Finding the patterns in Robbie Lawler’s controversial win over Carlos Condit at UFC 195
Distance and regression
Robbie Lawler fought a bad fight against Carlos Condit. Is it ok to say that? It seems almost sacreligious. He fought with guts and determination; showed an incredible last-minute will to win.
Robbie Lawler can wrestle, Robbie Lawler can kick, he can pressure and he can counter. Sometimes he takes time off in fights… but in recent years I don’t think he’s ever made one as hard on himself as he did at 195. David and myself talked about how stubborn Lawler’s been, but also about how his UFC run has been characterized by a focus on strategy. Instead of giving Matt Brown time for his offense to get rolling, he went after him early. He started fast and racked up body work against Hendricks the second time out. Leg kicks against Rory the first time, better takedown defense the second.
This one felt like a regression, like the Robbie Lawler of old who fiends for one perfect punch and gets lost in the patterns of his opponent’s offense.
As a disclaimer, I personally picked for the champ to win, and win big… but one thing nagging at me before the fight was Dan Hardy and John Gooden’s excellent preview, specifically when Dan mentioned how awkward and difficult it actually was to close distance on Carlos Condit. I was thinking a bit about how wrestling has always been Condit’s weakness, but how this has cloaked the fact that those who have beaten him have also had something which naturally tends to accompany wrestling ability- namely a quick step-in for crushing distance. GSP, Woodley, Hendricks… but not Lawler.
Still, there was a relatively clear strategic path to victory for the champion. If Condit’s footwork is awkward, it’s not hugely efficient, and he has never been unhittable or difficult to push back to the cage. Lawler did start coming forward at the start of the fight, but was relatively quickly scared off by an exchange. Then, instead of pressuring a defensively vulnerable fighter, he increasingly started drifting back, looking to counter, and trying to one-shot someone famous for his durability. Gone was the jab, and largely absent were straight and the left kicks, all of which which he might use to pin Condit against the fence. Instead he spent a lot of the fight trying to thread the needle by throwing a looping left or the right hook through the middle of Condit’s marching combinations. Sometimes it worked, and a lot of the time it didn’t.
Flatten out the wrinkles in your brain
A lot of the credit here has to go to how well Condit fought, and I myself drastically undersold him before the fight. He’s an interesting guy. As illustrated in Duane Finley’s superb fight journal series, he loves art, music, and books. What comes through strongly is the idea of a fight not as a way for establishing dominance but as a means of self-improvement; self-expression.
He’s something of a genius when it comes to offense, and the ability to put out something close to pure variety in a fight is rare stuff. “Mixing it up” in this way isn’t just a case of learning different techniques, although that’s hard enough, but in being able to access and cycle them without mentally tiring, repeating, or getting predictable. It’s a bit like… playing one of those kid’s games where you have to keep from repeating yourself, reeling off as many animals as begin with the letter ‘O’ as possible or something, but in front of thousands of people and with someone periodically ringing your skull like a bell.
Condit himself summed up what Lawler does and what he’d have to do to beat him in an MMAjunkie interview
“…There’s breaking down the puzzle and saying what we’re going to do and then there’s actually going and execute it when you’ve got somebody like Robbie trying to flatten out the wrinkles in your brain.”
Condit’s fight process is something like free association poetry, or improvisational jazz- art assembled from dozens or hundreds of pre-learned phrases, and put together in different ways every time. That Lawler was able to read into the elaborate structures, gambling his belt on being able to adapt faster than the challenger could create, and actually have success? This is tribute to just how defensively sound he is, just how good he is at catching onto patterns, and how absurdly hard he hits.
Narratives and robberies
The details of what happened in the fight have already been covered- over the entire course of the fight by David here and in the key swing round in the 3rd here by Hutch. I can’t do as well as them, so I won’t try. Let’s talk about what happens when we watch fights, though.
In combat sports, the biggest thing in the mind of the viewer is almost always narrative. Everyone builds a story about what’s happening in the cage. I stress again: everyone does this, and anyone telling you they can “objectively” judge fights is a liar.
Big fights are first made big through big, saleable narratives, and thus why this showdown between two likable, respectful, exciting fighters is unlikely to do very well in PPV sales. Afterwards, fights are retrospectively defined by narratives of who won and lost: you’ll still get people saying how Jones dominated Cormier, or how Werdum completely shut out Velasquez. Even individual rounds get taken over by their own stories. There was a bit of discussion about whether Lawler deserved a 10-8 in the final frame, but the first two or three minutes of that round were massively one-sided in favour of the challenger. All that was drowned out in the image of Condit staggering around the cage right at the end.
Uncertainty is the enemy of satisfying narrative resolution, but the story of MMA and combat sports is a tapestry stitched together with narrowly-won and subjective decisions. This includes GSP, and Jones, and everyone at lightweight ever, and Condit, and Lawler.
Winston vs Gift
The champ first announced himself as a modern contender when he beat Rory Mac. The first round was a prime piece of veteran gamesmanship, where Lawler was outstruck in head strikes, but landed a few uncharacteristic and relatively low powered leg kicks, and whiffed on a picturesque flurry at the end of the round. Taken as a clinical analysis of effective offense, did Lawler really win the round? Maybe not, but he looked like he did, and that’s normally what’s important.
Round one of Lawler’s first fight with Hendricks was close- Lawler landed the cleaner shots, and Hendricks landed more. Almost everyone scored it for Hendricks, though, and those that demurred did so with the understanding that Lawler had probably given it away because judges look for activity and are historically poor at judging defense. Similarly, the key fourth round (which I wrote about here, and I think it’s still OK) in their second fight doesn’t really have much of a definitive winner. GSP-Hendricks mostly hinged on a few strikes in the clinch vs a failed guillotine.
These examples are deliberately from a mixed set of bouts: some are seen as controversial and some aren’t, but none of those swing rounds are easy to score, to the extent that they expose an inherent tension in scoring. When we’re watching, we each make our own choices, where we balance Winstonian ideals of how we think rounds should be scored, and Goftian realities of how we’ve historically seen the judges score fights. Everyone has their own way that they balance what happens; their own grey areas.
Past this, there are people who are just plain magnetic in the cage, who have an energy which naturally draws eyes and often scores towards them, like Diego Sanchez, Leonard Garcia, Ben Henderson, and probably Robbie Lawler too. They can drag scorecards through the grey areas, and in some cases, past them.
Fighting the better fight
Here’s one story of the main event- Condit fought a better fight than Lawler. He was more consistent; in the contest of smart, adaptive fighters he was smarter. He won his rounds more clearly than the champion did, and I don’t even think it’s crazy to score the second for him. It is so hard to allow this narrative not to colour the fact that the swing round was also close; to not let notions of “deserve” to influence how it went, and that for everything behind it, it was simply nothing more or less than an uneventful, closely contested round which probably had a slightly larger chance of going one way but went the other instead. The weight of narrative hangs too heavy on something which doesn’t have a big capacity for resolution inside it, no matter how close you look.
The larger narrative before the fight is what makes a lot of us care- we feel like we know Condit, we’ve watched him through a title run, injury and resurgence. For many, watching him get painfully close and get turned away at what may be his final chance hurts.
It’s not a robbery, though, or something where the judges need to be censured. There are infinitely worse screw-ups in MMA all the time, even on this card: the late stoppage of Westcott-Garcia; the dodgy Morono-Noke decision and the genuinely appalling pair of 30-27 cards that Justine Kish picked up over Nina Ansaroff. Each of these is a bigger breach of professionalism than scoring for Lawler to retain his belt, but because we’re not invested in Ansaroff, or Noke, or Garcia and because the stakes are lower, we don’t really care.
There aren’t the thousands of words written for them because it’s not really the realities of scoring or judging that people are complaining about. It’s anger at the unsatisfying conclusion to a story they believed in; the hopeless wish for a do-over which had people so mad at the ending of the Sopranos, or Mass Effect, or Time Bandits.