The Curtain Falls: BJ Penn's Finale

There is a saying that the cynic sees the world more clearly, but the optimist deals with it better. If we're to handle these terms very roughly for mixed martial arts use, the cynic has the technical know-how. The optimist is the man with a heart. He is the one who fights back when he’s reeling half-blind. Because how stupid is it to get up when you’ve been hurt that badly? Stay down. You need to know things are going to be all right when you put your head up. It takes an optimist to stumble back to his feet with the storm all around him.

BJ Penn is the purest cynic this sport has ever seen. He is the sharpshooter, the accurate fighter who measures you up and knocks you down. He knows the facts; he can't handle it when they contradict him. When you push him, he seems to freeze. He'll stand dead on his feet and let the worst happen to him, like that's the only way he can deal with it. A thousand ways to cut you down, but if you can stand up to him... You’d have to go back quite a while to find an instance of Penn winning a single round after he’s lost one. You'd have more luck finding him on either end of a wipe-out. Making grown men cry or quitting on his stool - take your pick, he's done both.

Nick Diaz, though – what a stubborn fighter. I cannot call that man an optimist, not even in my very liberal reinterpretation of the word. It just wouldn't be right. But as much as Diaz doesn’t like to fight, there is no one with a better fighting heart and no one born to it like he is. Some people said that when the third round came along, Diaz would show Penn what a real fighter looked like.

When he started slapping punches at Penn along the cage, I knew it was over. I knew if Penn went down he wasn’t getting up, and I knew in the last round Diaz would be fiercer and Penn would be fading. I was wrong about at least one of those things.

Last night was the most heart Penn has ever shown. Swinging after being swung on. When was the last time you saw him push through a flurry like that? Maybe a decade ago, when he fought Pulver for the first time, a kid with three fights going in. When it was all new to him and he knew he could still conquer the world. The optimist.

Say what you want about his preparation. That he was lazy in his training. That he didn’t put in the work he should have. He got by on talent alone. He was never the fighter he could've been or should’ve been. It’s all part of his story now. You can hardly praise Penn without criticizing him.

When he refused to stand back before the third round, I thought it was bravado, like so much of his career. He has to keep up the act. Can’t let Diaz know how bad it’s gotten. I’m not so sure now. Who would blame him if he’d let his legs go limp and covered his head? Let himself wilt. It would've been easy. Same career, same loss, when all was said and done.

But that last round was everything. He gritted his teeth and squinted past Diaz’s knuckles, and he fired back. You’ve never seen him so bruised in his life. He had to know, for sure, if he was good enough. He caught Diaz hard and he went for takedowns. He tried to hobble forward. He swung hard at air. Anything. Nothing worked. It was his best fight in years. As pure and as good an ending as you could hope for – because you know he'd never go out on a win. It had to be beaten out of him. That was the finest beating of his career. And it was beautiful to see that at the end of his rope, BJ Penn could still... just scrap.