Category — Pride FC

Jordan Breen over at Sherdog has written a truly grade-A story to address the downfall of Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic, breaking things down in such detail that you really need to read the whole thing if you’re a Cro Cop fan at all. And the piece makes one interesting point that I latched onto only because of my previous post regarding watching Cro Cop highlight clips: Cro Cop’s reputation, especially among casual MMA fans, has been built up and heightened in large part due to the highlight head kicks, something we all hope for and even expect to see every time he steps into the ring or cage, and as a result of these micro-moments of greatness he has become one of the first if not the first Youtube MMA heroes.

I’m excerpting a huge chunk of the story here simply because it’s so damn good, so well-written, and so on-the-button. Much like a Cro Cop head kick circa 2006.

There can be no doubt those physical attributes that made him the posterboy for K-1 converts have diminished. His reflex and strike speed lags, and he struggles to explode away from the clinch as he once was able to when desperate fighters latched onto him. Though some are quick to say that Filipovic is “only 35,” that misses the fact that age — especially in MMA — is extremely relative.

“You’re only as young as you feel” sounds like a hollow line from a dental adhesive or margarine commercial, but it couldn’t be more true in this sport. While Randy Couture is constantly used as MMA’s refutation of aging, “The Natural” started MMA 12 years ago at age 33 after a fairly healthy wrestling career. Cro Cop has been training and fighting for nearly two decades at this point, and it has taken its toll on him. In recent years, he’s had surgeries up and down his body to fix nagging issues from a deviated septum to a busted foot to a faulty elbow to nagging knees. That process isn’t about to stop, and if anything, it will only exacerbate. Prizefighters are like porn stars: When it’s gone, it’s gone. You might have another stellar scene or two, but you’re sure as hell not going to sweep the AVNs.

But it’s wrong to view Cro Cop’s current predicament strictly as a product of wear-and-tear. If anything, his physical depreciation has served to highlight the technical flaws of his game that have always been present and often ignored.

Part of what has been difficult for fans to digest is that he hasn’t just looked awful as of late: He’s looked awful on the feet despite being hailed as the greatest striker in the sport for years. However, chinks in the armor have always been present. Apart from his bouts with Mark Hunt, the southpaw Cro Cop has circled left on orthodox fighters since his K-1 days. Circling into your opponent’s power tends to be a major no-no, but it has always given Cro Cop the best chance to land his left cross and left head kick, by far his two best weapons. When fighters with real striking skills have opted to be aggressive against him, though, he’s suffered as a result.

He walked into Fedor Emelianenko’s right hook repeatedly, and shortly after, barrages of left hooks followed. Hunt’s right found him repeatedly in their MMA rematch. While people remember the Cheick Kongo bout for Cro Cop’s testicles being battered, the Frenchman dominated latter proceedings with his right cross and right kicks to Cro Cop’s exposed body. In one of the most brutal starchings the sport has ever seen, he walked right into Gabriel Gonzaga’s shin at skull-level. And Saturday night, Junior dos Santos pelted him with both hands, but especially rights.

Compound this issue with the fact that he generally struggles going backward. At his finest, Cro Cop was less the tiger he was once nicknamed for and more akin to a shark, circling opponents quickly at short range. Watch the Nogueira bout to see the ideal range and movement for his attack; it is little coincidence that he displayed nearly all of his offensive weapons in that bout’s first round. When forced backward, his primary weapon to halt opponents was his left cross — the same punch that destroyed Bob Sapp and got the wrecking ball rolling on Wanderlei Silva in their second bout. However, from Hoost to Cigano, when opponents are fleet enough to avoid the punch, or stay close enough to stifle it, he’s less a fighter and more a cornerback.

Maybe most critically of all, for all his striking acumen, Cro Cop has never been a quality counterstriker. At his best, whether in K-1 or MMA, he attacked first, hurt his foe, then finished the job. When ambushed, he’s always pushed opponents away and circled out wide to reset. Even against Josh Barnett, whose game plan in their second bout was haphazard punch-swarming to set up the clinch, Cro Cop was still almost entirely defensive. Even his punches on Sapp and Silva were not really pure counters as much as fighters walking directly at him with their hands down.

The point about counterpunching is especially relevant, as it is the method through which the cleanest chances for damaging blows in combat sports are created. It is no coincidence that virtually all of the top fighters in the sport right now are adroit at either slipping punches to counter (Emelianenko, BJ Penn) or parrying punches to counter (Machida, Rampage). At this stage in the sport, it’s not good enough to just endlessly circle left, hoping to set up a roundhouse kick to the dome.

There’s also been a noticeable reduction in his actual striking arsenal. His bouts at this point are reduced to a few sparse punches and failed attempts at the left head kick. However, his brutal salvos of leg kicks and body kicks mostly appeared when his opponents stopped moving, as in the cases of Nogueira or Silva, or when he was facing rigid and awkward opponents like Hidehiko Yoshida and Hong Man Choi. As for his punching combinations, their appearances were almost entirely relegated to when he got opponents stuck in the corners of the ring. The punches that polished off Mark Coleman? The furious barrage on Aleksander Emelianenko? The brutal head-and-body assault that started the destruction of Josh Barnett in their third bout? Every single one of those opponents he’d trapped in the corner of the ring, a point sorely missed as people squabbled about Cro Cop’s adaptation to the cage in terms of how it would affect his ability to stop takedowns.

So, where were all these deficiencies in 2003, when he was putting the boots to hapless foes, and why are they so painfully vivid now?

Obviously, the aging process plays a formative role in exposing these flaws, but it’s actually a quintessential double whammy: Cro Cop’s physical decline also coincided with the general improvement of heavyweight MMA and more consistent fights with top heavyweights. Your baseline heavyweight in an elite promotion in 2009 is a bit less likely to circle face-first into the strike that his opponent is synonymous with. Some are even talented and brazen enough to throw strikes against a former K-1 World Grand Prix runner-up, and aggressively so. Even if they wanted the fight on the floor, as Gonzaga and Overeem did, the ability and willingness to trade strikes in a way that the likes of Herring, Waterman and Coleman couldn’t made those takedowns that much easier.

Perhaps a better question is why so much was expected from the man upon his arrival in the UFC. After all, the reaction to his decline is not simply a tough-but-necessary acknowledgement that his better days are behind him, the way many now view Randy Couture’s performances. Instead, the response is one of sullen dejection and disappointment, not because he’s past his prime but because that fact means he cannot and will not fulfill their lofty expectations for him.

It is hardly a new hypothesis that many of Pride’s fighters attained a staggering aura of invincibility due to the crafty and lopsided pro-wrestling-style matchmaking of parent company Dream Stage Entertainment, but it is still an important one. It is fairly telling that one of the most famous moments of his MMA career is decapitating masked Mexican luchador Dos Caras Jr. For that matter, it is perhaps even more telling that his signature K-1 moment is destroying Bob Sapp. Perhaps no fighter in MMA’s short history has been better suited to the Youtube generation and the highlight reel, and that’s largely due to the brutality he was able to dish out against sacrificial lambs.

The potency of his knockouts coupled with his aesthetic and authentic gimmick — the Croatian anti-terrorist force member with enough sangfroid to spare — made him MMA’s first larger-than-life fighter. That, along with the fact his exploits came within the ring of Pride, in a heavyweight division that was markedly deeper and more talented than the UFC’s (which featured the likes of Mike Kyle and Wesley “Cabbage” Correira), solidified the idea that he could be UFC champion simply upon showing up in the Octagon.

This is not to say the man’s resume is without merit. However, the question is how that merit was distorted as people convinced themselves he would rule the UFC with an iron fist. Victories over Heath Herring and Igor Vovchanchyn were strong wins six years ago. Now, though, we know Herring to be a dependable if flawed gatekeeper-to-the-stars, and Vovchanchyn was marginalized as an elite fighter the moment his contemporaries developed half decent boxing and top games. Aleksander Emelianenko has gone on to be a strong heavyweight, but at the time Cro Cop dispatched him, he was an out-of-shape novice with a special surname.

The best wins of Cro Cop’s career are over Wanderlei Silva — a longtime light heavyweight now bound for 185 pounds — and his trifecta over Josh Barnett, the only perennially top heavyweight he’s defeated in his eight-year career, though I imagine that trio of W’s doesn’t look too damn good right now given Barnett’s recent indiscretions. Beyond these fights, when you think of Cro Cop against elite fighters, you think of him losing. And in some cases, to non-elite fighters as well.

At the time, each of those losses could be justified in some absolving fashion. He lost to Nogueira, the second best heavyweight of all time, due to his inexperience on the ground. Against Kevin Randleman, he simply “got caught.” Against Fedor Emelianenko, he simply bumped up against the best heavyweight we’ve seen yet. Against Mark Hunt, he was burned out and unmotivated after his fourth fight in six months. All of these explanations were reinforced by the fact that somehow, losing in Pride was not at all indicative of the success one might have stateside against the likes of Andrei Arlovski and Tim Sylvia. Interestingly enough, during his Pride tenure, Cro Cop was part of the “Big Three” along with Emelianenko and Nogueira, but historically, he actually fits in much closer with his hypothetical victims Arlovski and Sylvia, two other quite successful but often faltering heavyweights.

His victory in the Pride Openweight Grand Prix three years ago, in which he notched the two best wins of his career in a single night, came specifically at a point where the hackneyed UFC-versus-Pride suddenly wasn’t such a landslide any more. Pride was crumbling under the Shukan Gendai scandal surrounding the promotion’s underworld ties, and “The Ultimate Fighter” generation brought the UFC prosperity, and as a result, some of the sport’s best fighters. Those who parroted the superiority of Pride for years, as well as the neutral parties who wanted a UFC heavyweight division where Justin Eilers didn’t fight for a heavyweight title, placed unfortunately high expectations on a fighter who they desperately wanted to believe was a superhero instead of an aging, fallible heavyweight standout.

I fear this piece coming across as an attempt to impeach the career of Mirko Filipovic on all fronts. Let me assure you, that is not my intent. If anything, I see crucial value in pointing out his technical and competitive shortcomings to actually bolster his standing in public memory. While I would find it unnerving for history to depict Cro Cop as an absolute all-time great with an iron-clad resume, I would be equally dismayed for him to be remembered as a bittersweet failure because he couldn’t vindicate vehement Pride fans.

He will be the owner of a scintillating highlight for the rest of time, but his actual resume won’t position him as the dominant heavyweight it was assumed he would always be, in the ring or the cage. He should be remembered just as much for his impressive victories as for his failures when it counted the most – to Hoost, Hug and Bernardo, to Fedor, Nogueira and Gonzaga. However, he should not be scorned for failing to live up to the unrealistic expectations of those whose hearts skipped a beat whenever Simon LeBon’s voice filled a Japanese arena.

I could watch Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic head kick highlights all day. In describing his powerful kicks, he’s said “right kick hospital, left kick cemetery.” In fact, his left leg could have it’s own 24-hour TV channel. Of course, it would all be reruns because that leg hasn’t done much damage since Gabriel Gonzaga’s right leg had a close encounter with Cro Cop’s head at UFC 70. I wonder if Cro Cop’s had that leg insured the way movie stars and models have their tits and asses insured. But I digress.

When Cro Cop found himself crying uncle in a shockingly timid performance at UFC 103 last weekend it looked like he was heading toward retirement. His infamous left leg already seemed to be sitting in a rocking chair enjoying its golden years even before the run-in with a hungry Junior dos Santos. Afterward, Cro Cop admitted his heart wasn’t in the fight and that his head had gone fishing and that we’d probably seen the last of him in those colourful Croatian flag man-panties.

Turns out the former PRIDE FC headhunter has had a change of heart and mind. He has two bouts remaining on his UFC contract and he tells Croation newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija that he’ll likely honour them. “Often things can get on top of you but I cannot say that I don’t love this sport. It’s hard for me to decide now but I think that I will do these last two fights for UFC. This thing is stronger than me. Sometimes the mind says yes but the heart says no.”

Cro Cop has a 25-7-2 (1) MMA record dating back to 2001 and a 16-7 kickboxing record dating back to 1996. And he’s a member of an elite Croatian anti-terrorist unit in a country that has a lot of terrorists. He’s a soldier and a fighter and it looks like he’s having a hard time walking away from the sport.

“Take for example, when a man spends 30 years in prison, you let him out; he robs a store and takes only a pack of cigarettes, just to be returned to prison because they can not live outside. This is my fear,” he says. “The problem is that my way of life is saturated with this military discipline, which does not allow for such things as Christmas or New Year holidays. Training is never a problem – I think I missed five or six sessions in my entire life and never just because I couldn’t be bothered.”

Still, though, the question remains: What happened to MMA’s most fearsome fighter? He made Bob Sapp cry, fer crissake. Cro Cop was supposed to destroy all comers en route to the UFC heavyweight crown and now he’s just trying to salvage a little dignity.

Two video clips, each trying to sell us on a different fighter – Rich Franklin and Vitor Belfort – based on what? How they handled Wanderlei Silva? That seems to be the approach for promoting this UFC 103 catchweight match-up.

But does it make sense to promote Belfort based on a fight that took place 11 years ago? Yeah, a lot of UFC fans might be unfamiliar with the Brazilian with the blazing hands because he hasn’t fought in the UFC since 2005 and his last octagon win was over Randy Couture for the light heavyweight crown at UFC 46 in 2004. And yes, Belfort’s demolishing of Silva was epic, the kind of glory days story aging athletes retell every time they have the opportunity.

Except Belfort’s only 32 years old and is far from the middle-aged oaf looking back on his years scoring touchdowns and screwing cheerleaders as captain of the high school football team. He may have made his UFC debut at UFC 12 where he won the heavyweight tournament, but he’s still in his prime with a record of 18-8 (7-4 in the UFC). He’s also on a four-fight winning streak, including back-to-back Affliction triumphs over Terry Martin and Matt Lindland.

Meanwhile, Rich Franklin is talking about his decision win over Silva at UFC 99, a decision that many – myself included – feel should have gone the other way.

Using Wanderlei Silva as a benchmark or measuring stick might work on the noobs, but come on. Both these fighters have incredible fighting records, incredible battles. Why not highlight some of them? Because Wanderlei Silva is a known quantity, even if he doesn’t best represent the kinds of fighters Belfort and Silva are.

The UFC is trying hard to make November 14’s UFC 105 in Manchester, England, worth your while. Michael Bisping vs. Denis Kang is the headliner and now there’s talk of making it Antonio Rogerio “Minotoro” Nogueira’s UFC debut.

Minotoro (aka Lil’ Nog) is the younger brother (by seven whole seconds) of heavyweight Minotauro Nogueira, who beat Randy Couture last Saturday. He’s also a former PRIDE light heavyweight, Sengoku and Affliction sensation with a 17-3 record, including a TKO win over current Strikeforce heavyweight champ Alistair Overeem and a submission victory (armbar) over UFC middleweight contender Dan Henderson.

Like his brother, Lil’ Nog is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and talented boxer who can absorb a ton of punishment. He was even a bronze medalist in boxing at the 2007 Pan American Games.

While there’s no word on who Lil’ Nog will face, you won’t see him stepping in with light heavyweight champ Lyoto Machida at any point. Like Anderson Silva, Nogueira is friends with Machida and would never consider fighting him. Which means UFC president Dana White will be happy when Machida loses the title.

Friday’s M-1 Global: Breakthrough card was a non-event top to bottom as the only firewoks of the HDNet broadcast was when they cut away to the launch of the space shuttle Discovery between bouts.

Sure, the headliner between heavyweights Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal and former Pride FC and UFC veteran Mark Kerr (a late replacement for MMA legend Don Frye) lasted just 25 seconds. But it was a dull and unimpressive 25 seconds.

Lawal, a former NCAA Division I All-American wrestler, shot for a single-leg takedown and – despite being outweighed by 44 pounds – slammed Kerr to the canvas. Kerr immediately turtled like a frightened schoolgirl and Lawal pounded away until the referee intervened. Lawal, now 5-0, showed me nothing more than speed and brute strength, and there’s plenty of that at every level of MMA, and had reason to slouch arrogantly against the ropes before the bout. Besides, Kerr isn’t exactly in his prime.

As for the exhibition match between training buddies Fedor Emelianenko and Strikeforce light heavyweight champ Gegard Mousasi, it was less entertaining than the average sparring session. Fedor tossed the Dutch-Armenian to the mat a few times and finally ended it with an armbar late in the first round.

The only other fight on the card (barely) of note was Karl Amoussou’s first-round submission of John Doyle. Amoussou’s only worth mentioning because he’s the fighter Wanderlei Silva once referred to as the “future of mixed martial arts.” If so, the future looks a little bleak.

Two months from today, undefeated Lyoto Machida will defend his UFC light heavyweight belt against a resurgent Mauricio “Shogun” Rua, who is looking more and more like the 23-year-old version of himself who tore through the 2005 Pride FC Middleweight Grand Prix. And while it’s way too soon to be digging into and dissecting UFC 104’s main event, I did come across these training camp videos that I thought are worth taking a look at just to get the ball rolling.

Anderson Silva received a lot of criticism for his lackluster (i.e. boring, non-knockout) wins over Patrick Cote and Thales Leites. He jazzed things up at UFC 101 by out-dancing Forrest Griffin’s attacks and then laying him out on the mat in the first round. If the UFC wants to capitalize on that, build Silva up in the public eye, make him a household name, they need him to continue to be aggressive in the ring.

They also need him bring more of this kind of flashiness to the show before and after the fight. Look at these videos, especially the first one from back in his PRIDE FC days. Sure, all of PRIDE was a spectacle, but Silva was an exceptional showman who backed it up in the ring. He’s got personality, a sense of humour, and confidence, wow, how many people can be so relaxed as to do a full-on Michael Jackson impression on their way into a fight? It’s the kind of stuff that gets people out of their seats and on a fighter’s side before the first punch is even thrown.

Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (aka “Minotauro,” aka “Big Nog“) let slip during today’s UFC 102 media conference call that his twin brother, Antonio Rogerio Nogueira (aka “Minotoro,” aka “Little Nog“), is joining the ranks of the UFC light heavyweight division and will make his octagon debut this fall.

Little Nog is a PRIDE FC, Sengoku and Affliction veteran with an impressive record of 17-3 and has notched wins over the likes of Kazushi Sakuraba, Dan Henderson and Alistair Overeem.

Smart move by the UFC, making the light heavyweight division a little more stacked. If Lyoto Machida wants to keep his belt the UFC’s not going to make it easy for him, and that means good fights for us fans.