A crushing amount of crushing MMA happened over the last week, which culminated in Conor McGregor’s shocking KO of Jose Aldo, demonstrating the tiny margins of error in this sport
MMA is the most brutal sport in the world. If you’re close enough and invested enough, then sometimes you might notice that the brutality doesn’t come in quite the flavour that the world expects from it. There’s the blood and the broken bones, sure, and if you’re a politician looking for a moral drum to beat then you don’t have to look far to find pictures of fighters looking sightlessly up at nothing, or soaked in gore. The physical realities of combat can be ugly, but the proverbial crimson mask is only the outer face of the most viciously unforgiving sport around.
The idea of fighting as this pain-ridden, animalistic thing where two people meet in the cage or the ring and beat the s— out of each other is common, and it’s true that you generally need to be a bit off-kilter to be a fighter. It’s something a lot of them will gladly play up, too. Most like being seen as a badass, and the idea of fighting as being this otherworldly thing requiring a tolerance for pain which is beyond mere mortals is… cool.
If you talk to fighters, though, then sometimes the more honest ones will tell you a secret: that what happens in the cage is normally kind of fun, and that it doesn’t hurt much at all. When your brain’s saturated with fight-or-flight chemicals, getting punched or kicked and even getting bones fractured feels bad, or uncomfortable, but not normally painful unless serious trauma happens. Combat is its own unique space and it takes something significant to puncture it.
On its own, a conception of fighting as fun or absorbing doesn’t exactly lend much nobility to the sport. At least the misapprehension of it being painful has a sort of Nietzschean, “elevation through suffering” quality to it. Without it, it’s easy to come up with an idea that fighters are nothing more than thrill-seekers. They go out there risking their health for money and entertainment, buzzing on a cocktail of perception-altering hormones.
This is true (to an extent) but combat sports will never stop reminding you that they are very hard, and they are very painful. The hardness is in the work. The old idea of animalism is rebutted by the thousands of hours of training it takes to get to the top levels of a combat sport. To trade short-term hardship for long-term gain is an almost uniquely human trait; to be able to visualize a future, hold it in your mind and then do something that you really, really don’t want to do right now in order to build towards it. If you want to make it to the championship level you need to get up day after day, and run, lift, spar, roll, wrestle and hit pads over and over and over again. You will need to do this through sickness, tiredness and injury.
The pain comes in a loss, when the hardship adds up to nothing. I always seem to end up going back to Gay Talese’s “The Loser”, and Floyd Patterson’s losses to Sonny Liston:
“… And so I went out, and they asked questions, but what can you say? What you’re thinking about is all those months of training, all the conditioning, all the depriving; and you think, I didn’t have to run that extra mile, didn’t have to spar that day, I could have stayed up that night in camp and watched ‘The Late Show’. . . . I could have fought this fight tonight in no condition. . . .”
For fighters, something as simple as a single punch can put paid to years of work. It can derail a career. This is true for kickboxers, boxers and Muai Thai fighters, but MMA is more brutal than any of these because it combines all of these disciplines and more. It is so incredibly unforgiving, so unbelievably difficult to avoid the reaper swing of something going wrong. The small gloves are what everyone references, but more than this it’s the array of potential attacks. A fighter has milliseconds to respond to a tell and figure out whether what’s coming is a takedown, a punch or a kick, and getting it wrong can be fatal. The margins for error in MMA are tiny, and the last week of championship-level fighting proved that more than anything else.
Frank Edgar and punching power
The relationship between knockouts, punching power and chin is a fluid one, informed by probability and variance. The vast majority of fighters in the UFC neither have terrible chins or great ones- most with “bad” chins simply have terrible defensive habits. Similarly the outliers in terms of punching power are rare, and it often comes down to technique rather than raw physicality. Pretty much everyone can knock out an opponent if they hit them right.
Beyond this, as McGregor proved in the main event, it’s all about where punches land, and sometimes someone just hits the off switch on an opponent. Mighty Mouse on Benavidez; Diaz on Lawler; Marquardt on Maia- these are all sudden shots which completely and shockingly knocked their opponent dead (it’s also, perhaps, worth noting that none of those fighters were the worse for wear afterwards).
Frankie Edgar knocked out Chad Mendes with one punch. A little like the main event, Mendes missed a right hand then came around with a left hook, only to meet his opponent’s left. It cracked across the line of his nose, and left him crumpling to the canvas. The real difference between the two fighters was in head movement- in the pocket and out, Mendes has tended to use head movement only on initial step-ins, and relies heavily on footspeed and parries on defense. He tends to freeze his head in space once he throws, and he was stock upright. Edgar slipped his right, came back and hit him, and was already slipping again by the time Mendes started to fall.
The KO has led to discussion of whether Mendes’s chin is degraded, but I’m not willing to write him off yet. Frankie Edgar has always had a reputation as something of a pillow-fisted striker, but it’s notable that some of his past opponents, including Jim Miller, had specifically commented that he hits pretty hard. He knocked out Gray Maynard with a short uppercut off a scramble, and Gray Maynard had only been knocked out once before (admittedly the KO didn’t come from a particularly devastating offensive fighter, namely Gray Maynard). Incidentally, I can’t be the only person who wonders what a freakish, brutally powerful bantamweight Frank Edgar actually would have been in some parallel world where the UFC expanded to the lighter weight classes earlier.
Wheel kicks are the worst
Luke Rockhold has had a strange love-hate relationship with wheel kicks. By and large, MMA wheel kicks are dumb and bad; an artefact of a sport where people are still struggling to understand how to control the space in front of them, and often basically give up and try to cover it with the most wide and sweeping technique they can, where they’ll almost invariably fail. Because they’re normally fighting people who also struggle to understand distance, their opponents normally just hop back out of range. Pointless, but mostly harmless.
I’ve been waiting for the first high-profile wheel kick failure for a while, but it was hard not to feel anything but bad for Weidman. The fight had been relatively back and forth until that point- Weidman was almost immediately the first person to ever effectively crack Rockhold’s defensive grappling by getting him down and taking the back, but Rockhold swept and latched onto a guillotine (and then puzzlingly held onto it with Weidman in side control). In the next round, Rockhold knocked Weidman down with his favoured check hook counter, and then started going to work with the body kicks. For those that picked Rockhold, this combination was likely why: an ability to counter off the back foot, and an ability to throw out a barrage of kicking offense which a relatively plodding fighter would have to wade through.
Weidman has always been astoundingly tough, though, from fighting Sakara with a rib injury to the short-notice weight cut before his fight against Maia. He kept moving forward, then landed a body kick to Rockhold which appeared to have the challenger visibly hurt. Weidman keyed into it, and started thumping more round kicks to the body. Then he threw a wheel kick. It’s easy to see why: he was fairly sure Rockhold was going to step away, scared off by the champion’s offense, and so he wanted to catch him moving backwards.
Chris Weidman is a fantastic athlete. He is strong and durable (although he is notably not the kind of flexible and quick kickboxer like Barboza or Thompson to effectively use wheel kicks). His greatest skill is an exteroperceptive sense for where his opponents are going to move in space, and it failed him here.
More than the technical interplay, for my money the advantage Rockhold held in this fight was that he’d fought against people who could contest him athletically in Jacare and TRT Belfort. He had an inherent understanding that he could be put in bad positions, whereas Weidman seemed to be mentally unprepared that he could go up against someone strong and skilled enough to force him into bad situations, and who wouldn’t back up when he hurt them. So Rockhold stepped forward instead of stepping back as people normally do against wheel kicks, and clinched, and spun Weidman to the ground, and then took mount. The all-offense champion had another problem here- he has a terrible defensive habit on the feet where he just shells and waits for his opponent to give up on hitting him. Unfortunately it seems to be common to his ground game as well, and Rockhold rained down about 80 crunching punches and elbows. When the bell rang for the fourth, it was a matter of time before Herb Dean was pulling the new champion off.
Precision beats power
The “fight of the year” was over quickly. Jose Aldo threw a noncommittal right hand and then leaped forward with a left hook. The only thing you can really say is that it was uncharacteristic of the featherweight champ. Maybe McGregor had gotten to him; maybe he thought that McGregor was going to start the fight like he often does, by stepping forward and kicking.
Jose Aldo was the best defensive fighter in the sport, and still is, no matter what happened. Regardless, a singular mistake, a really bad one, floats in its own pocket of space and time, standing apart from what happened before and afterwards. That second that Aldo overextended, it didn’t matter who he was or how he’d gotten there. If time had been stopped as he started to step in, and a conference of all the greatest striking minds in history had been gathered to discuss his options, there wouldn’t have been one who could have saved him.
Conor threw a single punch across the body, the same backstepping cross he used to knock out Ivan Buchinger. It wasn’t as hard as the hook Aldo threw, because McGregor’s punches rarely are. This, oddly, is much of what leads to his far higher knockout ratio- Aldo hurts and scares off his opponents with power shots and then resets, while McGregor simply stays in front of them, prioritizing accuracy and volume over power until the opponent hits the canvas. This time it took one punch. Aldo hit the canvas.
The best featherweight ever was down in 13 seconds. Given his history with injuries, and how infrequently he fights, he might never contest for the championship again. In general the higher the peak a fighter scales, the harder it is for them to get back to the top. Chad Mendes likely had the door slammed shut on his championship hopes forever. He thought he could be champion last year, and now he’s 0-4 with stoppage losses against all of the top 3 in his division. Some thought Chris Weidman might have the chance to overtake Anderson Silva as the best middleweight ever, but now he’s been big brothered by Luke Rockhold, just like Rockhold said he would.
There is no room for what-ifs, some kind of uchronie where these fights unfolded in different ways. No point discussing what happens if Mendes moves a bit differently, if Aldo decides to step back instead of forwards, if Weidman decides not to channel Edson Barboza. MMA rolls on, utterly relentless. No matter how hard you work, if you make an error it will break your bones, and it will relentlessly tear you up, or it will flatten you in seconds, but any champion fighter would take these and more if it meant having to avoid what happens when they lose.
“You realize where you are, and what you’re doing there, and what has just happened to you. And what follows is a hurt, a confused hurt- not a physical hurt- it’s a hurt combined with anger; it’s a what-will-people-think hurt; it’s an ashamed-of-my-own-ability hurt. . . . And all you want then is a hatch door in the middle of the ring- a hatch door that will open and let you fall through and land in your dressing room instead of having to get out of the ring and face those people. The worst thing about losing is having to walk out of the ring and face those people. . . .”
It is so very easy to find yourself in this situation in MMA. It is the most brutal sport in the world.