A year of hype brimmed over in thirteen seconds. That was the amount of time it took for Jose Aldo to lunge in wild and get caught by the short, back-skipping left hand of Conor McGregor. It was an underwhelming end to the heated rivalry, and disappointing to see Aldo throw the fight away so quickly, but it is certainly pleasing that now we can at least see MMA fans admit that McGregor is something special. It was taking far too long to get that recognition from some.
I find myself disappointed in Aldo, though probably not as much as he and his team are. When it was time to write Killing the King: Jose Aldo all the way back in February of 2013 we noted Aldo’s overcommitment and tendency to lead with his face when punching, and also his lack of a competent jab, particularly in the bout against Mark Hominick. Lo and behold, Aldo comes out against Frankie Edgar with a new, sharp jab and the sprinting in face first has subsided completely. I had no reason to mention his habit for bending forwards at the waist or running onto punches again… until last night.
Videos by VICE
Aldo leaning way forward to reach with his right hand.
A little bit of foreshadowing by Mark Hominick, catching Aldo with a short left hook as he runs into the low kick.
For McGregor’s part, he did what he always does. If he was working on anything new for this fight, we didn’t get time to see it. The lancing left straight quickly shocked Aldo. A stomping low line side kick to the knee bothered him. And then Aldo sprinted in for a running left hook and ate a short left counter. The same back-skipping left McGregor used against Buchinger, Brimage, and has attempted in pretty much every fight of his career.
What was nice was that every single thing McGregor did, we covered in our Ringcraft: A Study in Conor McGregor. If you’re feeling robbed by shelling out sixty dollars for thirteen seconds of action, enjoy ten minutes of McGregor for free.
As mentioned in Ringcraft, McGregor has been somewhat denied the opportunity to counter of late, but Aldo seemed so riled up and happy to run in swinging that McGregor was able to get back to his roots.
Following the fight the talk is now of how ridiculous McGregor’s power must be to fell Aldo with a flick of the wrist while moving backwards. Of course, it wasn’t McGregor who supplied the force, it was Aldo—in running forward with his chin out in front of him and blinding himself to any return. Punching while retreating is something I used to write about a great deal, mainly because it was one of the major reasons for the success of Anderson Silva, but it rarely provides knockdown blows against top flight fighters because they tend not be lunging in behind their faces.
Though in 2009 it was standard practice.
It is difficult to put your body weight into a blow while you are moving away from it. Mostly, back-stepping or back-skipping punches are either partial punches which catch the side of the jaw or temple as the opponent lunges in, or straight punches in which the puncher is simply building a structure for the opponent to run onto, rather than throwing their weight forward into the blow. They are an excellent weapon which every top striker should understand, and they are defused with feints, low kicks and good ring positioning.
So what’s next? For Aldo, there’s probably not much chance of an immediate rematch. Under any other circumstances a rematch would be a license to print money, but the nature and speed of the loss mean there’s little to excite fans there. Perhaps the move to lightweight he has been threatening for years. Personally, I’d love to see him fight top featherweight prospect, Max Holloway—though for Holloway to have to beat the most accomplished featherweight of all time to get a title shot on top of his streak of wins would be a little sadistic. Perhaps with the pressure off of Aldo for a bit, he and Cub Swanson could headline a Fox card in Brazil—a chance at a tune up for Aldo, a chance at springboarding back into contention for Swanson, or at least some revenge for his own embarrassing knockout loss.
For McGregor? Frankie Edgar seems sensible. Edgar just knocked Chad Mendes out even quicker than McGregor was able to, catching Mendes with a left hook as he closed the door on a flurry. Pretty out of character for Edgar, but I’m sure he was pleased with the result.
McGregor’s brilliant salesmanship has created a world where he was always going to be a bum if he lost to Jose Aldo, and an undefeatable demi-god if he won. You know better than that. He’s completely unique in the division, but he’s a man with habits and flaws all the same. Let’s give him a few fights and see how it goes if you must start thinking about unbeatables and hypothetical cross-division matches.
There’s talk of fights at lightweight, but the UFC learned its lesson about letting champions go up for competitive fights with BJ Penn vs Georges St. Pierre II. It hurts the brand of one of the UFC champions, marketed as unbeatable. The man who cuts to the smaller weight will normally get beaten up, and if he doesn’t it’s just embarrassing for the higher division. The UFC benefits far more from letting people speculate on the hypotheticals and promising that Jones versus Silva, or GSP vs Silva, or Jones versus Velasquez, or Weidman versus Jones is in the very near future. Even if McGregor were to take a fight against the lightweight champion and win, suddenly you’ve got two belts on one man, each being defended half as often, and you’re even more strapped for headline acts.
The entire UFC 194 card was stacked with top quality fights, and the Ultimate Fighter finale the night before boasted some pretty good scraps too. I don’t have the room to name check them all so I will give just a couple of moments which struck me as interesting or significant.
Luke Rockhold dragged the belt away from Chris Weidman in the middleweight title bout. It was a curious one because I enjoyed the game of both, but by the second and third rounds they were both already looking sluggish. One of the interesting exchanges in the bout came as Weidman moved in to close the distance, was tagged by that Rockhold check hook—which you can be almost assured he will throw on every retreat—and looked to be knocked off balance. Rockhold’s follow through on the hook and side on stance, however, meant that after he had rattled Weidman’s brains, his own back was exposed.
Curiously, Rockhold caught an arm in guillotine and held it even as Weidman progressed to side control. Normally considered a rookie error, Rockhold was able to hold Weidman there, unmoving, until Herb Dean opted to stand them up. A pretty rare occurrence to be stood up from side control by a referee as experienced as Dean. What’s more, being in an apparently pointless choke seemed to go some distance towards tiring Weidman. It was a strange moment and it reminded us that all the rules of fighting have a little wiggle room and their exceptions.
Discipline is what Weidman lives and dies by in the cage. Luke Rockhold only knows one way to fight, and he does it for better or worse. Weidman when he’s upset or anxious or frustrated is a very different animal to Weidman when he’s on point. Despite success in punting Rockhold’s leg out from under him with the couple of low kicks he tried, Weidman—apparently frustrated by Rockhold’s height and length—began running in on Rockhold, shifting stances as he did so. At the beginning of the second round, this got Weidman dropped by that back skipping hook.
Rockhold won the second round through his powerful kicks and Weidman being unable to get in and box. But in the third, Weidman went to his own kicks and while they lacked the thudding force of Rockhold’s, they were landing on the body more easily. It was then that Weidman made a crucial tactical error—he went for a wheel kick. The danger of the wheel kick has always been that the striking surface is very far out from the body as the back is turned. A step in from the opponent by accident or on purpose, or just misjudging distance as the kick is thrown, will lead to the opponent taking the back very, very easily. And that is exactly what Rockhold did.
After some sustained punishment to finish the third, Rockhold quickly got top position on Weidman in the fourth and pounded his way to an impressive stoppage. One of the intriguing things about this bout was that, like Robbie Lawler and Johny Hendricks, you get the feeling that with some tweaks here and there each man could up his game against the other in a rematch. I’m not keen on immediate rematches, and the middleweight division is stacked with talent, but I’m sure these two will meet again down the road and after the rounded skills and scrambles shown by both I very much look forward to it.
Performance of the night should doubtlessly go to Demian Maia. The most beautiful jiu jitsu player to ever put on four ounce gloves. Against Gunnar Nelson, himself considered a fantastic jiu jitsu practitioner, Maia was a force of nature. His work in his opponent’s guard is hypnotic. His crushing of the opponent’s butterfly hooks, his transitions to leg weave positions, his mounts.
Maia likes to hang out on one of his opponent’s hooks until they feel they need to do something. Then he’ll switch his hips and bring his knee through to a smash pass / dope mount / leg weave position. From there it’s a simple progression to the mount.
There is something about Maia. Seemingly so advanced but also so simple. You expect the world class grappler to pull out the slick sweeps and the inversions—but when Maia is on the bottom he is almost always coming up on the humble single leg takedown, with great success.
It has become clear now that Maia isn’t going to become a truly rounded mixed martial artist as he never seemed to have the aptitude for striking but he has done the next best thing and added some pop to his strikes. While he was positionally out grappling Nelson, he wasn’t just holding and inching towards submissions as he used to or as other one dimensional grapplers will. He was slapping and hitting, punching and elbowing. And while some of them didn’t look like much, others clearly hurt. Round two started on the feet and all of Nelson’s usual bounce was gone. He was so flat footed that he barely reacted when Maia stepped in to nail him with a left straight.
A final neat moment from the somewhat underwhelming bout between Yoel Romero and Ronaldo ‘Jacare’ Souza was Romero’s backfist. He looked to hit it a couple of times off of missed kicks but failed because Souza was too far away, but when Souza did finally step in after a missed kick, Romero’s backfist clacked across his dome and sent him to the mat.
This is an excellent technique for active kickers because the more you kick, the more you miss. You cannot expect to be a successful kicker and not end up showing your back to the opponent occasionally. Cung Le knocked down a few good fighters with the back fist off of missed or parried kicks.
Before we get on with the task of preparing for the best free card of the year, Cerrone vs Dos Anjos, let’s take a second to feel for Marlon Sandro—a cautionary tale of not getting into the right promotions at the right time. You will know him as “Aldo’s cornerman”, a gif which is making the rounds on the internet:
But for a couple of years he was ranked just below his teammate as the number two featherweight in the world. Doing things like this on the regular:
Fortunately, when all of the sourness subsides it will be impossible for Jose Aldo to suffer the same fate. He has done too much for the company, the division, and the game at large. In fact it is sometimes necessary to be reminded of our heroes’ fragility as just another human to put their incredible accomplishments in proper place.
Pick up Jack’s new kindle book, Finding the Art, or find him at his blog, Fights Gone By.
