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On December 22, 2017 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Sherdog’s 2017 Fight of the Year

““It is international fight week,” announcer Todd Grisham said moments before the headlining fight started at The Ultimate Fighter 25 Finale, “and there are some very big fights this weekend. But few if any are expected to be better than the one we’re about to witness.” That turned out to be a prescient comment. Not only was the main event between Michael Johnson and Justin Gaethje the best fight of International Fight Week, it surpassed every other fight from 2017.

There was, indeed, a lot of hype leading up to the fight. It was Gaethje’s Ultimate Fighting Championship debut after going on a TKO tour in the World Series of Fighting, where he was the 5 time defending lightweight champion. He didn’t just bring his championship experience with him; “The Highlight” brought his undefeated, 17-0 record into the promotion, and only two of those fights had gone the distance. Gaethje had a hard-earned reputation for being one of the most violent, exciting, leave-it-all-in-the-cage kind of warriors in the entire sport.

Yet he was the underdog going into his Octagon debut, and for good reason. Gaethje was impressive on paper, but he was relatively untested. Johnson was not a showcase opponent brought in to lose. He was a top five lightweight who had hovered around title contention for years. Johnson was coming off a tough 2016 where he knocked out streaking contender Dustin Poirer and then got pummeled by Khabib Nurmagomedov in Sherdog’s 2016 Beatdown of the Year. Still, at 31 years old, Johnson remained a factor in the UFC’s most talented division. His hand speed, athleticism, and diverse skillset were all tools that Gaethje had never dealt with in the WSOF. “The Menace” entered the bout a slight, -155 favorite when the cage doors closed.

They didn’t touch gloves before the fight…”

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On December 12, 2017 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Mixed Feelings for the Middleweight Division

“Of all the memes that MMA has given us, none is more perpetually useful than Nate Diaz’ classic line after he defeated Conor McGregor: “I’m not surprised, mother [expletives].” This was the precise feeling I and no doubt many others had when it was announced that Georges St. Pierre had vacated the Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight title. At 33 days, his championship reign would rank as the sixth shortest celebrity marriage, a comparative metric far more fitting than other UFC title runs.

St. Pierre’s decision to vacate the title caps a strange 18 months for the middleweight belt. The top of the division has been on a meandering journey ever since Michael Bisping knocked out Luke Rockhold in June 2016. That was bizarre enough on its own. It included what has got to be cleanest single punch of Bisping’s UFC career, and it was on short notice against a man who had thoroughly demolished him before. At that time, the middleweight division was the best it had ever been, with contenders like Yoel Romero, Ronaldo Souza, Robert Whittaker, Gegard Mousasi and the deposed Rockhold champing at the bit for a shot at the new champion.

Of course, none of them would receive that shot…”

 

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On December 5, 2017 By In Mixed Martial Arts

A GOAT For All Seasons

“A few years ago, I wrote a series called “Under the Microscope,” where I analyzed the Greatest of All-Time arguments for fighters across several weight classes. I only did this for the five legacy divisions — lightweight through heavyweight — since the sub-lightweight weight classes were too young; there simply weren’t enough fighters who could be legitimately defended as the G.O.A.T. Every weight class had its own distinct gray areas and there were definitely fighters that were harder to make a case for than others, but there were at least enough contenders for the crown.

I debated doing a shortened version for featherweight but ultimately didn’t because there was really only one option: Jose Aldo. He was the only Ultimate Fighting Championship featherweight titleholder at the time, and he had dominated two of the three previous World Extreme Cagefighting champions along the way. I could have made half-hearted cases for Urijah Faber and Mike Thomas Brown — and an even less-convincing one for Norifumi Yamamoto — but those would have been tremendous stretches. There was Aldo, an unfathomably wide gulf, then everybody else.

That was 2015, though. In the post-UFC 218 world, the discussion surrounding the greatest featherweight of all-time is now a lot more interesting. Following Max Holloway’s 12th straight win and second consecutive TKO victory over Aldo on Saturday in Detroit, the G-Word was floated around the 26 year-old. “Blessed” himself declined the G.O.A.T. mantle, chiefly citing a lack of title defenses compared to the all-time great he had just thoroughly smashed for the second time in six months. If anything, Holloway has made his case for the humblest featherweight G.O.A.T. contender.

There is, however, a case to be made for Holloway, as there continues to be one for Aldo. Of course, there is also a case to be made for Conor McGregor. It’s worth inspecting these cases, as they provide different looks at the criteria we use for assessing greatness and the various ways in which a fighter can be great…”

 

 

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On November 28, 2017 By In Mixed Martial Arts

What’s Legacy Got To Do With It?

“Having a legacy is the closest we can get to immortality. It’s how we combat the transience of our lives and the fact that most of our time is spent doing things that will be forgotten shortly after they’re finished. A legacy, though, outlives all of that. It etches our name in memories and record books and keeps us alive long after we’re gone.

It’s no wonder that the idea of a legacy is so important to professional fighters, whose job exists at the edges of mortality; it gives purpose to the life-shortening danger of their work beyond collecting a paycheck. We still talk about athletes from 100 years ago, and in a sport as young as MMA, legacies have less historical competition and thus are more up for grabs than in other sports. However, as recent events have shown, a fighter’s legacy is more complicated than it seems…”

 

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On November 16, 2017 By In book review

Book Review: ME by Tomoyuki Hoshino

“The title of Tomoyuki Hoshino’s new novel comes from a common hustle in Japan called the “me-me scam,” whereby a con artist calls an elderly person and only identifies himself by saying, “It’s me.” The victim, believing that they are talking to someone they know, is then swindled into sending money to the perpetrator, who claims to have gotten into financial difficulty. Scammers in Japan collectively extract $400 million every year from unsuspecting victims in this way.

ME begins with a similar scam, yet it transforms from a simple act of petty crime into an exploration of identity and individualism in a modern corporatized society. Hoshino, who writes both fiction and nonfiction, has won several major Japanese awards and had a number of his works translated into English. ME, first published in Japan in 2010, has now been translated as a result of winning the Kenzaburō Ōe Prize, named for the Nobel-winning Japanese author…”

 

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