In recent years, the bloody spectacle of mixed-martial-arts has rapidly grown in popularity. Tomorrow night, the largest MMA promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, stages a landmark event, UFC 100. Though MMA understandably doesn’t appeal to all tastes, tomorrow’s event is of added importance because it offers the opportunity to witness one of Canada’s most accomplished athletes at the top of his game: Montreal’s Georges St-Pierre, the current UFC welterweight champion.
Responding to MMA’s popularity are the competing choruses of devoted fans who obsess over it with a zeal geekier types (say, those of us at The Walrus) reserve for interests like Lost, and those disgusted by the sport’s alleged barbarism. Of course, there’s an expanse of grey between these, and it’s here that my own impressions reside.
I came to the sport reluctantly. Among my closest friends and family are people so devoted to the sport that they’ve trained under marquee names in the MMA world, traveling as far as Thailand to do so. The less brawny among them forego the gym and channel their obsession into research, consequently evincing almost PhD-level knowledge. There would be Saturday nights where if I wanted to see friends I had to sit through a UFC card. I eventually found it engaging, in the same way I can enjoy almost any sport given sufficient exposure to it, the guidance of those far more knowledgeable than myself, and the chance to see the greatest in the field. I hardly think I’m alone in this. How else does one explain the popularity of comparatively arcane Olympic events? It can’t all be base nationalism. Even those who find golf and baseball unbearably soporific can learn to appreciate Tiger Woods and Roy Halladay. Likewise, I can find MMA aesthetically, and to a degree ethically, off-putting, and still enjoy the undeniable greatness of St-Pierre.
St-Pierre, or GSP as he’s commonly referred to in the acronym-philic world of MMA, is among the most popular stars in the sport. He was named 2008′s Sportsnet Canadian Athlete of the Year, a title generally held by the more mainstream likes of golfer Mike Weir and basketball’s Steve Nash. Recently he was signed by the venerable Creative Artists Agency, whose clients include Brad Pitt, Bruce Springsteen, and LeBron James. He’s also featured in a current Gatorade print and TV campaign.
GSP’s marketability stems from both his remarkable skill and his endearing personality. That he is among the greatest fighters on the planet is uncontroversial. His current record stands at 18-2, and he’s avenged both losses. Training regimens and game-planning in MMA remain quite rudimentary, but GSP stands at the vanguard. He has a black belt in kyokushin, a particularly rigorous form of karate, and recently gained a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. To improve his ground game, he trains with the Canadian Olympic wrestling team, and was well on his way to qualifying for the Beijing games when he was forced to abandon that pursuit to train for a title defence. In preparation for tomorrow’s fight he has employed the services of Jean Charles Skarbowsky, a renowned Muay Thai fighter whose style approximates that of GSP’s opponent. What the nerd in me finds most impressive is that his preparation extends to breaking down an opponent’s weaknesses on a physiological level. His previous fight was against B.J. Penn, a fighter known for his punching prowess. In a strategy straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook, GSP focuses his attacks on an opponent’s greatest strength. To nullify Penn’s advantage, GSP and his camp devised a strategy of pinning Penn’s shoulder against the cage in order to build up lactic acid. As a result, Penn’s striking was uncharacteristically sluggish.
As much as this intrigues me, it’s GSP’s personality that really wins me over. In a follow-up post to the article about MMA he co-authored in this magazine last year, Jeremy Keehn wondered if MMA could potentially produce a fighter with the appeal of Muhammed Ali. GSP is certainly far from that, both in personality and broad appeal, yet he remains the only fighter that I, an extremely casual MMA fan, would watch of my own volition. Speaking in endearingly broken English through a thick Quebecois accent, he’s an exemplar of class in a sport that can seem distressingly devoid of it. GSP only rarely deigns to disparage opponents, and after succumbing to UFC brass’s pressure to insult one potential adversary, he apologized profusely. Despite being perhaps the most feared pound-for-pound fighter in the world, he admits to being terribly nervous in the days leading up to fights, experiencing chronic bouts of insomnia. Upon winning an interim title after the actual titleholder was injured and unable to fight, GSP downplayed the hoopla the UFC clearly wanted, and thanked the organization while insisting that he wouldn’t be any sort of champion until he vanquished his injured rival.
Tomorrow night he fights Thiago Alves, a devastating striker who may be his toughest challenge yet. Should he succeed, he will have essentially cleared out his weight class, threatening to reign for years to come. Though I don’t expect, pace UFC head Dana White, MMA to eclipse the appeal of currently more mainstream sports, GSP is as accomplished within his field as any Canadian athlete today. It behooves all serious Canadian sports fan to pay attention.
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