That’s what they all say

I really hate this. Georges St. Pierre cleans Thiago Alves’s proverbial clock at UFC 100 and now the excuses.

The folks over at Tatame caught up with the Pitbull, who walks that fine line between gracious-in-defeat and whiney loser during the interview. In the end – round about the time Alves says he could’ve beaten GSP except he was without his Muay Thai coach for the three months of training leading up to the fight – he comes off like a little bitch. I mean, seriously, one of the sport’s top strikers is without his Muay Thai coach in the lead-up to the biggest fight of his career? How the hell does that happen? Why does he not find another MT coach, a better MT coach, the best fucking MT coach on the planet?!

The interview actually starts off pretty funny. Alves says, “What surprised me was that I couldn’t find the guy… I did a great strategy, but every time I tried to catch him he moved away.” Has Alves never seen GSP fight? He’s almost as elusive as Lyoto Machida. And besides, getting out of the way of Alves’s punches and kicks was priority one for GSP and Alves had to know that.

“He’s a hell of a wrestler and I already expected for some takedowns, so I was training for that,” the Brazilian continues. “In the ground I was cool, but the problem was my striking, my movement, that was the difference. I knew he’d take me down, but the thing is that he couldn’t hold me there. If I were with my best striking, like I always were, the fight would have been different.” This is where he starts to lay the groundwork for the excuse to come.

But first, a little more humility: “He was better than me that night and now I have to go back to my training and work hard to get this belt. There are a lot of thing in my camp that was a mistake. Now I see the mistakes that I did and I’ll fix them and won’t let it happen again. St. Pierre is a great fighter, fought very well, but I couldn’t find myself in the fight. I learned a lot with this fight, I saw what the best fighter in the world has at his best, seen the best of the best fighter and I know I can beat him.”

Now – drumroll, please – the excuse, which I believe Alves’s mother wrote for him before he left for school: “The only problem that I had in my preparation for this fight is that I wasn’t with my Muay Thai coach, with whom I train for the last three years. He had to go away three months ago and I missed him a lot.”

Boo-frickin’-hoo. Just be a man about it and say you got your ass kicked by a better fighter, that you have some holes in your game you need to fill and you look forward to a rematch and be done with it. Is that so hard?