We spent all morning combing our Facebook photo gallery and hand-picked 39 of the most memorable images that we posted in 2013, which we’ve laid out below along with their original descriptions. Enjoy, and if you’re not following us yet, get with the damn program.
We spent all morning combing our Facebook photo gallery and hand-picked 39 of the most memorable images that we posted in 2013, which we’ve laid out below along with their original descriptions. Enjoy, and if you’re not following us yet, get with the damn program.
LAS VEGAS—Georges St-Pierre can trace a direct line from November 12, 1993, all the way to November 16, 2013.
St-Pierre—who was bullied by older kids as a child—was entranced from the moment he saw the seemingly frail and weak Royce G…
LAS VEGAS—Georges St-Pierre can trace a direct line from November 12, 1993, all the way to November 16, 2013.
St-Pierre—who was bullied by older kids as a child—was entranced from the moment he saw the seemingly frail and weak Royce Gracie carve a path of destruction through the first UFC tournament.
When he was 15 years old, St-Pierre went to a friend’s house for a barbecue. His friend went to the video store—back when seeing a movie required more than firing up Netflix—and rented VHS tapes of the first UFC events. St-Pierre watched, transfixed, as Gracie bested much larger men and forever altered our idea of what a fight could look like and how a smaller man would fare against larger foes.
It would change St-Pierre’s life, ultimately leading him to the UFC’s 20th anniversary show this Saturday night, where he defends his welterweight title against Johny Hendricks.
It also led him to Wednesday afternoon’s UFC 167 open workouts, where the legendary Gracie—clad in a weathered and worn gi—led one of his famous Gracie Train entrances, this time with St-Pierre and his camp in tow.
St-Pierre, also wearing a gi adorned with his Gracie jiu-jitsu black belt, took to the mat for a series of grappling movements with his hero. Triangle to armbar to Americana. Americana to armbar to triangle. All fluid and done with great respect.
It was a poignant moment and not just because of the anniversary and all the trappings that go along with it. This was the man who essentially created St-Pierre, the welterweight champion. Gracie had no input in St-Pierre’s training; in fact, Wednesday afternoon was the first time the Canadian had rolled with the elder statesman.
But what if St-Pierre had never squinted through those grainy old VHS tapes back in his teenage years?
St-Pierre says he still watches those old Ultimate Fighting Championship events. He can recite the name of every fighter and give you the kind of details that only an expert eye can see. His face glows when talking of his respect for the fighters who paved the way for him to become one the most famous mixed martial artists on the planet.
“Of course I do. I respect all of those guys. It was a different era, a different time. It was much tougher back then,” St-Pierre says. “It was a real fight. There were no time limits or weight classes. It was incredible. When I watch tapes from back then, I just didn’t know what would happen. We thought someone could die. There was too much unknown.
“I don’t think I would have had the courage to do that. I probably would have stayed at school.”
He ultimately mustered the courage to follow in Gracie’s footsteps, from his meager beginnings all the way to his reign as one of the best fighters in history. And St-Pierre wishes some of the rules and practices from the old days were still in effect today. He believes that a mixed martial arts bout is a real fight and should be treated like one.
Take the five-minute rounds, for example.
“I believe we are trying to mimic boxing. If you really want to see who is the best fighter, I believe you should just let them fight. Maybe a 15-minute fight without rounds or a 25-minute fight,” he says. “When you stop a fight, you stop the momentum. It could change the result of the fight.
“I believe if you want to see the best, you just let them fight. Me, I believe the sport will be more real if there were no rounds. Maybe the scoring could be based on every five minutes of a fight, but I believe they should change. I believe it might happen in the future. And most fighters, if you ask them, agree with me. They believe it’s a fight and you should just let them fight. Don’t break it up in the middle. It’s supposed to be a fight. You want to see the best man? Let them fight.”
Before he ever fought in the UFC, St-Pierre went to Las Vegas with friend David Loiseau to see UFC 40 and the main event featuring Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock. That was 11 years ago, before St-Pierre had any aspirations to compete and fight. He was simply accompanying Loiseau, who had scored a regional promotion win over Tony Fryklund in Montreal earlier that year to earn a call-up to the UFC in early 2003.
It was a very different time for the UFC; several years would pass before the lovable cast of the first The Ultimate Fighter season would capture the attention of people across the world and help catapult the promotion to the greatest heights it would ever know.
The night before the fight, St-Pierre and Loiseau sneaked into the MGM Grand Garden Arena and took a stroll in the Octagon. They just walked right in and stepped into the cage, with nary a security guard to be found. All these years later, he is still incredulous that he and Loiseau weren’t caught on their venture. Such a thing would never happen today.
“I just got in the cage and did some shadow boxing. I was a fan. I wasn’t even a fighter or anything,” he says. “There was no security. I couldn’t believe it.”
Despite the fame, money and attention that St-Pierre has garnered since that November night, he still finds the time to go back to his roots—to the days, people and events that turned him into a fan. His longtime trainer Firas Zahabi says that pulling out those old tapes is still a regular practice at his Tristar Gym in Montreal.
“I think those old tapes will always be watched,” Zahabi says with a laugh. “We watch every fight we can from the golden days. They’re like comic books. You can never have fights like that again.”
St-Pierre seems happier than usual. Perhaps that’s because he has had the best camp in many years, according to Zahabi. GSP says he is ready for Johny Hendricks, and even if the bearded power puncher is just the latest toughest fight of his career (as every fight usually is), it will be no less of an accomplishment if St-Pierre beats him and knocks back another would-be welterweight title challenger.
Or perhaps it’s because St-Pierre is here, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, in the presence of the man who made all of this possible.
An awful lot has changed in 20 years.
Twenty years ago, Royce Gracie swept through the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in what was essentially an extended advertisement for Gracie Jiu Jitsu. How did we get from Royce Gracie’s basic methods to…
An awful lot has changed in 20 years.
Twenty years ago, Royce Gracie swept through the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in what was essentially an extended advertisement for Gracie Jiu Jitsu. How did we get from Royce Gracie’s basic methods to the rounded skill set employed by Cain Velasquez or Jose Aldo?
When I was asked to write this piece, I thought that it would be fairly easy. I was obviously not thinking. This is a subject to which we could devote a sizable tome, but I will here attempt to do it in a few thousand words.
Today we will take a brief look at the development of mixed martial arts strategy from UFC 1 onward.
Royce Gracie and the Grappler’s Dominance
UFC 1 confirmed that in a bout of pure grappler against pure striker, more often than not the grappler will win. Ken Shamrock and Royce Gracie had easily submitted their opponents while the rest of the tournament was made up of ugly, clumsy brawls.
If UFC 1 didn’t fix this idea in the minds of viewers, UFC 2, 3 (though Gracie dropped out before the final), and 4 certainly did, as Royce Gracie swept through the competition time and again and remained undefeated.
Gracie’s success was due to two factors.
Firstly, almost no-one was familiar with the ground game; even those who were had not trained it in as methodical an environment as Gracie had with his family. Ken Shamrock leaping back on a leg from Gracie’s guard and allowing Gracie to come up on top of him is the perfect example of this.
The second factor was that almost no-one in the tournament had any idea of how to prevent or break away from the clinch or to stuff a shot. Knowing that Royce Gracie wanted to clinch, most went in expecting to have to knock him out before he did so.
The most important point that these early UFC bouts proved was that if a man doesn’t want to throw strikes with you, and instead wants to grab ahold of you, you have a very small window in which to knock him out. If you can’t break the clinch or stuff the takedown, you have almost no chance.
The Gracie method was pretty well expected by UFC 4, but nobody found a counter to it. He would throw that bizarre push kick to the knee or a front kick to the face, then charge in behind it and duck into the clinch or a takedown. In the event of a real struggle, Gracie would pull guard.
At UFC 5, Gracie’s involvement in a superfight with Ken Shamrock and not being entered into the tournament gave Dan Severn chance to shine. The great wrestler was able to manhandle his way to the final, where he won by an Americana.
The Rise of the Wrestler
It was now that the UFC, and mixed martial arts competition, began to resemble in many ways what we see today. As wrestlers began to learn to defend submissions from the top, and even apply a few of their own, they became the dominant force in mixed martial arts.
Gracie excelled because almost no-one he fought knew how to stop him taking them down, and the ones who did (Ken Shamrock, Dan Severn) struggled to deal with his skill from the bottom. From UFC 5 onward, the list of tournament winners reads like an amateur wrestling scrapbook.
Dan Severn, Don Frye, Mark Coleman and Mark Kerr each won the UFC tournament twice. The superfights were almost exclusively contested between grapplers who had succeeded in previous tournaments.
There were successes who weren’t wrestlers, such as the sambo master, Oleg Taktarov, and arguably the first complete mixed martial artist, Marco Ruas, but the trend was overwhelmingly in favor of the wrestler.
This era continued to impress that one great truth in mixed martial arts and set it in stone:
Whoever can control where the fight takes place owns the fight.
Even between wrestlers there was of course a great deal of variation. Some liked to shoot and others preferred the clinch. Mark Coleman could double-leg a horse, Dan Severn did a better job once he had a hold on his opponent.
The Ground-and-Pound Game
Not having the submission savvy of men like Royce Gracie or Ken Shamrock, the great wrestlers of the UFC tournaments primarily relied on hitting their opponent while they held them down. No-one was quite as frightening in the early days as Mark Coleman.
Coleman could hit hard. He didn’t have much of a gas tank, but he could hit often enough and with enough authority that he could grind his opponents down on the mat. Dan Severn was always a terrifying specimen, but he seemed reluctant to hit hard when on the mat. Coleman was a better wrestler, with none of these scruples.
When Coleman’s victim tried to stop him punching them, by reaching for his hands, Coleman would start butting them with his head. We often forget just how effective butting is, but a quick review of Coleman’s bouts will remind you why it remains such a dangerous technique.
At UFC 15, head butts (along with a host of other activities) were banned in an effort to make the UFC less controversial and more along the lines of an actual sport. Coinciding with an ACL replacement, Coleman’s success rapidly dropped off in the UFC, but on moving to PRIDE FC, where knees to the head of a downed opponent were legal. He enjoyed a career resurgence and provided some brutal knockouts from the front headlock and north-south positions.
The Defensive Guard
Before strikers began learning to sprawl, something which took a long time, the guard took on the role of the most important position in the bout. For the men who couldn’t out grapple on the feet with the great wrestlers, the guard was the equalizer.
Around the same time that Mark Coleman was dominating the UFC, a Dutch kickboxer named Bas Rutten was ruling over the competition in Pancrase, a Japanese promotion.
Rutten had entered the organization with little submission experience and had faltered against submission fighters such as Masakatsu Funaki and Ken Shamrock. While Rutten was able to starch the lesser wrestlers in the organization, his realization that the guard was his most important tool turned his career around rapidly.
Rutten eventually came to the UFC, but one of his Pancrase stable mates found success with similar tactics before Rutten made the move.
Maurice Smith is one of the truly remarkable success stories in MMA. Arguably the best kickboxer that the US has ever produced, there was still nothing to suggest that he could beat Mark Coleman in an MMA match. Smith’s 5-7 record in MMA was particularly discouraging.
Meeting Coleman at UFC 14, at the height of Coleman’s headbutting, double legging, face pounding powers, Smith had a huge task ahead of him. What Smith did have, and Coleman had shown to lack, was cardio.
Through the first round, Smith weathered the storm. From his guard he effectively shut down Coleman’s strikes and used the lock down from half guard to keep Coleman’s weight off of him and out of the head butts. Controlling Coleman’s head and posture masterfully, Smith avoided the soul-sapping beating which Don Frye had suffered from his own closed guard.
Smith threw up no submission attempts—he simply controlled and exhausted Coleman, and scrambled when he was in a bad spot. In the two extension rounds, Coleman could hardly stand, while Smith was breathing hard but was more than happy to open up with his jabs and low kicks. Smith won the decision and momentarily bucked the great trend of grapplers beating strikers. But he had done so as a rounded mixed martial artist.
Bas Rutten was able to exhaust Tsuyoshi Kohsaka and Kevin Randleman from underneath shortly afterward. Similarly, Frank Shamrock was able to do the same against a much bigger, strong Tito Ortiz in arguably the best fight in UFC history, TKOing Tito in the fourth round.
This was an incredible step forward from the days of fighters simply holding closed guard and hoping for a referee to insist on a stand up as Igor Vovchanchyn and other non-wrestlers did.
Sprawl and Brawl
The more popular method of dealing with wrestlers was to face them head on. Many strikers tried to pick up the wrestling game to the extent where they could stuff a good wrestler’s takedown attempts, and most utterly failed.
In PRIDE FC Mirko Cro Cop Filipovic had great success, but in the UFC the man to watch was Chuck Liddell.
We began the article, and indeed the UFC, with the rule that it is extremely hard to knock a man out before he clinches you. What Liddell and other successful strikers have done so well in recent years is force an opponent to keep attempting the clinch or shot.
The more times an opponent is forced to attempt a shot or clinch, the more they exhaust themselves and the better you can come to know their timing and habits.
Liddell could stuff the best of them, and when that failed he didn’t simply hold his guard, he worked his way up. A pioneer of the wall walk, Liddell would seemingly ignore his opponent’s offense on the ground and begin wriggling his way toward and then up the fence.
Nowadays, the successful strikers have realized that actively trying to stuff takedowns is an awfully exhausting process. Some fighters will feed the single-leg takedown and hop to the cage for balance such as Jose Aldo and B.J. Penn. Others will use space and backpedal, avoiding engaging at all and baiting their opponent to rush in and be countered, such as Lyoto Machida and Anderson Silva.
Of course, the truly wonderful thing about MMA is that there still exist the simple ground-and-pounders. The strikers with a great guard, and the striker who wades forward and hopes to sprawl in time. The process of evolution in mixed martial arts has not been about shedding layers, but of accumulating them.
The Fighters of Today and Tomorrow
Bill Bryson observed that it is a common misconception that biological evolution marches toward a pinnacle such as man. The evolution of the fight game is not dissimilar. It is not working toward a final point or peak. There is no final form or perfect fighter.
As fighters learn new techniques, older ones get neglected or forgotten and then return with as much efficacy as they had on the day they were invented.
I am often asked what direction I think the fight game will take in years to come, and I have no answer for that. I don’t think there is one. What is so exciting about mixed martial arts now, 20 years after the first UFC event, is that there still exists a vast number of styles and strategies.
We have takedown artists and ground-and-pounders. We have guard passers and guard pullers. We have runners and ring cutters, clinch fighters and wall walkers. We have guys who jump off of the fence as if it were the floor, and we have stallers. We have exciting fighters, and we have guys who you hope to see lose more than anything.
The side kick we laughed at when recalling Royce Gracie two years ago is now a commonplace technique in the arsenals of Jon Jones and Anderson Silva. Keith Hackney’s rolling axe kick attempt has been replicated numerous times in the cage (though no knockouts yet). We even had a 205-pound champion who was using karate to fluster people.
After 20 years of constant evolution, you cannot point to any one factor that combines the current crop of the UFC champions except that they are good in every area. Each has his own approach and methods. This is not art versus art but fighter versus fighter and preparation versus preparation.
The UFC and MMA have been through a lot in two decades, and there’s a hell of a lot more on the way.
Pick up Jack’s eBooks Advanced Striking and Elementary Striking from his blog, Fights Gone By.
When we were in high school, my friend Thatcher’s parents had a Bowflex in their living room.
Of course they did. It was the ’90s.
Thatcher’s house was the first place I ever saw the UFC. I’m pretty sure he and I cut class …
When we were in high school, my friend Thatcher’s parents had a Bowflex in their living room.
Of course they did. It was the ’90s.
Thatcher’s house was the first place I ever saw the UFC. I’m pretty sure he and I cut class one afternoon during our sophomore year to sneak over there and watch it on VHS while his parents were at work. His dad had taped it off pay-per-view that weekend and when Thatcher said it was amazing, that I had to see it, I probably said something like, “Yeah, cool, whatever.”
Boom. The rest of my life. Right there.
Considering the formative role it played with me, you’d think I would remember every detail of my first encounter with MMA, but the truth is, I don’t. I don’t remember much at all about what we watched that day, except this one fleeting memory of a guy in white pajamas arm-barring a guy in Hammer pants.
That’s it. No context, nothing else. Just a disembodied, flickering image that railroads through my mind without preamble or explanation. As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of UFC 1 on Tuesday, you ask me about my earliest UFC memory? That’s all I got.
I do remember my reaction to what I saw, which history now tells me was pretty universal to kids about my age. I remember being amazed that the little dude in the gi was cleaning house by sucking people onto the ground and making them quit with strangleholds and joint locks.
There was that ah-ha moment where it dawned on you: The best style of karate wasn’t karate at all. It was jiu-jitsu. It seemed so simple once the little dude showed you how.
The little dude, of course, was Royce Gracie, and you could make the case those early tournaments were basically set up for him to win. The fight director was his uncle, and while the bouts weren’t fixed, it’s not a huge leap to assume the Gracies started by inviting a bunch of guys they thought Royce could beat. The UFC, such as it was, was really sort of a live action infomercial for Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and, man, it worked.
Even if I knew at the time that Gracie wasn’t the underdog in those early fights, that he was actually the overwhelming, prohibitive favorite, I probably wouldn’t have cared. We were willing to overlook a lot in those days: the mismatches, the terrible broadcasts, the scorn of our friends, family and of society.
Because, brother, that first handful of events, they were bad.
Viewed with the benefit of 20 years worth of hindsight, everything about the first days of the UFC seems seedy and corny and hilarious. The announcers were awful, arguably less prepared than any of the shockingly ill-prepared fighters, and there was so much general confusion mixed in with the brutality, you couldn’t help but laugh at a lot of it.
The pure sport aspect was almost nonexistent, and even as a spectacle meant to terrify and titillate the public, they don’t really stand the test of time. It’s weird now to think that those early fight cards could’ve gotten their hooks into me, but I guess they did.
My personal evolution as a fan followed a fairly routine trajectory for spectators during MMA’s awkward adolescent years. We raided the local video stores for all the UFC events we could lay our hands on, watching a lot of them out of order because that’s how they came to us. Later we bought DVD collections out of the bargain bins—King of the Cage and Gladiator Challenge shows by the dozen—and eventually chased down early Pride cards and even some RINGS events.
At some point, somebody said we should go to Vegas for a show and we did. Then we went to another and another, and pretty soon they started to run together in my mind.
The next thing I knew I was a superfan, and 20 years later I realize I owe all of it to that house with the Bowflex in the living room, and that one shaky memory of the guy in pajamas curling up underneath the guy in Hammer pants, making him tap.
Once I had the benefit of the Internet on my side, I went back to research that moment, with the intention of filling in the gaps in my memory. As it turned out, I wasn’t missing much.
I discovered the first UFC fight I remember watching was Royce Gracie vs. Jason DeLucia in the quaterfinals of UFC 2—not UFC 1. It was just Gracie’s fifth official MMA fight and DeLucia’s third, though the two of them had faced off before as part of the now-infamous, underground Gracie challenge series you can still dredge up on YouTube.
Neither fight went so hot for DeLucia.
Their UFC bout lasted one minute and seven seconds, but during that time there are a lot of what you might call “early UFC” moments. For example, ring announcer Rich “Go-Go” Goins introduces Gracie as the “defending Ultimate Fighting Champion…champion.”
The broadcast team knows what’s up, they are completely in the bag for Gracie. They don’t even consider the notion that DeLucia might win, instead choosing to spend their time talking about what Royce is doing, why Royce is, doing it and what Royce is going to do next. When it’s over, as they’re all marveling over Gracie’s skills, commentator Jim Brown yells—in the most Jim Brown way possible—“You can’t wrestle with a snake!”
How on earth do I not remember that?
Oh, the bad old days. Twenty years later, we’ve come so far, but I still have no idea what Jim Brown was talking about.
(McCullough vs. Cerrone: a great fight overshadowed by the shitstorm that was Filho vs. Sonnen II. / Photo via Getty)
In today’s CagePotato Roundtable we’re talking underrated fights — fights that deserve to be remembered as some of the best our sport has to offer, yet are rarely even brought up during the discussion. Obviously, Fight of the Year winners are disqualified from this list, and UFC Fight of the Night winners have been strongly discouraged from inclusion. Read on for our picks, and please continue to send your ideas for future CagePotato Roundtable topics to[email protected].
Until their recent rematch truly helped bring to light how incredible their first encounter was, I would argue that Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler at Bellator 58 was the most criminally underrated fight in MMA History. It wasn’t difficult to see why; the fight just happened to transpire on the same night that Dan Henderson defeated Mauricio Rua in a “Because PRIDE” classic at UFC 139, and being that Bellator plays Wes Mantooth to the UFC’s Ron Burgundy, Alvarez vs. Chandler was sadly overshadowed by its manlier, more mustachioed counterpart.
Contrary to popular opinion, however, I would additionally argue that Alvarez vs. Chandler surpasses Hendo vs. Rua in terms of pure excitement, and I say that as a guy who dug PRIDE more than Seth digs TNA Impact. For one, there was more than pride on the line for Chandler and Alvarez, there was a lightweight title. Sure, it was a Bellator lightweight title, but that’s worth like three MFC titles, dudes. And while Hendo vs. Rua was a goddamn barnburner in its own right, it never quite reached the fever pitch of the first round of Chandler vs. Alvarez.
(McCullough vs. Cerrone: a great fight overshadowed by the shitstorm that was Filho vs. Sonnen II. / Photo via Getty)
In today’s CagePotato Roundtable we’re talking underrated fights — fights that deserve to be remembered as some of the best our sport has to offer, yet are rarely even brought up during the discussion. Obviously, Fight of the Year winners are disqualified from this list, and UFC Fight of the Night winners have been strongly discouraged from inclusion. Read on for our picks, and please continue to send your ideas for future CagePotato Roundtable topics to[email protected].
Until their recent rematch truly helped bring to light how incredible their first encounter was, I would argue that Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler at Bellator 58 was the most criminally underrated fight in MMA History. It wasn’t difficult to see why; the fight just happened to transpire on the same night that Dan Henderson defeated Mauricio Rua in a “Because PRIDE” classic at UFC 139, and being that Bellator plays Wes Mantooth to the UFC’s Ron Burgundy, Alvarez vs. Chandler was sadly overshadowed by its manlier, more mustachioed counterpart.
Contrary to popular opinion, however, I would additionally argue that Alvarez vs. Chandler surpasses Hendo vs. Rua in terms of pure excitement, and I say that as a guy who dug PRIDE more than Seth digs TNA Impact. For one, there was more than pride on the line for Chandler and Alvarez, there was a lightweight title. Sure, it was a Bellator lightweight title, but that’s worth like three MFC titles, dudes. And while Hendo vs. Rua was a goddamn barnburner in its own right, it never quite reached the fever pitch of the first round of Chandler vs. Alvarez.
How good was Chandler vs. Alvarez 1? Good enough to pull over a million viewers for its (equally enthralling) rematch. A rematch which, by the way, went down on a last-minute clusterfuck of a card that was extremely underwhelming until Alvarez and Chandler saved it and possibly the promotion.
If we’re talking about underrated fights, let’s give some attention to MMA’s earlier days. There were a lot of great fights then — and I’m not just talking about the “classics” that are constantly cited as examples of MMA’s best fights. I’m talking about the underrated fights that offered an inkling into MMA’s future. One such fight is Keith Hackney vs. Royce Gracie.
When watching this fight in 2013, it seems kind of bland, but you have to look at the fight in its historical context. The fight took place at UFC 4 in 1994. Back then, Royce Gracie was a monster. In the young, borderline-illegal “sport” of MMA, Gracie was the closest thing there was to a Mike Tyson. He was untouchable, and he dispatched his opponents without effort — at least until Gracie met Kimo Leopoldo.
At UFC 3, Leopoldo exhausted Gracie to the point where the Brazilian couldn’t continue on in the tournament even though he had beaten Leopoldo with an armbar. Yes, Kimo was the first man to make Gracie look mortal…but Kimo was a roided-up monster. Keith Hackney couldn’t make that claim, and that’s why Keith Hackney vs. Royce Gracie was so awesome.
A karate guy with a little bit of boxing experience and some high school wrestling who ran a heating business managed to, at least briefly, stymie a living legend and a fighter who had been training to fight for his entire life.
If you haven’t seen the fight, here’s how it didn’t go down:
When Royce Gracie fought a striker, he took them down in comically easy fashion and then had his way with them. Strikers were hapless fish-out-of-water. Their sole purpose in the early days was to make “Gracie” Jiu-Jitsu look bullet-proof by getting their ass kicked.
Boxers? Nothing compared to a Gracie.
Karate men? Laughable!
But Hackney didn’t follow this precedent.
Yes, he lost, but he performed better against Royce Gracie than any striker had performed against a legit grappler at that point in UFC history. He stuffed several of Royce’s takedowns and even managed to land a few clean, powerful punches to Royce’s then unblemished face.
The fight wasn’t a barn-burner, but it’s underrated for what it was: A fight that showed the start of MMA’s progression.
Who doesn’t like a good ol’ fashioned fist fight where both competitors match up evenly?
Answer: Nobody; well at least nobody that visits Cagepotato.
Yet somehow, Nate Quarry vs Tim Credeur is rarely even brought up as one of the best fights in the history of our sport.
Both dudes were different stylistically yet they each shared a TUF background. Fans knew who they were because both fighters made an impression on the show; remember, this fight took place back when “fans” actually watched TUF. There was built-in name recognition to this curtain jerker on the main card of Fight Night 19 for both guys whether it was warranted or not. Oddly enough, this fight card served as the lead-in for TUF: HEAVYWEIGHTS starring Kimbo Slice #ratings.
What happened in the course of 15 minutes was nothing short of awesome. Round 1 saw the underdog, Credeur, drop his opponent and quickly follow him to the mat for a quick transition to an attempted RNC (not to be confused with the delicious BRC from El Pollo Loco; up yours East Coasters). Quarry was able to get back to his feet and then both men just started swinging. It was great and Credeur took the first frame.
Round 2 started with both guys throwing bombs until Quarry connected flush and sent Crazy Tim to the mat. Nate landed some solid GNP strikes from inside full guard. Although Credeur was taking punishment, he was constantly shifting his hips looking for a submission and returned fire with shots of his own from the bottom. Even though he was active from his back, Quarry knotted the fight at one round apiece.
In the final stanza it was clear that both men were tired and beat up but that is why this fight was my choice. Both Quarry and Credeur showed Arturo Gatti-esque balls and just kept swinging with Crazy Tim getting tagged several times. Though Credeur was eating punches and getting knocked down, he kept getting up. On wobbly legs, he continued to throw punches even though Quarry was getting the better of him. Quarry, for his efforts, had a mouse under his eye that looked like a Halloween-sized Snickers bar and his counter-punching was spectacular. The horn sounded and the two professionals embraced after giving the fans one hell of a slugfest.
Had this fight taken place only one year earlier, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have been Fight of the Year, and rightfully remembered as one of the greatest MMA slobber-knockers of all time. But instead, Diego Sanchez vs. Clay Guida took home 2009′s FotY, and this bout is only a footnote in our sport’s history — a great fight from an otherwise decent card that earned both competitors an extra $30k for their efforts (yeah, the Fight of the Night award for this event was only $30k. Feel old yet?).
Barnett’s PRIDE career was relatively brief and not particularly successful — he went 5-4 in the Japanese promotion from 2004-2006, including three separate losses to Mirko Cro Cop — but his run in the 2006 PRIDE Open Weight Grand Prix was a career highlight, and his opening round match against Aleksander Emelianenko is, in my opinion, the most under-appreciated heavyweight bout in PRIDE history.
At the time, Fedor’s spooky “little” brother had a reputation as a dead-eyed psycho with unreal power in his hands; three of his previous four wins were knockouts that lasted less than 30 seconds. Barnett’s best strategy would have been to take the fight to the mat at all costs and let his grappling advantage take over. But in a misguided (yet totally awesome) display of bravery, Barnett spends the majority of the ten-minute first round trading bombs with Emelianenko. What transpires is everything you’d want out of a heavyweight MMA fight — two behemoths standing toe to toe and testing each other’s ability to remain conscious.
The fact that Barnett survives a ten-minute boxing match against Aleks was a moral victory in itself. And after proving his point, Barnett got down to business in round two, tripping his now-gassed opponent to the canvas, passing to side control, softening Emelianenko up with some knees, and wrenching out a tap via Americana. After the fight, Josh declared that “pro wrestling is the strongest in the world” (!) and vowed that Fedor was already dead (!!!). The Japanese fans swooned, and so did I, watching the fight later on the Internet.
Of course, opening-round fights of any tournament tend to be easily forgotten, and the epic Final Four at PRIDE Final Conflict Absolute tends to overshadow everybody’s memory of the 2006 OWGP. (My God this Cro Cop!) But viewed on an individual basis, I think Barnett vs. Emelianenko was the most entertaining and competitive of the 15 fights that took place in that tournament — and it made me a Josh Barnett fan ever since.
Until his reign as UFC Lightweight champion ended with a whimper — OK, a verbal tap — rather than a bang, Benson Henderson had developed a well-earned reputation as a fighter who fans could count on to engage in compelling fights. In large part, this was often a product of the durability of Henderson, his sound technique in all areas and the equal competency of his opponents. On two occasions, however, he squared off against a foe who brought out the best in him and vice versa. The first example is obviously Anthony Pettis in their 2010 Fight of the Year. Of course, when the fight in question contains the pre-eminent highlight of the sport, it’s probably a little too high-profile for this roundtable. The second was Donald Cerrone.
Cerrone is also notorious for engaging in entertaining fights. Unlike Henderson, his tend to be more violent and one-sided. Such was the case in his second fight against Henderson at WEC 48; Henderson clinched him against the fence, kneed him in the head until Cerrone developed a nasty hematoma and finished the fight with a guillotine in the first round. However, Bendo and Cerrone’s first match was one of the greatest fights in MMA history. With then-WEC lightweight champion Jamie Varner injured, Henderson and Cerrone competed for the interim title at WEC 43. The first two rounds took place on the ground following Henderson takedowns, but Cerrone was extremely active off his back throughout the fight and almost secured a fight-ending guillotine in round one. The third round was less eventful, but in the fourth Henderson — who had been active with takedowns and top control — began to fade. Cerrone began to capitalize, first in the standup in round four and then on the ground in round five. In that final round, Cerrone attempted no less than six submissions, all which had the potential to end a fight. Henderson, however, managed to survive each one of them, earning him a reputation for being nigh-unsubmittable that would stick with him until his last fight. Many observers, including myself, believed Cerrone had taken a close decision on the strength of his submission activity. Naturally, Henderson won the controversial decision, through Christ who strengthens him — or at least influences judges to weigh top control too favorably.
The match won Fight of the Year from Sherdog, MMA Fighting and Sports Illustrated. Given the popularity of both fighters currently, it would easily be in the consideration for the best fight in MMA history if it took place today. Yet it’s still a relatively obscure fight because no one knew who the WEC guys were in 2009. That’s a shame, because this fight not only epitomized every single aspect of mixed martial arts you could ask for (save for a definitive finish), but it also began to establish the legitimacy of the WEC and its fighters. This fight, along with the ascendancy of guys like Urijah Faber, Miguel Torres, and Jose Aldo, helped pave the way for the inclusion of lighter-weight fighters in the UFC. But even deprived of its context, this is still a truly exceptional fight. You can watch some potato-quality footage of the entire five-rounder right here.
I’m under no delusions that Leonard Garcia is a UFC-caliber fighter, but I’ll be damned if I allow this discussion to conclude without anybody bringing up “Bad Boy.” His aggressive fighting style almost always translates into an entertaining, memorable brawl. But I don’t need to explain that to you; hell, you probably look forward to watching Leonard Garcia fight even more than Jared looks forward to updating his To-Do list.
Back in September, Leonard Garcia returned to action against Nick Gonzalez. It was the back-and-forth brawl that you’d expect from a Garcia fight, with Bad Boy eventually winning the fight by rear-naked choke. If this fight took place in the UFC, it would have been Fight of the Night, but since it took place under the Legacy FC banner, most of you probably didn’t even know that the fight took place until just now. Go ahead and check it out.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call this a Fight of the Year candidate (like some people are), but it definitely deserves to be mentioned during any discussion revolving around great fights from 2013. Instead, it will more than likely play second fiddle to an Al Bundy GIF during this year’s Potato Awards. Such is life, I guess.
Have a fight that you’d like to nominate? Feel free to share your pick in the comments section.
(Taktarov vs. Kerr, as promoted by Bob Meyrowitz. If this doesn’t embody everything about today’s discussion, then what *does*? Photo courtesy of Sherdog.)
It was thirty-three years ago today that the absolutely tragic bout between Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes went down — where a younger, far more athletic Larry Holmes beat the aging legend so badly that he actually cried for Ali when it was over. Though Ali is still celebrated as one of the greatest fighters of all time, his legacy has never been the same as it could have been if he simply stayed retired. It’s in memory of this fight that we’ll be talking about falls from grace during today’s roundtable: fighters who stuck around far too long, lost some embarrassing bouts as a result and tarnished their once-great legacies. Read on for our picks, and please continue to send your ideas for future CagePotato Roundtable topics to[email protected].
Tim Sylvia: A name once synonymous with greatness, excitement, and extraordinary physique. Once atop the Mount Olympus of the sport, he reigned supreme over lesser beings for roughly four years, vanquishing the best of the best in his weight class. OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating here. So maybe Tim Sylvia was never exactly a world beater; he was awkward, plodding, fat, had no real ground game to speak of and was the UFC heavyweight champion when all the best fighters in the division were busy competing across the Pacific ocean.
But for all that, he was the heavyweight champion. He even had sex with his greatest rival’s ex-girlfriend. (Leading to this glorious interview with said rival, Andrei Arlovski.) He was relatively wealthy, at least compared to other fighters. Point being, he had achieved all someone who came into this world as Tim Sylvia could possibly hope to achieve. Even once he had lost the title, he still retained the respect that was deservedly owed to him.
(Taktarov vs. Kerr, as promoted by Bob Meyrowitz. If this doesn’t embody everything about today’s discussion, then what *does*? Photo courtesy of Sherdog.)
It was thirty-three years ago today that the absolutely tragic bout between Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes went down — where a younger, far more athletic Larry Holmes beat the aging legend so badly that he actually cried for Ali when it was over. Though Ali is still celebrated as one of the greatest fighters of all time, his legacy has never been the same as it could have been if he simply stayed retired. It’s in memory of this fight that we’ll be talking about falls from grace during today’s roundtable: fighters who stuck around far too long, lost some embarrassing bouts as a result and tarnished their once-great legacies. Read on for our picks, and please continue to send your ideas for future CagePotato Roundtable topics to[email protected].
Tim Sylvia: A name once synonymous with greatness, excitement, and extraordinary physique. Once atop the Mount Olympus of the sport, he reigned supreme over lesser beings for roughly four years, vanquishing the best of the best in his weight class. OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating here. So maybe Tim Sylvia was never exactly a world beater; he was awkward, plodding, fat, had no real ground game to speak of and was the UFC heavyweight champion when all the best fighters in the division were busy competing across the Pacific ocean.
But for all that, he was the heavyweight champion. He even had sex with his greatest rival’s ex-girlfriend. (Leading to this glorious interview with said rival, Andrei Arlovski.) He was relatively wealthy, at least compared to other fighters. Point being, he had achieved all someone who came into this world as Tim Sylvia could possibly hope to achieve. Even once he had lost the title, he still retained the respect that was deservedly owed to him.
After those humiliating 36 seconds, Sylvia was never the same. He came into his next fight, against former boxing champion Ray Mercer, weighing over 310 pounds. After an apparent gentlemen’s agreement was reached to only throw punches, Sylvia proceeded to open the fight with a leg kick. Mercer, who has previously suffered a defeat to Kimbo Slice and had no weapons beyond his hands, proceeded to knock Sylvia out cold. Sylvia has spent the rest of his career fighting nobodies at super heavyweight, with the one exception being another rematch against Arlovksi, which ended in a no-contest after Arlovski illegally soccer kicked him. (The rules for this fight were, let’s just say, murky.)
If you remain unconvinced Sylvia represents MMA’s furthest fall from grace, consider this. If you type in “Tim Sylvia” in Google, the first auto-suggestion is “Tim Sylvia shits himself.” That sentence will one day be inscribed upon his tombstone as a testament to all who tread there that as low as they find themselves, it’s probably not as low as Tim Sylvia has fallen.
I get that the idea behind these roundtables is to present a question that each of us attempt to “answer” as objectively as possible, with talks of “floor turds” and “garbage asses” abound, but to claim that anyone in MMA has fallen further than Ken Shamrock is to turn a blind eye to the facts, plain and simple.
Ken Shamrock is the soggiest, slipperiest floor turd of them all, a floor turd dropped from the foulest, most wretched garbage ass known to man. And worse, he’s a perpetual two-flusher — a turd that simply continues to cling to an otherwise pristine bowl in bits and pieces, no matter how hard you scrub or attempt to knock him off with a particularly strong stream of urine. The Bristol Stool Scale would label Shamrock a Type 6 turd — a mushy, fluffy, not-even-a-real-turd turd; a classification made all the more depressing when you take into consideration that Shamrock was once a fibrous, healthy, Type 3 turd that we all aspire to someday be.
But the point of these roundtables is not only to convince our fellow writers that they are wrong — which they undeniably are, in this case — but to convince you readers that we are right. So I ask unto you, Potato Nation: Have any of the other candidates on this list been guilty of the following?
The Gracie family has to be mentioned in any discussion about falling from grace. They went from being synonymous with victory and with MMA itself to being synonymous with being one-dimensional dinosaurs that can’t beat journeymen.
To understand how bad their fall from grace is, let’s start from when the Gracies took the world by storm: UFC 1.
Not many people knew about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu heading into UFC 1. That was partially by design, since the Gracie family — the savvy marketers that they are — called their art “Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.” So the average American who hasn’t heard of grappling arts sits down to watch UFC 1 and then sees a scrawny Brazilian dude in pajamas steamroll over people twice his size, including a roided-up Ken Shamrock.
To prove that winning the tournament was no fluke, Royce Gracie provided an encore at UFC 2. He withdrew from the UFC 3 tournament after a victorious match with chemically-enhanced Jesus freak Kimo Leopoldo exhausted him, but Gracie returned at UFC 4 and again won the tournament.
“Gracie Jiu-Jitsu” was on fire, the Gracie family was on fire. They became part of MMA’s burgeoning mythology. To the layman, the Gracies were an undefeated family of adept warriors who could crush anyone (despite the undefeated claim being patentlyfalse) and who practically invented grappling (also false; ground-fighting was older than dirt). This was the high point for the Gracie family, and it didn’t last long.
Sakuraba, a talented Japanese wrestler/submission fighter, systematically dismantled the Gracie family, and in doing so proved that the Gracie air of invincibility was just smoke and mirrors. Sakuraba first defeated Royler Gracie at PRIDE 8 in 1999. But his two most notable wins over Gracies were his 90-minute fight with Royce Gracie at the Pride 2000 Grand Prix that ended in Royce’s corner stopping the fight, and when he broke Renzo Gracie’s arm three months later.
The Gracies were mortal now, but there was no shame in that; the Gracie name still commanded respect.
But, six years later, the Gracie name was taken down several more pegs when Royce was lured into the Octagon to fight Matt Hughes. Hughes humiliated Royce almost as bad as Royce humiliated the hapless strikers he faced back in the early 90’s. Then, a year later, Royce further tarnished the Gracie family’s name by testing positive for anabolic steroids in a victorious rematch with Sakuraba — tainting his win over the Japanese fighter.
This was, more or less, the end of the old guard of the Gracie family (save for Renzo Gracie’s ill-advised return to MMA against Matt Hughes in 2010. Ugh).
The next generation of Gracies wasn’t fit to wear their fathers’ gi pants. They proved to be no better than regional-level fighters. Rolles Gracie Jr. couldn’t beat Joey Beltran — even Rolles’ own relative Renzo admitted that was pretty bad. There was a brief glimmer of hope for the Gracie family in the 21st century with BJJ phenom Roger Gracie but he, too, couldn’t put it together in MMA. After an impressive 4-0 run, he lost to King Mo. He won two gimme fights against Keith Jardine and Anthony Smith but then lost an ugly fight to Tim Kennedy in his UFC debut, and was unceremoniously booted from the promotion. Of course, Rolles and Roger are just the tip of the iceberg. I’m neglecting to mention countless other Gracies who tried their hand at MMA and couldn’t live up to their last name.
This isn’t to knock the Gracies though. Their “Gracie Breakdown” YouTube series is amazing, and they’re still a family of talented grapplers. It’s just that when you look at the 90s and then look at the present day, you can’t help but see the sad state of affairs for the Gracie family. Twenty years ago, they ruled the MMA world. Now, a Gracie fighter is only in the news when he fights like he fell out of a pub at 3 am.
There was a time not too long ago whenJens Pulver wasn’t just the face of the lightweight division, he pretty much was the lightweight division. The son of an alcoholic horse jockey, Pulver survived horrific instances of abuse and battled depression — an origin story that made it so easy to cheer for him, and so rewarding to watch him win fight after fight. Pulver went on to become the most dominant lightweight of the early days of the UFC, a true pioneer of the sport in every sense of the word.
Then the predictable happened: Pulver got older, his competition evolved, and MMA moved on, leaving him behind. Time for him to retire, right? If only it were that easy.
See, it’d be one thing if Pulver was rewarded for his services as handsomely as the present-day UFC champions are, but keep in mind that Pulver was in his prime back when the organization was still confined to insignificant venues in obscure towns throughout rural America (Lake Charles has an arena? That’s news to me…). How do you tell a guy who has done so much for our sport — a man with a family to feed and bills to pay — to get out once there’s actually some money to be made as an MMA fighter? You don’t. You simply cringe when you learn that Pulver dropped a lopsided contest to yet another guy you’ve never heard of, and just hope that he at least made bank for the beating.
See Also: Replace “lightweight” with “Japanese,” and you can pretty much say the same thing about Kazushi Sakuraba (if you add a gnarly professional wrestling injury, of course).
In the world of sports, the proverbial fall from grace happens frequently. An athlete is celebrated and perceived in a thoroughly positive manner, yet through their actions the facade is forever changed. Ryan Braun and Lance Armstrong were chemically enhanced cheaters while Pete Rose chose to bet on a game that he could directly affect. Then there are dudes like Tiger Woods whose balls have seen more holes off the golf course than on it while Lenny Dykstra is just a freaking maniac. All of them were beloved at one time or another but through actions outside the lines of their sport, they are damn near pariahs. This is the typical fall from grace but it is rare that a competitor’s legacy is forever changed due to actions within their athletic field.
It happened to Joe Namath in a Los Angeles Rams uniform just like Joe Montana for the Kansas City Chiefs. Willie Mays stumbled around the outfield for the NY Mets and even Michael Jordan couldn’t catch lightning in a bottle when he suited up for the Washington Wizards. Some athletes hang around too long and all the good will they had built up over the course of their amazing careers is almost like a footnote to how they are initially remembered. Such is the case with the very first mainstream media MMA superstar, Chuck Liddell. The Iceman was at the forefront once the ESPNs and Jim Romes of the world finally decided that our sport was legitimate.
Sure, we all knew who Chuck Liddell was, but using him as the pseudo poster boy of MMA was a great fit to the uninformed masses. He was college-educated and soft-spoken but he also had a Mohawk accompanied by head tattoos. He was cerebral, yet scary, and his highlight-reel knockouts solidified the persona. He was the UFC LHW Champion of the World and the perceived baddest man on the planet for several years. He beat a who’s who of the best fighters during his era like Randy Couture, Tito Ortiz, Vitor Belfort, Kevin Randleman and Alistair Overeem.
Then with one glancing blow on the point of the chin from Quinton Jackson and *POOF* it all changed.
Everybody in MMA loses. It happens. If a fighter hangs around long enough, eventually his lights are going to get turned out, and that’s exactly what happened to The Iceman back at UFC 71. It was supposed to be a momentary setback and he was hand-fed the glass jaw of Keith Jardine in his next outing. Problem is, Jardine and his meth-addict style actually avoided the overhand right of Liddell, handing the former champ his second consecutive defeat. In his next fight, Chuck Liddell vs. Wanderlei Silva FINALLY happened and it did not disappoint. It was a back and forth war that saw the Iceman come out on top. Sadly, it would be the last victory of Liddell’s HOF career.
Let’s not mince words here: the Iceman’s last three fights are brutal to watch. Not just because we witnessed a former champ losing, but losing in such a manner that we feared for his safety. It started with Rashad Evans damn near sending Chuck’s head into the 13th row with a vicious overhand right. Then Maricio Rua left Liddell on his back staring wide-eyed at the arena lights, and in his final Octagon appearance, Rich Franklin put The Iceman’s career on ice (*rimshot*). It was an uncomfortable end to an otherwise fantastic career. A 1-5 record with 4 horrific KO losses forever damaged Chuck Liddell’s overall legacy and the biggest MMA fall from grace was complete.
From Richard and Maurice McDonald to Ron Wayne, history is littered with poor shmucks who cashed out too early; guys who missed the big picture and went for the short money. Art Davie is one of those guys. A former ad-man and born hustler, Davie was arguably the most important driving force behind the creation of the UFC, pitching his idea of an eight-man mixed-styles fighting tournament to Rorion Gracie and John Milius, and co-founding WOW Promotions, which produced the UFC’s early events along with fledgling pay-per-view outfit Semaphore Entertainment Group.
The UFC became an immediate PPV phenomenon after launching in November 1993 — but after just five events, Davie sold his interest in the company to SEG, and officially left the UFC at the end of 1997, allegedly due to conflicts with Semaphore’s Bob Meyrowitz about the direction that the promotion was taking. Davie would later urge Meyrowitz to stop promoting UFC fights altogether, following the death of Douglas Dedge. But he still takes bittersweet pride in his creation to this day; watching the UFC blossom without him is like being a “divorced father with someone else raising my kid,” Davie once said.
Davie had it all, but didn’t know it, and got out when he thought the getting was good, years before it actually was good. Now, he’s just another old guy in a fedora sitting at the bar, telling anybody who will listen that he “invented that UFC stuff.”
“Sure, pal,” the bartender will say, pouring Art another double of mid-shelf scotch. “Sure you did.” Has there been an especially painful fall from grace that we’ve omitted? Let us know in the comments section.
LAS VEGAS—Georges St-Pierre can trace a direct line from November 12, 1993, all the way to November 16, 2013.
