In the UFC echo chamber, words are weapons. If you say something long enough and loud enough, it becomes truth, regardless of merit.
Take, for example, the idea that Canadian Rory MacDonald is among the very best welterweights in the UFC.
Now, that may…
In the UFC echo chamber, words are weapons. If you say something long enough and loud enough, it becomes truth, regardless of merit.
Take, for example, the idea that Canadian Rory MacDonald is among the very best welterweights in the UFC.
Now, that may very well be true. Still just 24, MacDonald has shown a wide array of skills, both standing and on the ground. His terrifying, serial killer-esque persona sends shivers down the spine when you meet him in person. This is a man who would smash you to pieces and never once change expression. His complete lack of affect is scary to the extreme.
All of the above certainly makes MacDonald a very interesting prospect. I wouldn’t reject the idea that he eventually reigns over his division like a savage king. It could be he really is that good.
But, conversely, the idea that he’s one of the best in the world may turn out to be complete hogwash. Maybe he folds under pressure against a top striker? Perhaps he struggles against a solid American wrestler? Maybe, just maybe, he’s a front-runner who fails to rise to the occasion when the going gets tough?
We simply don’t know. It’s a premise that’s completely unsupported by the objective record.
Fact No. 1: Rory MacDonald is the No. 3 ranked welterweight in the world according to the UFC’s esteemed media rankings.
Fact No. 2: Rory MacDonald has never beaten a top-10 welterweight.
The best matchmakers in combat sports, like the UFC’s Joe Silva, have a gift for manipulating the public. Left without explanation, that’s a harsh statement, a damning indictment of a sporting culture that awards glitz and glamor over accomplishment and record. A system that rewards potential, both economic and athletic, over success.
But where else but the UFC or boxing could an athlete advance to the top of his sport without testing himself against the best?
MacDonald has never fought a great wrestler. His one match against a solid striker, Carlos Condit, ended in a loss. The truth is, MacDonald’s record is made up almost entirely of journeymen, lightweights like B.J. Penn and generalists.
He’s never fought the best, so there’s no way to extrapolate how he will perform against the best. His ranking, beneath only teammate Georges St-Pierre and Johny Hendricks, is completely a product of smoke and mirrors.
Is Rory Macdonald for real?
If you’re answering, with either a yes or a no, you’re wrong. We just don’t know.
Against Jake Ellenberger this weekend, we’ll finally see MacDonald against a fellow top-10 fighter. It’s a chance to prove he’s more than hype, more than just another protected prospect ripe for a hard fall.
It seems as though every time Rory MacDonald fights we are bombarded with comparisons with his stablemate, Georges St-Pierre.
While it gets incredibly tedious if you are a religious viewer of UFC events, as I am and I know that many of my readers are, …
It seems as though every time Rory MacDonald fights we are bombarded with comparisons with his stablemate, Georges St-Pierre.
While it gets incredibly tedious if you are a religious viewer of UFC events, as I am and I know that many of my readers are, the comparisons are sometimes quite apt. While I am not ready to buy into MacDonald as a world-beater, he does share at least one invaluable quality with the great welterweight champion: He is extremely good at doing what he is told.
The true talent of Rory MacDonald is that he, like Georges St-Pierre, is a perfect conduit for his coaches’ strategies. Every other week we hear of some fighter moving camps to Jackson’s MMA, Black House or Tristar, and many times—outside of improved cardio, a couple of neat tricks on the ground or in the clinch, or occasional sharper stand-up combinations—it rarely makes nearly as much difference as the public or the fighter think it is going to.
Leonard Garcia was at the camp known among fans for producing some of the best game plans in mixed martial arts, Jackson’s MMA, for years and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference to his fights because of the way he opted to fight.
If a fighter is focused on getting a knockout with only his hands or headhunts exclusively, or is only worried about being exciting (and they are often the saddest ones to watch waste their immense talent) then training with elite strategists is going to count for diddly squat.
Now the Tristar Gym has had it’s fair share of fighters come and go, but Rory MacDonald and Georges St-Pierre stand out because they are not guilty of becoming fixated on one particular method or on throwing away a dominating, if mundane, victory for an entertaining crapshoot. They are well-rounded fighters who come in following their coaches’ specific instructions and consequently win most of their bouts in dominating fashion.
They don’t make for the most exciting personalities and they don’t sell a fight all that well—a look at MacDonald’s embarrassing post-fight call-out of Carlos Condit or tweets this week will show that—but a disciplined, rounded and receptive fighter is the most a coach can ever really hope for.
To demonstrate MacDonald’s ability to follow a game plan, I’ll use his most recent bout against B. J. Penn.
Analyzing fighters is a little harder than some realize, and the coaches who are really good at it stand head and shoulders above the others. That is not to overstate the importance of what I do in my articles; I simply point out merits and flaws in fighters; I don’t go about fixing them or training fighters to exploit them—that is the truly hard part!
B. J. Penn for quite some time was written off as someone who had to be held down or against the fence to be beaten, but as time went on the cracks began to show.I speculated for some time before Penn’s fight with Diaz that Penn seemed to struggle in the face of body shots, but the only evidence to suggest this had been Hughes’ brief ground assault on Penn’s ribs, and St-Pierre’s body jabs and punches from guard.
Nick Diaz certainly tested that theory (if you ever want to know if a man can take a body blow, put him in against Diaz) but MacDonald—who had never previously shown much aptitude for hitting the body—went about attacking Penn’s abdomen with such certainty that it is unquestionable that his coaches picked up on this weakness in Penn.
From the beginning of the bout MacDonald sprinkled in a lovely left hook to the body which he had otherwise never shown. It clearly hurt Penn, as did the body kicks that MacDonald landed later in the bout.
Another weakness in Penn which was obvious from his first bout with Frankie Edgar, but could have been assumed all along based on his boxing-based stance, is his difficulty dealing with low kicks and in fact most types of kick. He stands long and narrow with his lead foot turned in, much like Diaz and Junior Dos Santos, in order to maximize reach on his jab and lead hook.
This means, however, that the slightest low kick will buckle Penn’s knee joint and hinder his movement, and that he lacks the wide base necessary to be taking powerful kicks on the forearms or shins while remaining in position to counter.
Boxing and kickboxing are two completely different games: Boxing in MMA works wonderfully when opponents want to punch, but the finer points of a pure boxing game are negated by decent kickboxing.
Additionally, throughout the bout MacDonald was able to effectively land jabs on Penn which immediately drew comparisons with that of the great Georges St-Pierre, who also handily out-jabbed Penn in their second bout.
Now obviously Rory was able to follow his team’s game plan and was even able to get creative later in the fight as he beat on a gassed and bewildered Penn, bringing out everything from counter elbows to Brazilian kicks to the least awe-inspiring Ali shuffle I have seen in a while.
Now I do not want readers to undervalue the idiocy of Penn fighting at welterweight. It is not simply that he is underweight at that weight class but that he has a style of stand-up, based around the jab and around counterblows, which relies on having a reach advantage or at least an even reach.
On the occasions that Penn has slipped jabs at welterweight and looked to come back with his counterpunches, his opponent has just been too far away. With the exception of Matt Hughes, a poor striker and a similar length to Penn, B.J. has not out-boxed a welterweight since Georges St-Pierre, back when the latter didn’t understand that Penn was going to slip and counterjab every time St-Pierre jabbed.
Penn giving up reach is a bad start, but against an opponent who will strike his body, throw kicks at him and not simply headhunt with punches, his boxing game is almost completely impotent.
Now Rory MacDonald’s height and reach advantages and excellent team game-planning culminated in a brutal beatdown, but the performance was hardly flawless. Rory would feint his jab excellently, which was very important to throwing off Penn’s timing on the counter-jab, something which so few of his lightweight opponents managed to get their head around, but when he did step in with the jab his chin would come up and extend in front of him, then he would pull his head straight back.
There were simply so many occasions in the bout when it was clear that Penn’s reach disadvantage cost him good punches, as Rory’s defense got sloppy and he resorted to hopping straight back after any attack. If Penn had low kicks or could rush opponents as he followed them out of their attack rather than just plodding after them as he always has, the fight might have been less of a massacre.
Still, it is Penn’s choice to fight with a reach disadvantage, and the weight disadvantage seems to be more of a bragging point than a smart career move. Whether Rory MacDonald’s striking will look anywhere near so impressive against opponents who have a build more suited to welterweight, let alone competent, rounded strikers, remains to be seen.
There is absolutely no trait in combat sports as valuable as discipline and receptiveness to coaching. In this respect it is clear that FirasZahabi and the Tristar team are molding the finest clay available where many gyms—even those with elite strategists—are often working with athletic silly putty.
Pick up Jack’s eBooksAdvanced Striking and Elementary Striking at his blog, Fights Gone By.
In late 2011, I was in Toronto covering UFC 140: Jones vs. Machida for my former employer.
I remember plenty about that week. Jon Jones faced his toughest challenger yet in Lyoto Machida, then left him face-down and unconscious on the canvas afte…
In late 2011, I was in Toronto covering UFC 140: Jones vs. Machida for my former employer.
I remember plenty about that week. Jon Jones faced his toughest challenger yet in LyotoMachida, then left him face-down and unconscious on the canvas after a brutal guillotine choke. Frank Mir murdered Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira’s arm with a kimura. And I ate roughly 21 gyros from this fantastic little gyro joint next to the UFC’s host hotel, which was a terrible decision and one I do not recommend replicating.
There’s one more thing I’ll never forget. On Thursday night before the fight, the UFC’s public relations department held a media mixer at a local bar. It was a chance to get together with folks working in the media field, to talk and generally have a good time without a computer in front of us and with no work to do. It had already been a long week, though, and I was exhausted.
But then Rory MacDonald showed up.
I began chatting with MacDonald. As tired as I was from a hectic work schedule, MacDonald was even more exhausted due to an endless amount of media commitments. This was another media commitment, in a way, even though it was held at a bar and offered free food and drinks. And so he wasn’t in the best mood, which is understandable; the PR schedule some of these fighters must endure often borders on the insane.
MacDonald and I didn’t talk much about MMA. When you’re away from work, you don’t really want to talk about work, and even though I consider myself extremely lucky to work in this field, there still comes a point when you don’t want to talk about it. You want to relax. I knew MacDonald likely felt the same way, so I mostly kept the conversation to other, non-cagefighting things.
But I did ask MacDonald a question that was on the back of everybody’s mind back then, and it has since moved to the forefront: If push came to shove, if a championship was at stake, would he fight friend and training partner Georges St-Pierre?
“No,” MacDonald told me, and I could sense that he was resolute. “There’s just no reason to do that.”
I understood. I used to be a big believer in the idea that teammates should fight each other, but that was before I visited gyms like American Kickboxing Academy and Tristar. That was before I saw how close-knit many of them were. What I didn’t understand then, and what I understand now, is that it’s not just about training or showing up at the gym and putting work in alongside another fighter.
When fighters from these gyms say that they are teammates, that is what they mean. They are a team, united in helping each other while also furthering their own careers in the process. At AKA, I watched a team meeting come together after a training session; in the meeting, the fighters were encouraged to get any gripes off their chest in front of everyone else on the team. Those gripes were discussed and resolved, and then the athletes gathered in a circle for a practice-closing chant.
That was the moment that made me realize it’s probably okay if Cain Velasquez and Daniel Cormier don’t want to fight each other.
Still, there are moments where two teammates are stacked at the top of a division, where the challenger has nowhere else to go if he doesn’t want to face his teammate. That’s what we call a career conundrum; how do you maintain that brotherhood with your teammate when he’s holding the gold that could potentially crown you the best in your division?
It’s workable. Cormier won’t face Velasquez because he isn’t just a friend or a training partner; he’s also the heavyweight champion’s wrestling coach. And so he is planning an eventual drop to light heavyweight to avoid the messy discussion and the questions about Velasquez.
When I talked to MacDonald, I believe he was resolute. He wasn’t near the top of the division then, and so he had no real reason to discuss the possibility of training somewhere other than Tristar and being coached by someone other than FirasZahabi and perhaps punching St-Pierre in the face for real and not just in training.
Perhaps it’s just me, but I sense that MacDonald’s position may be shifting these days. With a win over Jake Ellenberger at UFC on FOX next week, MacDonald will be in the driver’s seat for a title shot. Because that is the case, the questions about MacDonald and St-Pierre are coming with more regularity, only the answer he’s giving these days is a lot different than the one he gave me in December 2011.
“I’m just kind of focused on this fight for now. My whole career’s kind of been go with the flow, everything changes after each fight,” MacDonald said on a conference call today. “I’ll see where I am after this fight, and just the options from there. Nothing’s out of the question.”
Nothing’s out of the question.
That statement is a signal that MacDonald is considering the possibility of fighting St-Pierre. If it wasn’t something he’s been thinking about, he would’ve shut down the question the kind of answer he gave me. Instead of saying “No,” MacDonald is essentially saying “we’ll see.”
MacDonald currently sits at #3 in the UFC’s official welterweight rankings. The two men in front of them have either already lost to St-Pierre (Carlos Condit) or will get their chance to face him later this year (Johny Hendricks).
MacDonald is in the driver’s seat. If he beats Jake Ellenberger—and though he’s facing the toughest opponent of his career thus far, MacDonald still has a very good chance of winning the fight—he’ll be in a position to challenge the winner of St-Pierre and Hendricks, to prove that he’s the best welterweight fighter in the world.
Perhaps MacDonald will avoid the entire situation by moving to middleweight. Perhaps he’ll take fights against other top 10 welterweights until St-Pierre either loses or retires, leaving an opening at the top of the division.
Or maybe, just maybe, MacDonald will elect to step in the cage with St-Pierre. They’ll handle it with professionalism, but it would still be a messy situation. MacDonald would be forced to change training camps because St-Pierre has tenure at Tristar. For a brief period of time, MacDonald would have to change everything that he knows, and it will be painful and difficult.
But I’m sensing that MacDonald is driven to be the best, and I also sense that he knows the road to the top goes through St-Pierre. And while it won’t be an easy road to travel, I believe MacDonald has the desire to be the world champion, even if that means facing off against a friend, training partner and mentor.
Rory MacDonald and Jake Ellenberger will square off in the Octagon this summer when they meet at UFC on Fox 8.The winner of the fight will likely be the front-runner for the next title shot at welterweight. Although it is doubtful that MacDonald would …
The winner of the fight will likely be the front-runner for the next title shot at welterweight. Although it is doubtful that MacDonald would challenge his teammate, GSP, for the gold, the welterweight showdown has heavy implications.
MacDonald is on a four-fight win streak since his defeat to Carlos Condit in 2010. He is the premier prospect of the division. Ellenberger has won back-to-back fights after a come-from-behind win by Martin Kampmann last June.
The 170-pound division continues to be one of the most exciting divisions in all of MMA.
Here is a head-to-toe breakdown of this important welterweight fight.
A welterweight showdown of major proportions has been added to the upcoming UFC on Fox 8 card, as Canadian Rory MacDonald will return to action against Jake Ellenberger. The two UFC contenders have agreed to meet as part of the upcoming card in Seattle…
A welterweight showdown of major proportions has been added to the upcoming UFC on Fox 8 card, as Canadian Rory MacDonald will return to action against Jake Ellenberger.
The two UFC contenders have agreed to meet as part of the upcoming card in Seattle on July 27.
UFC officials announced the bout via The Province on Wednesday.
It will be familiar surroundings for MacDonald, as he last fought in Seattle as part of UFC on Fox 5: Henderson vs. Diaz, where he put on a dominant, one-sided performance over former UFC welterweight champion BJ Penn.The young Canadian was then scheduled to meet Carlos Condit at UFC 158 in March, but a neck injury sidelined him from avenging the only loss on his record.
Instead of facing Condit when he returns from injury, MacDonald draws a tough test against a contender who has been looming around a title shot for the past year.
Ellenberger was potentially one fight away from battling for UFC welterweight gold before he suffered a loss to Martin Kampmann in 2012.Since that time, he has returned to form with two wins in a row including a blistering knockout of former Strikeforce champion Nate Marquardt in March.
Ellenberger has been charging toward the top of the UFC’s 170-pound division since losing to Kampmann. Since coming to the UFC in 2009, he has gone 8-2 overall, with his first defeat coming to Condit in his debut fight that he took on one month’s notice.
The winner of Ellenberger vs. MacDonald will be in prime position to pounce on a title shot against the victor of champion Georges St-Pierre vs. top contender Johny Hendricks.
While that fight has yet to be scheduled, it looks like St-Pierre vs. Hendricks will go down in the late summer or early fall.Either Ellenberger or MacDonald could potentially be one fight away or even next in line depending on their performance at UFC on Fox 8.
Damon Martin is a Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report.
With all the temptations of money, fame and glory to seduce rising stars and incumbent champions, two men fighting in the same division of the same promotion, ranked in the top five, are destined to fight each other. Canadian welterweight Rory MacDonal…
With all the temptations of money, fame and glory to seduce rising stars and incumbent champions, two men fighting in the same division of the same promotion, ranked in the top five, are destined to fight each other.
Canadian welterweight Rory MacDonald isn’t there yet, but his place in the upper echelons of the sport is all but guaranteed, bringing with it a compelling showdown with his mentor and training partner, Georges St-Pierre.
Both men have repeatedly said that they have no intention of fighting each other, but we’ve seen how sacred those vows are when the UFC dangles lucrative paydays at its fighters.
It is not for GSP to challenge the young prodigy. He’s the welterweight champ and one of the most dominant fighters of his era.
But MacDonald is one of the most exciting talents fighting in the UFC today. His emphatic victory over BJ Penn at UFC on Fox 5 last Saturday means he could be facing a disturbing dilemma.
Either challenge GSP for the title or remain in his shadow for years to come.
In the press conference following his victory against Penn, MacDonald was once again asked whether he’d fight GSP, as though the world expects him to give a different answer sooner or later.
So, I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. I don’t feel like I need to fight Georges. I don’t think it will happen. It won’t happen. Me and him are friends. He’s done a lot for me and I’m very grateful to him and I’m not going to stab him in the back. And I don’t want to wreck my opportunity training at Tristar. They’ve done a lot of things for me. So I dunno, we’ll see. See what happens. There’s other fights for me right now.
That seems like an emphatic answer until you consider his response to that question a year-and-a-half ago.
Back in July 2011, MacDonald was fresh off a career-defining win over young hotshot Nate Diaz. He’d recently relocated to the Tristar gym in Montreal, home of GSP, and that move had clearly paid off.
At the time, he couldn’t be more grateful to his new training partners. According to Cage Potato, he said:
The gym is now my full-time home and I have a second family there. When I first moved down here, Georges St-Pierre was one of the most helpful guys and was always looking to make the transition easier for me. I didn’t have a car at the time, and Georges went out of his way to pick me up every day for training.
He went on to explain the unparalleled mentorship GSP provided to him in his early days at Tristar, teaching him what it meant to be a mixed martial artist as well as a professional athlete.
These guys are like family to me now and Georges is as close as a brother. I would never ask for a title shot while he was still UFC champion. He has helped me out, taught me things and extended his trust to me. There’s no way I could then turn around and demand a fight against him. I would never disrespect him like that…If anything, I would move up in weight and fight for the middleweight or light-heavyweight belts instead.
On the surface, that response seems little different to what he said after the Penn fight. But beneath the surface, his tone is now less reverential and emphatic.
“I don’t know. I’m not there yet,” he said. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. I don’t feel like I need to fight Georges.”
He doesn’t know? He doesn’t “feel” like he needs to fight GSP? He’ll cross that bridge when he gets there?
And it’s not just these hedged responses that should raise eyebrows.
There’s something different about MacDonald compared to the fresh-faced fighter we saw in July 2011. Something changed in him after he obliterated veteran Mike Pyle via first-round TKO in August 2011.
He started dressing and talking differently. He changed his nickname from “Waterboy” to “Ares”—the Greek god of war.
By July this year, he was openly saying to MMA Weekly that he no longer considered GSP a mentor.
I’ve come to a point in my career where I don’t look up to anybody in this sport anymore. Yeah, Georges he’s a good friend of mine, but I don’t look up to anyone. He’s a regular guy and a great training partner for me and me for him so it works good together.
This doesn’t mean that the two fighters will inevitably face each other. As things stand, MacDonald still has more fights to win before he’s considered a title contender.
At 31, GSP is looking to wind down his career. Having already cleared out the 170-pound division several times, he only has a couple of intriguing matches left at welterweight. There’s Nick Diaz in his immediate future and perhaps Johny Hendricks after that.
Then, he will very likely have to face Anderson Silva at catchweight.
GSP has already said that he’d have to add muscle if he is to face Silva. If he does that, he’d never be able to move back down to 170 pounds.
That would solve the MacDonald question in a snap.
The two will have avoided each other, a friendship will have been saved, the veteran could retire into the sunset and the young star could then go on to fulfill his promise with a clear conscience.
But as we saw with Jon Jones and Rashad Evans—two training partners who acted like brothers—so much can turn on the slip of the tongue, especially when egos are involved.
Both Jones and Evans once said that they would never fight each other, but then in an interview Jones said that he may have to fight his training partner if UFC president Dana White asked him to and Evans saw red.
White is already stirring things between MacDonald and GSP.
“I guarantee you if Rory looks looks at GSP’s f****** bank account, he’ll want to beat the s*** out of him,” White said in April (H/T MMA Junkie).
It’s not inevitable the two Canadian welterweights will meet in the Octagon. There’s every chance that their paths will never cross.
But one comment from GSP taken the wrong way could put a target on his back in the eyes of MacDonald, who today carries himself with the demeanor of a stone-cold killer.
In the UFC echo chamber, words are weapons. If you say something long enough and loud enough, it becomes truth, regardless of merit.