It is appropriate that the last two rounds of a title bout are commonly referred to as the “championship” rounds. More than anything else, it is these final rounds of the fight that seem to separate the good fighters from the great, the chaff from the–well, the champions. It’s not merely a matter of stamina, though fatigue has been the downfall of many wistful challengers. Rather, it’s something mental. A truly dominant champion must have some inbuilt, chemical reaction to the final minutes of a fight that all but forces him to prove what he’s truly made of.
Funnily enough, Jose Aldo is a great enough fighter that, since winning his belt five years ago, he hasn’t had to prove himself in that way. Instead, he’s either knocked out his opposition early, or won the early stages of the fight so convincingly that the final rounds are simply academic–a chance to practice his defense, more or less. To hammer the point home, Jose Aldo is so good that he can afford to spar men who are trying to fight him.
But faced with an opponent good enough to force him to fight back? To work for the finish until the final bell? Then it becomes very clear that Jose Aldo is, without a doubt, a worthy champion.
(Author’s note: This is part two of a two-part article. This installment will explore the final three rounds of Aldo vs Mendes II. If you missed part one and want to read about the thrilling first two rounds, you can find it right here.)
ROUND THREE
After consulting with trainer Andre Pederneiras in the corner, Aldo had reclaimed the fight fairly securely in round two. Using his long, stinging jab, straight punches, and his feared low kicks, the Brazilian took full advantage of Mendes’ hesitancy resulting from a knockdown just after the horn to end round one. Mendes had been shaken up, and now he could be controlled.
Except, as it turns out, a fighter good enough to drop Jose Aldo less than a minute into the fight is also good enough to adapt and pose new threats as the rounds wear on. About three minutes into the third, Mendes tried something new. It worked.
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1. Mendes steps into range.
2. He extends his hands and Aldo, as he has done throughout the fight, prepares to throw around them.
3. Mendes dips beneath Aldo’s jab and the champion overextends himself a bit.
4. Mendes goes one step further, touching Aldo with his open left hand to sell the threat of the takedown. Aldo pulls his right foot around and drops his weight, preparing to deny Mendes the double and pivot away from the single as he always does.
5. Mendes’ right uppercut catches him completely unawares.
Aldo’s reaction to a takedown is generally very safe. He not only bases out, but pivots away, using the pivot to both take his rear leg out of danger and deny his opponent the chance to dig in and drive through for the takedown. At the same time, it gives him flexibility to duck under or pivot away from tricky punches should the takedown attempt prove a trap. It’s a pared-down, effective approach to wrestling.
The uppercut, however, is the perfect punch to circumvent it. It should be said, there are a lot of problems with the mechanics of Mendes’ uppercut. It’s wound-up beyond reason. It’s thrown a little too straight up-and-down to remain dangerous were Aldo to pull back. And Mendes throws it by straightening out his legs and presenting his opponent a tempting target.
But despite all of this, it accomplishes the bare essentials needed to work in this situation. It is thrown with power. It cannot be easily evaded once Aldo has already started to move down. And, for all intents and purposes, it is positively invisible. Aldo’s cover-all takedown defense, normally beautiful in its simplicity, was finally used against him, to beautiful effect.
Unfortunately for Mendes, this staggering blow was not the pivotal moment of round three. That’s not to say it couldn’t have been. Followed with intelligent, measured offense it could easily have sealed Mendes a round that, up to that point, Aldo was comfortably winning. Instead, Mendes fell victim to the same thing that lost him the equally close first round–and I don’t mean Aldo’s right hand. The specter haunting Mendes throughout this bout was his own inexperience.
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1. Aldo has just landed a counter, but Mendes still smells blood. He pressures Aldo toward the fence.
2. Stepping forward, Mendes commits a cardinal boxing sin–winding up his jab. No matter how hurt Aldo is, Mendes turns what should be his safest punch into a suicidal trap.
3. Aldo slips just inside Mendes’ punch, his own right hand arcing over Mendes’ arm.
4. He clips the challenger behind the ear with his own trusy cross counter . . .
5. . . . and drops him–again.
Pressure tends to reveal a man’s true nature, but there are in fact many kinds of pressures in this world. For Aldo, in this sequence, the pressure of Mendes’ offense–combined with the fact that Mendes has just stunned him–means only one thing: opportunity. An overzealous opponent is exactly what Aldo needs to recover the fight after recovering his senses. Mendes, on the other hand, is under a different kind of pressure, one mostly self-imposed. Unwilling to let the fight slip away from him a second time, he bites down and pursues Aldo with reckless abandon, his gusto sealing the very fate he wishes to avoid.
What can be said of inexperience? There are ways to disguise it, but there is really only one way to overcome it for good. At this point in time, Chad Mendes presented the best version of himself that has ever existed, at least in terms of fighting ability, and it was still not enough. The chance of the knockout was there–tantalizingly close, in fact. But Aldo is too good for chance.
The fight was not over yet, however, and Mendes proved that, in a couple of years, perhaps, he could very well still be the man to dethrone the king.
ROUND FOUR
Mendes surged to the center of the Octagon at the start of the fourth, not anxious this time but eager. Whereas the first knockdown had seemed to deflate him, his close call in the third round seemed to have stirred him to action. Barely pausing to touch gloves, Mendes pressed forward, taking incessant, small steps toward the champion’s center, feinting and threatening all the time.
Ultimately, this would prove to be Mendes’ easiest round of the fight. While Aldo quite likely aided him by taking much of the round to rest up, credit is owed to Mendes for returning to the one thing that had brought him the most success early in the fight, namely good, sound boxing.
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1. Mendes peppers Aldo with feints, touching his gloves, reaching toward his eyes, and even feinting the jab to the body. All the while, he moves forward and presses Aldo’s center.
2. The champion finally bites on a feint, and pulls his head back . . .
3. . . . pivoting afterward and moving away from Mendes once again.
4. This time, Aldo is prepared for an attack to follow that feint. A masterful tactician, he ignores this next false jab . . .
5. . . . and instead bites on the false right hand that follows it.
6. As Aldo tries to meet Mendes’ cross with a counter jab, Mendes slips out of harm’s way and spears the champ’s solar plexus with a left uppercut.
7. And only then does he throw the right, looping the punch over Aldo’s outstretched left arm and onto his cheek.
As it happens, Chad Mendes is actually a very good boxer when he wants to be. With his confidence shaken earlier in the fight, he had often turned to flashy, dancing movements and lunging, off-rhythm punches–more hallmarks of his stablemate TJ Dillashaw than cohesive parts of his own style (GIF). With renewed vigor to start the fourth round, however, Mendes found his most consistent success with nothing more than an educated left hand.
Again, the fact that Mendes failed to fight this way consistently is a product of Aldo’s extreme high-level experience bringing out his relative inexperience, but it cannot be overlooked that, at several points in this bout, a man known best for his wrestling cleanly outboxed the best boxer in all of MMA.
Before this match, Aldo repeatedly said of Mendes that he was “just a big right hand.” I have no doubt that he sings a different, far more respectful tune now.
ROUND FIVE
At the start of this piece, I waxed poetic about the stuff of champions, the mental fortitude that separates the best from the rest. It should not surprise you, then, that this was the theme of the fifth and final round of this battle.
Mendes gave it his best. Right off the bat, he pursued the takedown, his safest bet to secure the round and hopefully squeak by with the decision (though we now know that the judges had him losing already regardless). At first, he succeeded, at least in holding Aldo down, which is certainly an admirable feat in and of itself. Then, with the champion pressed up against the fence, he looked to do some real damage.
Aldo wasn’t having it.
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1. Mendes feels himself losing control of Aldo’s body, so he grabs on to a collar tie and makes the best of it.
2. A Duran-esque short uppercut just misses the mark.
3. And Aldo, quite literally, shoves Aldo away, throwing him bodily into center cage.
4. The tone set, Aldo walks Mendes down. He is tired, and the footwork is a bit loose, but he moves forward.
5. A jab feint draws Mendes’ customary right-hand catch . . .
6. . . . and Aldo deftly slips a hook around it . . .
7. . . . followed by another relentless step forward . . .
8. . . . and a clean left uppercut.
9. That, in turn, is followed by a beautiful straight right.
10. And, just as Aldo senses that Mendes will soon be forced to return to his wrestling, he catches him on the way to a takedown with a vicious knee to the chest.
If you’ve read my analyses before, you know I’m a fan of flowery language. I’m a sucker for metaphors, and indeed I believe that combat sports are the best place to look for meaning and metaphor in the sporting world. You may have heard me say that a fight is like a conversation, and in many ways it is. A fight is full of questions and answers, and it would be a lie to say that Aldo vs Mendes II was not a spirited discussion between two expert debaters, because metaphorically, it was.
But it also bears remembering that fighting is not really a conversation. It is fighting. And it can be a gutsy, instinctive, animalistic affair stripped of all metaphorical artifice and whatever other window dressing with which we journalists would like to present it. And it is fitting, ironically, that the sport’s most perfect technician should be the one to remind us of this fact. The sequence above is not a very pretty one. Between the strikes you see landing are several clean counters from the challenger. But what matters is that Aldo is throwing and landing strikes of his own. And what better way to send a message at the start of the exchange than to literally shove Mendes into the center of the Octagon.
This is what it takes to be champion. We marvel at these fighters for their incredible technique, and that’s all well and good, but at the end of the day technique, strategy, tactics–these are merely helpful tools. The only thing truly required of fighters is that they fight, no questions asked, without complaint, to the end. They refuse to lose. That is Jose Aldo, and for all the diagrams and illustrative GIFs I’ve made over the years, it’s the will of fighters like Aldo that this series is meant to celebrate.
Pivotal Moments is not only about specific fight sequences, but about pivotal people. Champions like Aldo are the crux of the sport, and sometimes it takes a display like this to remind us of that.
For more on the wrestling aspects of this bout, check out today’s episode of Heavy Hands, the only podcast dedicated to the finer points of face-punching. On today’s episode, BE’s own Coach Mike Riordan talks about his background in wrestling, and how this underappreciated art is fundamental to mixed martial arts.