School’s in for the Dean of Mean

Whoever said “styles make fights” never saw Keith Jardine in the cage. Bouncing like an under-inflated football, hands held high and wide, back curved like a question mark, chin swaying in the breeze. It’s embarrassing to call what he does a style. He’s like a drunken hunchbacked orangutan.

Somehow, though, he makes it work. And that makes him one of the most dangerous strikers in the UFC light heavyweight division, someone Thiago Silva, his opponent at UFC 102, needs to be very wary of.

Just look at how Jardine picked apart Chuck Liddell two years ago, an overhand right dropping Liddell in the opening frame and chopping kicks to the legs and body for the remainder. But Jardine is a rollercoaster. He knocked out Forrest Griffin and was knocked out by Houston Alexander five months later. A split decision over Liddell before being dropped by Wanderlei Silva’s right hand. Another split decision over Brandon Vera before running into Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and losing on the scorecards.

Which Keith Jardine will we see on Saturday? That’s the question his posture seems to be asking.

As for Silva, he’s positively quantifiable by comparison. He’s a Chute Boxe product, possesses the stalking Chute Boxe style, like a younger, faster Wanderlei Silva, who stopped Jardine at UFC 84 with a massive right hand and then pounced on his crumpled body for the ground-and-pound finish. Silva is also a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, not that anyone expects the fight to go to the ground.

To beat Jardine, Silva needs to do what comes naturally – be aggressive and press the action, force Jardine into a gunfight, which Jardine is a sucker for. It’s a tactic that backfired when Silva faced champ Lyoto Machida, who served up Silva’s first pro loss with a first-round KO.

But Jardine is no Machida. Elusiveness is not in his vocabulary. Neither is patience. And Jardine is a notoriously slow starter (two of his four UFC losses were knockouts inside of 60 seconds), which means Silva has to end it early or he’s in trouble. Also in Jardine’s favour is the number of top-ranked fighters he’s faced. He’s battle tested. Silva has really only fought one big fight and he came up wanting.

While it could come down to whoever lands first, I’m going to go with Jardine on this. His unorthodox style is hard to get a bead on, and once he finds his rhythm he’s scary. And he can take a punch as well as anybody. Silva, not so much.