As we move further into the future of MMA and watch the sport grow into an absolute powerhouse, the issues of health and wellness for the athletes that make this sport so great is beginning to take center stage. CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy), is a rising concern in contact sports. A degenerative disease that is brought on due to brain trauma, you can certainly bet that mixed martial artists and other combat sport participants are potential victims that this degenerative ailment will effect.
As we move further into the future of MMA and watch the sport grow into an absolute powerhouse, the issues of health and wellness for the athletes that make this sport so great is beginning to take center stage. CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy), is a rising concern in contact sports. A degenerative disease that is brought on due to brain trauma, you can certainly bet that mixed martial artists and other combat sport participants are potential victims that this degenerative ailment will effect.
All that being said, fighters are still going to fight, boxers box, football players…football, and really that’s their right. If they’re aware of the risk and still go through with it then it can’t be helped. It’s their right after all. But it makes the importance of training smart all the more paramount in a sport where contact is absolutely certain. Which brings us to Vicente Luque and the brilliant sparring session caught on film last week.
The video of Vicente features the UFC welterweight in a hard sparring session with a training partner at Cerrado MMA. The two fighters throw caution to the wind and decide to bring the heat during their sparring session. It’s not uncommon to go through hard sparring during a training camp, but there’s hard sparring and then there whatever it is these guys decided to do. Check it out below.
A video posted by Vicente Luque (@luquevicente) onOct 21, 2016 at 1:43pm PDT
Training hard, especially if you’re going to enter into a combat situation, is certainly an important aspect of training. It teaches you to be calm under heavy fire and that you won’t break under pressure when the going gets rough. That being said, there’s a point of diminishing returns and continuous hard sparring, particularly in the gym, can lead to severe brain injury. Surprisingly most damage is done in the gym and if this kind of hard training trend continues then you can be sure that CTE cases will be on the rise in MMA.
What do you think of Vincente Luque and his hard sparring session?
Jonathan Salmon is a writer, martial arts instructor, and geek culture enthusiast. Check out his Twitter and Facebook to keep up with his antics.
(After 11 years in a sport marked by physical trauma, emotional turmoil, and financial misdealings, St-Pierre is beaten, but not broken. / Photo via Getty)
The key to understanding the way St-Pierre has conducted himself, both inside and outside the Octagon, goes back to his earliest origins growing up in the rural area of St. Isidore, Quebec, Canada:
“I went to a school where it was pretty rough — I’d get my clothes stolen, my cash. And at home life was pretty hard too. I had a difficult childhood,” said St-Pierre to an interviewer in 2006.
The upshot of these challenges translated into the single quality that defines GSP to this day — his relentless desire to please everybody around him. Not only was St-Pierre an absolute perfectionist with respect to his performance as a fighter, but he actively sought to cultivate positive relationships with all of the people he crossed paths with in life.
In a non-corporate environment, that character trait might have gone over better. In the shark tank of pimps, hustlers and thieves who infest the fight game, it made St-Pierre an easy mark for managers who felt entitled to take his money.
(After 11 years in a sport marked by physical trauma, emotional turmoil, and financial misdealings, St-Pierre is beaten, but not broken. / Photo via Getty)
The key to understanding the way St-Pierre has conducted himself, both inside and outside the Octagon, goes back to his earliest origins growing up in the rural area of St. Isidore, Quebec, Canada:
“I went to a school where it was pretty rough — I’d get my clothes stolen, my cash. And at home life was pretty hard too. I had a difficult childhood,” said St-Pierre to an interviewer in 2006.
The upshot of these challenges translated into the single quality that defines GSP to this day — his relentless desire to please everybody around him. Not only was St-Pierre an absolute perfectionist with respect to his performance as a fighter, but he actively sought to cultivate positive relationships with all of the people he crossed paths with in life.
In a non-corporate environment, that character trait might have gone over better. In the shark tank of pimps, hustlers and thieves who infest the fight game, it made St-Pierre an easy mark for managers who felt entitled to take his money.
TMZ.com broke the story of St-Pierre being forced to pay out $737,066.35 — and counting — to his former manager Shari Spencer. In a similar vein, GSP’s first manager, Stephane Patry, earned some hard cash after St-Pierre settled over Patry’s lawsuit with him.
“Georges St-Pierre has a lot of money, and he could walk away forever if that’s what he chose to do,” said UFC president Dana White during Friday’s conference call where GSP’s departure was announced to the media.
This statement begs the question — while GSP certainly never banked Mayweather money, how much of a hit did St-Pierre take from paying out 20 percent commissions to Patry and Spencer simultaneously? Will the courts mandate that Spencer gets to swallow up another 20 percent of his revenue for a portion of the time period since St-Pierre’s new co-managers, Rodolphe Beaulie and Philippe Lepage, took over in 2011?
Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, the UFC welterweight kingpin only seemed to discover just who he was dealing with by the time it was too late to do anything about it. Besides the transgressions from his managers, the UFC was happy to control many aspects of St-Pierre’s commercial deals from owning his video game likeness rights in perpetuity to refusing to allow St-Pierre to use UFC footage in the GSP documentary The Striking Truth. These were raw deals that will cost St-Pierre both in terms of his post-retirement earning potential and his reputation for decades to come.
It’s incredibly suspect that two days before GSP’s retirement announcement, Dana White told MMAFighting.com that St-Pierre was signing autographs at a mall. Was the financial hit the UFC would take from loss of pay-per-view, sponsors, and diminishment of the UFC brand in the eyes of television partners like Fox Sports incentive for the UFC to do everything in the organization’s power to retain GSP as champion? With Cain Velasquez out for a year, Chris Weidman as a new champion needing more build-up and lighter-weight champions not drawing big PPV numbers, St-Pierre’s exit couldn’t come at a worse time for the organization.
The most overlooked aspect of St-Pierre’s decision to retire comes down to risk of further traumatic brain injury (TBI). Tim Marchman of DeadSpin.com provided solid analysis that of the 875 strikes GSP has taken in his career, 412 have come in his last three fights. An athlete doesn’t need to be slurring their words or have a poor memory to be suffering the effects of repeated head trauma; depression, bouts of anger, and mood swings can be among the symptoms of TBI.
Georges St-Pierre’s tremendous desire for public validation of his talents was both his greatest strength as a fighter and his greatest weakness in terms of his personal health. He put it on the line for fans, media, and a promoter who were all just as likely to offer scathing criticism as they were to give him praise.
It’s possible that St-Pierre returns to MMA, just as so many other fighters have returned from retirement. In fact, it’s likely that GSP will go stir-crazy on the sidelines and want to restore his past status. St-Pierre will need a strong network of friends and family to pull him back from the brink — but no amount of external validation will overcome any internal dissonance within his soul.
We owe it to Georges St-Pierre to remember his life, career, and legacy as it happened, and not the revisionist or politically correct history that certain stakeholders in MMA might be selling. GSP needs to be remembered exactly as he the person he was: one of the greatest — if not the greatest — MMA fighter of all time.
