a party at New Mexico State University the year after he graduated high school. Someone was playing Nelly over and over again, and Sanchez went over and changed songs.
Big mistake.
The song was the official jam of the football team. Star running back Walter Taylor, Sanchez remembers, took issue with his actions.
Looking to cool things off, Sanchez went outside to the patio. Nursing a beer, he shared a bit with a little dog who had joined him outside.
Mistake number two.
The dog, it turned out, also belonged to Taylor. Soon, surrounded by the running back and his offensive line, Sanchez knew trouble was imminent. He apologized and tried to make an exit only to be hit in the face with a Bud Lite, the bottle arcing high in the air and leaving Sanchez with a cut over his left eye.
It was too late to walk away.
“Those linemen were big. If they wanted to hold me down, they could hold me down,” Sanchez says. “I started yelling ‘one-on-one!’ as loud as I could. One of my homies reached his hand in his waistband like he had a gun and screamed, ‘If any of you jump in, I’m shooting all of you.’ He’s bluffing them so good, I was wondering if he had a gun too. He didn’t, but he probably saved my life.”
Taylor took off his shirt. “Muscles on muscles,” Sanchez remembers. His giant gold chain was next. The delay gave Sanchez time to clear his head and devise what passed for a plan.
“I remember thinking about Dan Severn and Ken Shamrock,” Sanchez says. “I knew he was bigger than me. I knew he was the starting running back, and running backs can take a hit. And he was strong, so I knew he probably gave a good hit himself. So, I said to myself, ‘This has to be the best double-leg takedown of your life.’
Sanchez put his hands behind his back, daring the cocky football star to charge at him. What happened next felt like a movie, one with Sanchez as the star.
“I swear, it was like slow motion, like The Matrix. He charged at me, and his fist is coming. I lowered my level, shot in on him perfectly, and I wasn’t letting go, bro. I lifted him up and I ran him, bro. Boom! Slammed him hard.”
Taylor yielded after a couple of knees to the head and, once again, Sanchez tried to walk away. A sucker punch followed, and Sanchez only knows what happened next based on witness reports. He was in a blind rage and remembers coming back to his senses with each hand grasped like a vise onto Taylor’s ears, pounding his head into the ground.
“I’m lucky I didn’t kill the guy,” Sanchez says. “Thank God he was a durable guy too. But I ruined his football season. I grabbed both of his ears and started shaking the blood that was pouring off my face onto his face. Then I started headbutting him.
“Everywhere I went, people whispered, ‘Isn’t that the guy who messed up Walter Taylor?’ I was a legend after that.”
While word of his prowess on the streets may have spread throughout Albuquerque, it was Spike TV that spread his name around the world.
Before The Ultimate Fighter, mixed martial arts was a fringe sport on the precipice of disaster. Afterward, it was a global behemoth, a little more than a decade away from a $4 billion valuation. Sanchez and his fellow reality television pioneers were a big part of that success.
The show made it clear that MMA was much more than bar fighting, requiring a diverse set of skills and extraordinary courage and will. It also revealed a sport full of interesting characters, with Sanchez, who would rush outside in a thunderstorm to be at one with nature’s energy, among the most eccentric in a collection of delightful weirdos.
While Forrest Griffin‘s fight with Stephan Bonnar received the bulk of the attention after the show was over, Sanchez was actually the first “Ultimate Fighter” in UFC history, beating Kenny Florian in a fight he still calls his best-ever performance, mostly because of all he had to overcome.
“I was sparring with Dan Christison, a big heavyweight,” Sanchez says. “I threw a leg kick and broke my fibula. Before the Florian training camp.”
Sanchez told no one. Only Jackson and his chief sparring partner Keith Jardine knew. He walked with a cane and told anyone who asked about his limp that he had rolled his ankle. The smart move was going to a doctor, living to fight another day.
Sanchez never considered it.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I told Greg ‘I’m not giving this fight to [reality show archrival Josh] Koscheck.’ I didn’t have to go to a doctor. I knew it was broken. Every day I taped it up. I couldn’t do any cardio. The only training I did was in Keith Jardine’s guard.”
By fight night, six months after the reality show had wrapped, Sanchez was able to move around with ease again. The result, in his mind, was never in question.
“From the moment I walked out, I knew I was going to win,” Sanchez says. “I was very calm; I put it all together and was one step ahead. It was so clean and so pure. I knew from rolling together during The Ultimate Fighter that his ground game was legit. I could tap him out, but he could tap me too. Most often it would be a stalemate. He had more knowledge than me, but I was the better wrestler. And I was a tough-ass son of a b—h.”
The victory earned Sanchez a coveted “six figure” contract with the UFC. While that was a good thing on the surface, and a long way removed from the grueling hours he had been spending unloading boxes from sweltering UPS trailers in the New Mexico sun, the contract was a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it allowed Sanchez to pursue fighting as a job and not just a hobby. On the other, it locked him in for nine fights at what became an increasingly unappealing rate as the sport continued to grow and grow.
While his bank account didn’t expand like he’d hoped, his celebrity continued to grow. Soon he was surrounded by an entourage, and New Mexico was just a blur in his rear-view mirror en route to California.
“At that time, there were a lot of voices in his ear,” Jackson says. “What happens is these guys get to a certain level, and then all these people jump in to get on the bandwagon. Those people just start putting poison in the ears. I don’t want to control anybody. I want them to be here because they want to be here.”
While he still held fast to his dream of winning UFC gold, Sanchez was soon devoting just as much time and energy to his pursuit of sex, challenging himself to score with as many Hollywood models, ring-card girls and seemingly unattainable women. With fast women came a fast life, each fight followed by weeks of partying.
“My whole life was divided into two periods—in training camp and out,” he says. “Training camp was super strict. No sex. No alcohol. No carbs. Out of training camp was all partying. I went from one extreme to another, for purity to the opposite.”
In time, even without Jackson’s guidance, even while sometimes going weeks without calling his parents at home, success came. A title fight against BJ Penn earned Sanchez $400,000, by far his biggest payday.
But that fight ended with both men covered in Sanchez’s blood and Penn licking it off his gloves like a savage. While Penn pounded his chest, Sanchez found himself lost, his dream he was so certain was about to be realized shattered.
“All I wanted to do was just numb the pain of failure,” he says. “Failure at your true heart’s goal. Partying, drinking, girls, sex. Those are the addictions that I had. Those demons, they got me. I hit the rock bottom.”
A lot of soul-searching followed. He remembers vividly bringing a beautiful model home for sex and feeling empty and alone when it was over. His life, he realized, wasn’t sustainable the way he was living it.
That was when he lost everything.
Little by little, a member of his entourage was collecting the information he’d need to steal Sanchez’s identity. He acquired credit card numbers, set up an eBay account, and eventually drained Sanchez of more than $150,000.
“I wanted to meet with a Mexican assassin to come over the border to San Diego, shank him,” Sanchez says. “I could go to New York for the weekend. But, in the end, I realized God doesn’t want that blood on my hands.”
He returned to what he knew, a fight with a young British fighter named John Hathaway. But he was far from ready—if not physically, emotionally. The hard line he’d drawn between training and regular life was soon blurred by marijuana and alcohol.
“Even in camp I was drinking beers and smoking,” he says. “I shouldn’t have been in that fight. But I needed the money.”
If the Penn loss was a wake-up call, after the Hathaway bout his eyes were wide-open. It was time to return to the gym where it had all begun.
“When you hit bottom that hard, you want to be around family,” Sanchez says. “You need to find your roots.”
Less than a month before his fight with Matt Brown on Saturday, Sanchez got the scare of a lifetime. A French grappler, new to Jackson-Winkeljohn’s, snapped in a practice session and cold-cocked Sanchez.
He immediately turned to his longtime teammate Jardine for a damage assessment.
“It’s pretty bad, bro,” he was told.
The scar on his nose was still present more than a week later, but it was the damage you couldn’t see that frightened the fighter more than a mere laceration.
“I felt a little cognitive decline; I felt my short-term memory was a little off,” he says. “And that freaked me out. Because even after all my wars and all my battles, I’d never had that…I probably had a mild concussion.”
In the past, an injury like that was considered the cost of doing business.
“We used to train where we would bang and spar all the time, and if you had what we call a boxer’s headache, which is just a concussion, you’d just work through it,” Jackson admits. “Now we spar hard once a week if that, and even ‘hard’ isn’t like we used to do where you were basically trying to kill each other. People are a lot more aware.”
The new Sanchez, a family man with a daughter and stepson, can no longer afford to ignore long-term health consequences. At the same time, losing a huge chunk of his yearly income a month before the holidays is also far from ideal.
“The level of anxiety and stress made it one of the most challenging weeks of my fight career,” he says. “It was scary. I didn’t know if I was going to have to pull out of this fight. I remember lying in bed worrying about telling my wife I was thinking about pulling out of the fight.
“Christmas is coming up and, financially, this is a fight we were planning on. But I was worried about a TBI [traumatic brain injury]. I had to rest and heal. I couldn’t be hit again. The thought crossed my mind, ‘What if I can just never be hit again?’ Just having that thought come into your head—I was so angry. This guy did this to me!”
It was an odd feeling for Sanchez, whose positive energy is almost omnipresent. He fills any room he enters with it, talking a mile a minute, shifting into different voices as he tells stories, always onto the next self-improvement scheme.
“I wanted to go back to the streets like the old school and whip his ass,” he admits. “I was so angry at this guy that I found myself thinking about getting him back. But one of my healer guys, he does my acupuncture, told me the only way I could get true healing was by letting it go. He believes that injuries are not just physical, they’re emotional. So, I let it go. I had to be a leader and show the team the right way to do things and let it go. Move forward.”
Brain health is a new passion of Sanchez’s. In April, he was knocked unconscious for the first time in his career by the slugger Al Iaquinta. That, and a family history of dementia and Alzheimer’s, created enough concern that he traveled to the Cerebrum Health Center in Dallas for a battery of tests to ensure his mind was still sharp.
The result has been a reinvention of his training, almost all sparring eliminated in favor of drilling and pad work. He also has a new set of toys, including a cryohelmet to treat his brain injury, and ocular exercises, including chasing a little red ball on a string to treat issues they identified with his peripheral vision.
“The eyes are the brain,” he says, a new mantra flowing easily from his tongue. “And the brains are the eyes.”
The new plan seems almost impossible for the Sanchez who has taken home Fight of the Night honors seven times—don’t get hit.
“After the Iaquinta fight, I want to minimize the chances of that ever happening again. I know people think I’m just the Diego Sanchez from the Gilbert Melendez fight,” Sanchez says. “Hook, hook, hook. A crazy brawler.
“But I realized the best possible fighter would not get hit. He’d close the distance and minimize the chances of the lights going out. I want to fight as long as I can and be as healthy as I can.”
Sanchez shares all of this at his favorite Mexican restaurant. The trip there was a harrowing, death-defying drive in his Audi, his phone streaming UFC’s Fight Pass. He gave constant advice to teammates Jodie Esquibel and Donald Cerrone, though the fighters were in Poland and not, say, there in the car with us.
Sanchez orders something called “the Ultimate Burrito” and supplements it with a chicken Caesar salad. That’s worth noting, if only because most fighters are scrupulously counting every calorie at this point of a training camp.
When he fought at 155 pounds, that would have been true of Sanchez as well. But the Brown fight will be contested at 170 pounds, allowing Sanchez to achieve the moderation he’s seeking in his new life as a family man, as the guy who gets up early to take the kids to school.
“Fighting at 155 pounds for the last nine years has taken my drive, taken my passion, taken my love for what I do,” he says. “All fight week I was not thrilled about what I was doing. And you should be thrilled. You should be mentally focused on your fight and what you’re going to do to win. Not on ‘Oh man, I have 10 more pounds to lose.’
“I’m going to war with a full stomach of brown rice, spinach, eggs, salmon. Whatever I want. While he’s cutting weight and miserable, I’m eating good. I’m resting easy in my bed not thinking ‘I wish I could have had dinner.’ I’m going to have that dinner.”
At one point, Sanchez even made the cut to 145 pounds for a bout with Ricardo Lamas. He was so dehydrated that he sometimes didn’t recall where he was, going four whole days without food before finally stepping on the scale.
“He poured himself a huge cup of coffee,” Gibson remembers. “And I said, ‘Are you going to drink all that on an empty stomach?’ He said ‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ and he poured me half.
“I drank it, but I though it tasted funny. He had magnesium powder in there, which is a laxative, and crushed black ants. He told me that crushed black ants take out all the BPHs [benign prostatic hyperplasia] from your body from drinking out of plastics. ‘The plastics in your body are slowing you down, and you have to get rid of it.’ He is a person of extremes.”
Weight cutting has been Sanchez’s bane for almost two decades. In high school, he cut down to 152 pounds, on a mission to beat the best wrestler in the state, his own Vision Quest. But the sacrifices required turned him off on the sport, and he decided not to pursue a college scholarship.
“In my wrestling days, bulimia was very, very prevalent,” Sanchez confides. “It still is in today’s MMA.It’s an old demon that every once in a while tries to possess me again. I have been able to avoid it through proper nutrition and education. It’s kind of a secret thing that is not really talked about. But I struggled with it. Not really as an eating disorder, because I love to eat, but because you have to make weight.
“I’ve seen some bad, bad cases. Throat injuries and all kinds of things. And the more you do it, the more serious hardcore consequences that can put you in the hospital. I’ve had to give some talks to some of the fighters. ‘I see what is going on.’ With cutting weight, it’s a part of it. I’m telling you right now, almost every fighter has had their finger down their throat. To the 90th percentile.”
Those worries don’t exist at welterweight. Instead, Brown is his only concern, which is just the way Sanchez likes it. He knows he will be giving up size. It’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make in favor of speed, energy and mental health.
This fight is part of what he knows is the final stanza in the ballad of Diego Sanchez. He calls it his exit plan, and it includes goals like “paying off my mortgage” and not things like “impress fans with wild action.” After 15 years as a professional, he has nothing left to prove.
“Prove? I’m not trying to prove nothing to you. I’m fighting because I’m a fighter. It’s what I do. I worked my ass off to earn the ability to fight for some damn good money. At least it’s damn good money to me.
“I’m making an honest living, I love what I’m doing, and I worked my ass off to get where I’m at. Ain’t no fans, or anybody else’s say so when I’m going to step away from the sport. Except my own.”
Jonathan Snowden is Bleacher Report’s senior combat sports writer and the author of Total MMA: Inside Ultimate Fighting and The MMA Encyclopedia.
Heaving for breath and covered in his own blood, things were not looking up for Georges St-Pierre (26-2) in the UFC 217 main event. The former welterweight champion, best known as GSP, had done everything he does, popped his precise jab, thrown his spi…
Heaving for breath and covered in his own blood, things were not looking up for Georges St-Pierre (26-2) in the UFC 217 main event. The former welterweight champion, best known as GSP, had done everything he does, popped his precise jab, thrown his spinning karate kicks and even secured several takedowns.
It had all been for naught.
His opponent for his first bout back in the Octagon in almost four years, middleweight champion Michael Bisping (30-8), had taken all St-Pierre had to give and returned calm and collected fire. As the fight was moving into its third stanza, it seemed all but inevitable that his superior conditioning and size would slowly, surely win the day.
That’s when the left hook boomed in, right over the top of Bisping’s nearly blind right eye—the kind of shot that pulls fans to their feet and moves fighters, even exhausted ones covered in their own blood, to do increasingly horrible things to their foes.
There was a time, late in his first UFC run, when St-Pierre would have hesitated. He would have weighed the risks of charging in, with his mind doing Octagon calculus, perhaps missing the moment all together. An all-out effort to finish could fail. Bisping could be playing possum. The correct decision is to sit back, to accumulate points, to win on the scorecards, to never risk greatness.
That was the old GSP, the one who walked away with the sadness in his eyes, the one who no longer seemed comfortable in his vocation.
The new GSP charged in like a one-man SWAT team, with his eyes gleaming, Bisping’s glazed expression the chum in the water that inspired a frenzy of elbows and punches.
And then, as if by magic, he was on Bisping’s back. His arm, made slick by the blood, was snaking under the champion’s chin. Soon consciousness, the only hope Bisping was holding on to, had abandoned him as well.
St-Pierre was middleweight champion of the world.
“I thought I was doing well,” Bispingtold Fox Sports after the fight. “He caught me with a good shot and wobbled me. He was strong. God bless him. Good for him. … This is a difficult sport. Respect to Georges. He beat me tonight. One team wins, and one team loses. Tonight was his night.”
In team sports, such a triumph is followed by downtime, an opportunity to unwind and process all that has just happened. Not in the UFC Octagon. Mere moments after having his hand raised, attention turned, not to what had transpired, but to what was next.
Welterweight champion Tyron Woodley, in the Fox Sports studio, staked his claim. Every middleweight contender looked at St-Pierre’s small frame, age, and wear and all but salivated. UFC President Dana White said GSP would remain at middleweight. The fighter himself told Joe Rogan this wasn’t his weight class but just an opportunity to challenge himself in his return.
“He’s not going to stay at middleweight,” former middleweight champion Chris Weidman opined on Fox Sports. “He’ll go back down now.”
No one said the only name that makes sense. No one mentioned Conor McGregor.
There are many reasons a fight between the two superstars is potentially a bad idea. The first 30, perhaps, are each pound that separates lightweight (where McGregor is the champion) from the middleweight class.
But while fanciful on the surface, the size difference isn’t nearly as extreme as it might seem. St-Pierre is no middleweight—not truly. Instead, he’s an enormously talented welterweight, a man whose skill, not his size, carried him to victory after victory. And McGregor, despite making his name at 145 pounds, is no small man. Only one inch in height and two inches in reach separate the two—hardly an insurmountable obstacle for a fighter of McGregor’s caliber.
St-Pierre would be the bigger man should the two meet at 170 pounds—but not so much bigger that the fight would be a farce.
GSP would, most likely, be a heavy favorite. Not only would his size pose problems for McGregor, but his skill set is strongest where the Irish superstar is weak. It’s easy to imagine the new middleweight champion, a man who just survived flush punches from a 185-pound man, walking through McGregor’s vaunted left hand, blasting a double leg takedown and hitting The Notorious until someone decides to find mercy in their heart and stop the fight.
But while the 30 pounds make a compelling case, the millions and millions of dollars a fight between the two men would generate surely makes it’s own loud argument. Earlier this year, McGregor got a taste of the income a superstar fighter can generate in a superfight when he boxed Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Las Vegas.
It was a ludicrous contest, one wherein the odds were stacked against him and the only victory likely to present itself was the trip to the bank to deposit one enormous check after another. Sound familiar?
The bout between Bisping and St-Pierre worked in part because of how beautifully their personalities interplayed. Bisping is the sport’s most likable jerk, a scamp with mischief glowing in his eyes, willing to say or do anything to keep things interesting. GSP is the consummate gentleman, the kind of man who apologizes for saying the word “balls” after a cage fight.
McGregor, at his core, is the Uber Bisping. Cocky beyond reason and articulate beyond compare, he would destroy St-Pierre in the weeks leading up to the fight. GSP, as is his wont, would smile awkwardly, grimace and plot his revenge in the cage.
It would be the greatest spectacle and biggest fight in the history of mixed martial arts. Surely not even the UFC, the company that missed out on GSP vs. Anderson Silva, Randy Couture vs. Fedor Emelianenko and Ronda Rousey vs. Cris Cyborg, would be foolish enough to mess this up?
There are no more Mayweathers on the horizon for McGregor. Nine-figure paydays are likely a thing of the past. The closest he could come is St-Pierre. They should make that fight immediately and never look back.
Jonathan Snowden is the author of The MMA Encyclopedia and covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
On Saturday night, Georges “GSP” St-Pierre, arguably the greatest fighter in UFC history and the promotion’s long-standing welterweight champion, will make the long walk to the UFC Octagon for the first time in almost four years.
At the age of 32, afte…
On Saturday night, Georges “GSP” St-Pierre, arguably the greatest fighter in UFC history and the promotion’s long-standing welterweight champion, will make the long walk to the UFC Octagon for the first time in almost four years.
At the age of 32, after a dozen consecutive victories and nine straight successful title defenses, St-Pierre called it quits.
He returns to a different landscape.
The cage will still be 750 square feet. The rounds will still be five minutes in duration. One of the world’s best fighters, middleweight champion Michael Bisping, will be standing across the cage to greet him.
Almost everything else, from his weight class to the UFC’s ownership, will be dramatically different.
The return of a bona fide legend should be a big deal for a sport in desperate need of stars—but somehow it doesn’t quite seem like it. Does GSP still matter? And does he belong in modern MMA?
B/R senior writers Jonathan Snowden and Chad Dundas discuss his legend, legacy and likelihood of shocking the world and reclaiming his place at the top of the sport.
Does GSP Still Matter?
Last year, powered by Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey and the surprise return of WWE star Brock Lesnar, the UFC was at an all-time box office high. It was no longer a business with the potential to do big things—it was a fully realized juggernaut.
Or so it seemed.
A year later, Rousey has all but disappeared, Lesnar is suspended after a failed drug test and McGregor was last seen in the boxing ring. The bright future 2016 promised was suddenly hazy.
The UFCneedsSt-Pierre to matter. The promotion is built on pay-per-view, and now more than ever, it’s a star-driven business. St-Pierre was a star, one of the sport’s biggest.
Need some perspective on how long has it been since St-Pierre stepped into the cage? The last time he defended his welterweight title, mixed martial arts wasn’t even legal in the state of New York.
When GSP walked away, McGregor had fought just a single time in the UFC, on a humble Facebook preliminary card. His dream of winning multiple UFC titles was distant and unlikely to come true.
Today, he’s St-Pierre’s replacement as the face of the sport.
When St-Pierre stepped away, citing concerns about performance enhancing drugs, lost time and personal issues, he was in his physical prime. Now he’s the old guard, back to re-establish his place in the pecking order.
It’s something that has worked for UFC before.
In the early 2000s, the UFC catapulted to success on the backs of returning legends like Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie. The same trick may not work a second time.
According to industry insider Dave Meltzer (h/t Jason Nawara of Uproxx), it’s not just that MMA fans aren’t interested in GSP’s return—it’s that they don’t even know who he is:
“UFC did a marketing study and there was a result that surprised a lot of people, and spoke to the changes in the fan base and rapid turnaround. There was a shockingly high percentage of the current PPV buying audience that had never heard of St-Pierre. As it turned out, a large percentage of the PPV audience around today came into the sport with Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor, and have no historical knowledge of it prior to that point in time.“
GSP, for his part, doesn’t seem especially concerned.
“They’re going to know me after I win,” he told Mike Bohn and Matt Erickson of MMAjunkie.
The UFC, most likely, is far less sanguine. A lot is riding on a St-Pierre win here, both for him and the company. While fame and fortune may not be what motivates him, a victory at UFC 217 is one more in a war for historical supremacy.
—Jonathan Snowden
Where Does GSP Rank Among the Greats?
Even before the end of his time as UFC welterweight champion, many of the arguments against St-Pierre being the greatest MMA fighter of all time were based more on style than substance.
Chances are, if you dismissed GSP as a potential GOAT in 2013, it was probably because you didn’t like the way he fought.
Back in those days, it was easier to side with Anderson Silva or Fedor Emelianenko because they knocked people out or with Jon Jones because he did spinning stuff.
The ensuing four years haven’t made St-Pierre’s candidacy for all-time great status any less convincing.
While he’s been out, Silva has gone 1-3-1 and tested positive for steroids. Emelianenko sat idle during his own retirement from the sport before returning to nab a pair of wins in smaller overseas promotions before losing to to Matt Mitrione via first-round KO in his Bellator MMA debut.
Ironically, Jones has gone 3-0-1 while arguably having the rockiest ride. He spent nearly a year on the shelf in the wake of a hit-and-run car crash and has also failed three UFC drug tests—two for performance enhancers and one for cocaine. Jones’ future is as unclear as ever, owing to a pending suspension to be levied after his latest failed test.
St-Pierre’s legacy may have gotten a boost when he elected to simply stay home while the rest of his competition self-destructed.
If he manages to buck the odds on Saturday and defeat Bisping, it would put him on a short list, along with Randy Couture, BJ Penn and McGregor, of the only UFC fighters to win titles in two weight classes.
It would also move him even with Bisping for most total wins in UFC history, at 20.
Once you also consider the utter dominance of his nine welterweight title defenses and six-and-a-half years with the 170-pound strap, a second title in a heavier division might make it difficult to deny St-Pierre the throne as MMA’s all-time great.
Even if he loses to Bisping on Saturday, it may not effect his reputation all that much.
Fans will know St-Pierre took a chance by moving up to middleweight to fight Bisping. If he’s defeated, he would still have a handful of great options for a next fight, including the long-awaited matchup with Silva, a potential meeting with McGregor or a chance to regain the welterweight title against Tyron Woodley.
The only thing that could undermine St-Pierre’s legacy would be a prolonged losing streak that makes it clear he’s unable to compete with the MMA fighters of 2017.
He should do what he can to avoid the mistakes of Silva, Emelianenko and Jones. If he can manage that, his stock should only rise.
—Chad Dundas
GSP Was More Than a Fighter—He Was the Smiling Face of Progress in a Dirty World
Today, the UFC is clearly McGregor’s promotion. He’s the top-drawing fighter ever, a brash, abrasive, gaudy man with a left hand every bit as loud as his custom-made furs.
In many ways, he’s St-Pierre’s opposite, a Bizarro GSP replacing class with crass and a top-heavy ground game and meat-and-potatoes jab with flashy power punches and spinning kicks. St-Pierre famously dropped to his knees and begged for a chance at redemption. McGregor, perhaps rightfully so, sees opportunity as a right, not a privilege.
Navigating McGregor’s world hasn’t been easy for St-Pierre. Put him on a dais in front of a hungry media horde, and GSP magically transforms into one of the dullest human beings alive. His inclination is to smile shyly and speak softly in the kind of meaningless jargon only a top athlete can master.
That’s why, when I first met him in 2008 on a promotional tour for his superfight with Penn, I wasn’t especially excited to sit down for an extended interview. Generic sports speak is no fun for anyone, with predictable questions batted back with the corresponding cliche in a game of verbal tennis.
One-on-one, he was an interesting and engaging conversationalist, even in his second language. In his element, St-Pierre was as compelling outside the cage as he had ever been inside it.
We discussed military history, then a new passion of his, and the development of the composite bow. It had changed warfare forever centuries ago, allowing riders to fire from horseback. He was searching for a similar weapon to disrupt the MMA game and leave his mark, both on history and his opponent’s faces.
Instead, his innovation was a consistency some found dull. The exciting techniques that led to his being nicknamed Rush, both because of the feelings he inspired and his hurry to finish the fight, were replaced with formulaic drudgery.
St-Pierre used his jab to batter an opponent, forcing them to close the distance. Then he would switch levels with deceptive quickness and take them to the mat, where he would employ a careful ground-and-pound attack.
His last seven fights all went to the judge’s scorecards, a fact that seemed to frustrate even the embattled champion.
“I’ve gotten better,” he told me in a2013 interview. “More experience. More maturity. But the thing is—my opponents have gotten better as well. Competition is much harder than it used to be. I didn’t fight guys like Carlos Condit or Nick Diaz then. I could go through opponents with only my athletic ability. It’s different now. …
“How many people have finished Nick Diaz? Nobody. You know what I mean? The guys I’m fighting are crazy. I do my best. I’m critical of myself. I want to do better and I’m working.”
Four years ago, a changing sport was already pressing St-Pierre to his limit. As MMAjunkie’s Ben Fowlkes noted, that was 161 UFC events ago. Is there any hope at all in a UFC more complex than ever?
—J.S.
Can St-Pierre Still Be Competitive After 4 Years Away?
The UFC and its fighters have both changed a lot since St-Pierre announced his extended hiatus from MMA near the end of 2013.
In Bisping, St-Pierre may be taking on a member of the Octagon’s old guard on Saturday at UFC 217, but there are still plenty of reasons to wonder whether the French-Canadian phenom can be competitive in the new-look UFC.
In retrospect, it seems quaint that the last time we saw GSP, he was getting the toughest test of his career from Johny Hendricks. During St-Pierre’s four-year absence following that bout at UFC 167, Hendricks has fallen off the map, going 3-5 and fading from welterweight heir apparent to middleweight afterthought (in a weird coincidence, Hendricks will take on up-and-comer PauloBorrachinhain UFC 217’s pay-per-view opener).
Meanwhile, the rest of the UFC has experienced a near-wholesale turnover—especially at the championship level—as the sport continues to evolve and adapt at breakneck speed.
The version of St-Pierre we’ll get Saturday will return at 36 from the longest stretch of inactivity in his fighting life. There’s no way to know whether the athletic freak who held the welterweight division in his sway during two runs with the title from 2006 to 2013 still lives inside him.
Over 11 straight victories leading up the Hendricks fight, St-Pierre systematically dominated the rest of the best 170-pound fighters in the world. After starting out as a kyokushin karate fighter with no formal wrestling background, he had transformed himself into a smothering and dominant wrestler lauded as one of the best offensive grapplers in MMA history.
Experts often puzzled over his workout regimens and training techniques. Opponents frequently came away feeling cheated—sometimes literally claiming as much.
But that was then.
As a significantly older athlete, St-Pierre dives into a pool of fighters who will be bigger, more skilled and better prepared than anything he’s faced before.
Though the sport lacks any definitive statistics to track it, conventional wisdom says the UFC’s roster is far better equipped these days to ward off takedowns than it was a decade or even five years ago.
During his heyday, St-Pierre was able to dismantle decorated grapplers like Jon Fitch, Penn, Josh Koscheck and Jake Shields without so much as losing a round. He may find that to be a much more difficult trick in 2017.
If St-Pierre can no longer dictate where and how his bouts are contested from start to finish, what will become of him? Likely nothing good.
That goes double for his prospects in the middleweight division, where he will give up any advantage in size or strength he once enjoyed against the welterweights of yesteryear.
Bisping, for example, is a much larger, stand-up-oriented fighter, who also comes equipped with an underrated takedown defense. It’s widely assumed that if St-Pierre can’t get him to the mat early and often (and keep him there) that this will turn out to be a long night for him.
Will the same prove true of St-Pierre’s comeback on the whole?
As he trudges into his late 30s, he’ll have to be up to the challenge of keeping pace with a bigger, mostly younger and more skilled crop of competition.
We’ll get our first clues of whether he can do it at UFC 217.
If he shows up looking like the same fighter who had to eke out a split-decision win over Hendricks all those years ago (or worse), I’m not sure I like his chances.
I bought my first Bill James Baseball Abstract in 1986, just another source of information to fuel my nascent fantasy baseball obsession. I mention this seemingly unrelated nugget of personal information to establish, right off the bat, that I’m not so…
I bought my first Bill James Baseball Abstract in 1986, just another source of information to fuel my nascent fantasy baseball obsession. I mention this seemingly unrelated nugget of personal information to establish, right off the bat, that I’m not some Luddite opposed to modern metrics. I enjoy them all, from WARP to Win Shares, and recognize that more information is often a good thing.
In combat sports, however, statistics are bunk.
Harsh? Maybe. But anyone who has watched a boxing prospect, inflated record built on tomato cans, flail around helplessly the first time he encounters real competition knows all wins aren’t created equal. Neither are punches—but a Mike Tyson uppercut and Nick Diaz slap both count the same according to the folks at CompuBox or Fight Metric.
Our intuition and our eyeballs tell us otherwise.
Simply counting strikes can never sufficiently tell the story of a fight. Not when one good one can erase everything that came before it. For all the complexity of modern martial arts, a fight is a simple thing, one often judged from the gut. Did one man hurt his opponent more than he got hurt?
That’s the essence of fighting—and you don’t need a spreadsheet to figure it out.
It’s worth keeping this in mind as we head into UFC 216, advertised as a historic night for flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson. His fight with Ray Borg, assuming he wins, will mark Johnson’s 11th defense of his championship. It’s the most in the promotion’s history, and it will put him ahead of Anderson Silva, the greatest MMA fighter of all time, in the UFC’s non-existent record book.
We are told this matters. It does not.
For Johnson, of course, it matters a great deal. In lieu of the accolades, love and money that usually land in the lap of dominant cage fighters, he’s seized on “history” as his great prize for a career in the cage. As our own Chad Dundas pointed out, it’s a feat he’s had his eye on for quite some time:
“This milestone obviously means a lot to Johnson.
“The men’s flyweight champion has been citing it as a motivating factor since at least before his second win over John Dodson two years and four fights ago. Beating Borg this weekend will give Johnson 11 straight defenses, moving him out of a tie with Silva and into uncharted waters of historic dominance for a UFC titlist.”
“I hope I can get to 20,” Johnson toldESPN.com’s Brett Okamoto. “I’m on pace to get two or three fights per year, and I think I’ve got five or six years left in me. Maybe I’ll get to something like 18 and walk away from the sport—retire as champion. I think 15 to 18 title defenses is something that would be in the record books forever.”
Twenty or 200, in many ways it doesn’t matter. Fighters, divisions, eras—none are created equal. A winning streak means exactly as much as the names on it. And, unfortunately, most of the names on Johnson’s list could sit down next to fans at UFC 216 and go unremarked. His will be a record built on a very shaky foundation.
That’s not to say Johnson isn’t an extraordinary fighter. He’s amazing, one of the most complete fighters to ever step in a cage. He’s typically better than his foes at every aspect of the fight game, dominating at distance and controlling the clinch. His wrestling is stellar. So are his submissions and his defense.
Despite internet consensus, he also hits hard and makes opponents pay for every mistake. He’s aggressive enough that his fights rarely stall out in any one position, forcing scrambles where, as you might imagine at this point, he is always a step ahead of the opposition.
Johnson is a fighter who deserves his reputation. But he’s not Anderson Silva.
Silva, still fighting at the age of 42, is more than just a cage fighter. He’s an artist, a Bruce Lee movie brought to life.
In his madcap antics we found a collective joy. Yes, there was pain too—the long, seemingly endless moments of inaction when he couldn’t make an opponent come to him, the rounds he appeared to be considering the deeper meanings of life and not the business in front of him, the arrogance on display as he dropped his hands and gave lesser men a chance at glory.
But the joy, both his own at his handiwork and ours in watching him, was mesmerizing. MMA isn’t a collection of names on a list. It’s a series of moments, seared into our hearts. And no one gave us more moments than Silva.
There was the front kick to the face of the fearsome VitorBelfort, the slow-motion dismantling of former light heavyweight champion Forrest Griffin and the last-second submission against ChaelSonnen, who had likely won every second of their first fight until his glorious demise.
These are things that no one who saw them will ever forget, martial mastery on the grandest stage possible, against the very best opposition in the world. Belfort was the face of the company in Brazil. Rich Franklin was trotted out for every mainstream appearance, one of the UFC’s hand-picked ambassadors to evangelize for an entire sport. Griffin was a beloved everyman. Those wins mean more than beating up 100 Borgs on a pay-per-view undercard.
Sure, on paper, the two mens‘ title reigns are strikingly similar. Devoid of context, looking only at the numbers, Johnson’s competition was even slightly better. Silva mixed in four fights at light heavyweight and finished more of his opponents than Johnson did. Then again, Johnson has never looked as vulnerable as Silva did, never dropped his hands and his focus and been knocked cold by a hungry young foe.
As you can see, parsing the record is a tricky business. Luckily, none of it matters. The stats can say any number of things depending on how you read them.
Numbers lie. Perhaps memories do too—but they do so in a much more satisfying way.
Silva has transcended the discussion in many ways, his legend so great that questioning his status is like doubting Spiderman or Goku. He exists on a plane beyond mere athletics, a human cartoon who actually once walked the planet, a fighter capable of the impossible.
Johnson is a lot of things—a charming man, a devoted husband, a gamer and a delightful fighter. His streak of success is notable, his position at the top of the MMA pound-for-pound list well deserved. But he’s not Anderson Silva. And no phony history can change that.
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
When you watch Justin Gaethje (18-0, 15 KO) fight, the eyes tell the story. There are his, filled not with anger, but with nothing at all. A cold, deep void, bottomless and unyielding.