GSP/Condit - Technical Mastery and Bad Publicity
Diaz/Condit was hyped as a sure-fire fight of the year candidate. Fans were teased by a giddy Joe Rogan at the end of the FX prelims for the oncoming onslaught of carnage, blood, and violence that was sure to rain down upon the live crowd at the main event later in the night. We were urged to buy the card if we considered ourselves "true MMA fans", because two fighters "in their prime" and "at an elite level" rarely meet, let alone two supposed "killers". Yes, I'm air-quoting. No, I'm not upset. I watched it at a local bar because I could smell the hypetrain's familiar post-card failure fresh in my nostrils.
Fights like this, and nights like last night underscore the reason why I'm beginning to gravitate away from MMA, at least in the sense of main event title fights. The fights are oversold, and very rarely do they deliver what was promised. I'm not going to pretend to know what's going through the casuals' minds today as a result of a visually disappointing fight to the untrained eye, nor am I going to pretend I care about the hardcores' thoughts on the masterful zen-like Command and Counquer-esque gameplanning of one Greg "Darth Siddius" Jackson. I feel like the sport I've enjoyed for the better part of the last decade is finally losing its appeal to me, and point-fighting, as it's so rightfully called, is to blame.
I don't watch MMA fights to see violence. I also don't watch to see brilliant examples of technical prowess. I watch because the thought of two people in a cage fighting to see who the better man is excites me, and the fact that any fight can end at a moment's notice drives me nuts. If some violence and wizardy comes with that package, I'll take it. When two fighters are locked in a submission battle on the ground, standing and trading, or stalking each other to land a killing blow, I find myself moving around trying to guide them through the motions they should take, usually annoying the hell out of my girlfriend in the process. That's what the entire experience means to me. If I'm that absorbed in the action, the UFC and the fighters involved have given me my money's worth. If I'm standing up at the edge of my couch waking my neighbors because Frank Mir locked in a perfect kimura or Rousimer Palhares took home another leg, I'm experiencing an emotion that no other sport gives me.
Last night was no such night. I enjoyed several of the prelims, but the main card was sorely, sorely lacking and overwhelmingly predictable. Roy Nelson didn't land the big right solid enough to come back from the Muay Thai drubbing his rhinoceros-thick skull was enduring, Jorgensen and Sobral went the distance, and Condit outpointed Diaz while doing his best imitation of a hummingbird. Anyone that's watched a mainstream MMA card in the last five years could've probably picked those results, and I would've been incredibly gullible to think otherwise.
If that doesn't paint a bleak enough picture, the future most certainly will. I can speak only for myself. I am in no way excited to see GSP fight Carlos Condit. I simply don't care. I've never been a big fan of GSP, though I have to admit I gave him a little salute after he kicked Matt Hughes' head into the third row due to my disdain for all former-asshole-now-totally-into-Jesus meatheads. I was a fan of Condit, but unfortunately it seems he's been stricken with the incurable killer instinct-dulling point-fighting plague knows as Mixorrhea, also known as "being in the mix". Maybe this fight would have interested me a bit more at the earlier stages of both fighters' careers when they weren't concerned with being safe. As of now, the fight possesses no luster. I watched Carlos Condit hit Diaz with shot after powerless shot, and even land a clean head kick with about 15% power. He's going to be even more reserved against GSP, and I have no desire to suffer through five rounds of that.
That said, I'm sure it'll be a brilliant back and forth. Stuffed takedowns, stiff jabs, dazzling high-low-high combos, and one undisputed technically superior champion. I, however, will not be paying to see it. I'll read the results the next day and go on about my business. "Good riddance, unworthy MMA fan", as the hardcores say. "We don't need you anyway." I'm fine with that. If enduring cards like last night's are what it takes to be a true MMA fan, well, I'd rather be in Skyrim.
The FanPosts are solely the subjective opinions of Bloody Elbow readers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bloody Elbow editors or staff.
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yeah, if I wanted to see brains overcome brawn
I’d re-watch Anonymous vs. Dana White.
A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand -- Nabokov
by mollcutpurse on Feb 5, 2012 5:12 PM EST reply actions 1 recs
well written but sorry you feel that way
i had a blast watching UFC 143.
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by gspmademegay on Feb 5, 2012 5:24 PM EST reply actions 2 recs
I don't get why so many are crapping on this card.
I enjoyed basically every fight. I’m not sure what more people want? If spending $60 is too much, I can get behind that. But I hardly consider that a fault of the fights.
Agreed
I might not go as far as saying Im not a mma fan anymore, but I wont get really pumped up and anticipate these main events anymore. I really came close to spending $55 to see 143, thank God I didnt
by DL2kold on Feb 5, 2012 5:57 PM EST via mobile reply actions
This issue could, in theory, get fixed real quick if the UFC really, really intended to.
How, you ask?
Well: Main Event Bonuses.
If the fight ends in a worthy KO/TKO, or sub, of the night, the winner gets a load of extra dough beyond the measly 60$ KO/TKO sub of the Night, or whatever that would be judged apart from the co-main and the main events, respectively—the bigger the fight, the bigger the payoff, and it should be big enough so a to qualify as an incentive for somebody who is essentially rich.
That said, where will the money come from? Especially given that the successful fighters get to have a cut of the PPV themselves. And on top of it, the UFC, as of today, makes about as much as an NFL team.
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locker room bonuses
They supposedly already exist. Sounds like you just want them to be guaranteed and disclosed
No, your dumb
by RashadsLeftNipple on Feb 6, 2012 2:31 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
I don't feel things are quite as dire
but I agree with the underlying premise. I’m hardly moving away from MMA, but I do feel the rise of point fighting has sapped some of the primal of excitement that drew me to the sport in the first place.
Also, there is zero chance I buy GSP-Condit, and I would have sworn before last night that I would have bought that fight whoever won. Now I’m just completely uninterested.
Tatum: I think he's a good man. I like him. I got nothing against him, but I'm definitely gonna make orphans of his children.
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This is where I stopped reading
Fights like this, and nights like last night underscore the reason why I’m beginning to gravitate away from MMA
Some of the best fighters, the champions representing the pinnacle of this sport are also some of its most violent. Did some of you forget the awesome the PPV in Brazil was? Anderson Silva, Jon Jones, Junior dos Santos, and Jose Aldo are all the best guys in their weight class. 2011 was a calender year for astonishing fights, with the Edgar/Maynard, Shogun/Hendo, and Alvarez/Chandler fights on tap.
But Condit outpoints Diaz just because Carlos wasn’t your monkey and didn’t sit his ass against the cage to get wailed on, the sky is falling? The words “good riddance” aren’t coming from ‘hardcore fans’. They’re coming from people who recognize emotionally stunted fanboys when they see them.
Follow @DavidCastilloAC
by David Castillo on Feb 5, 2012 10:12 PM EST reply actions 8 recs
Lets talk about emotionally stunted fanboys.
How about someone that throws a little tantrum at a dissenting opinion without reading the article? Cool your jets, killer. I’m not a fanboy in any sense of the word. Matter of fact I wanted Condit to win. The fight just didnt live up to the hype for me. If you disagree, good for you. Glad you enjoyed it, but take that garbage attitude somewhere else.
by vile(nt)green on Feb 6, 2012 9:59 AM EST up reply actions 2 recs
His point stands
The fact that you’re decrying the rise of point fighting three weeks after Jose Aldo kneed Mendes’ head into the sixteenth row in Rio and eight weeks after Jones choked the life out of Machida is absurd; this is what’s called “recency bias”, when you allow the most recent piece of evidence overwhelming weight in an argument.
Proud member of The Voices in Paul Harris' Head, BECW Season 2.
"By doubting we come to inquiry and by inquiry we perceive the truth." -- Abelard
by Patrick Wyman on Feb 6, 2012 12:17 PM EST up reply actions 5 recs
I can just as easily point back to Cruz/Faber and GSP/Shields. I’ll reiterate what i said in another response. All fights dont have to be killers. I don’t expect that. But when a fighter’s mentality shifts toward neutralization instead of victory, I lose interest. We can debate my opinion if you’d like, but I see no point. You were either entertained bythe fight or you werent. I wasn’t, and its a feeling I’m getting more and more frequently from UFC cards.
by vile(nt)green on Feb 6, 2012 1:20 PM EST up reply actions
Holy shit
did you just compare Cruz/Faber (I’m assuming the rematch) to GSP/Shields? If Cruz/Faber II sucked for you, then you’re watching the wrong sport.
Follow @DavidCastilloAC
by David Castillo on Feb 6, 2012 3:39 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
If Cruz/Faber II sucked for you, then you’re watching the wrong sport.
Yeah, that is a very odd opinion to hold! It seems that you are only satisfied by finishes!
"All the time he's boxing, he's thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him." - Jack Dempsey
by Drunken cutman on Feb 6, 2012 6:00 PM EST up reply actions
There's a difference between
a dissenting opinion, and a worthless one. You might be a pretty cool guy in real life, but your thoughts on this matter are out of control wrong. Again, go back to your original point. One fight has soured your interest in the sport on the basis of this silly idea that MMA is becoming too “sporty” or whatever, and I point to the fact that most of our best champions are complete badasses. Plus Condit’/Diaz itself wasn’t even a bad fight on its own. If your expectations were too high, or you expected Condit wasn’t interested in winning, that’s on you. I actually made the prediction that this fight wouldn’t be an all out war, but I still thought Diaz would win. As is, I’m satisfied with the fight. It wasn’t what I expected, marginally disappointing, but still a solid performance, and I look forward to watching both guys in the future.
Follow @DavidCastilloAC
by David Castillo on Feb 6, 2012 3:45 PM EST up reply actions
"If I'm that absorbed in the action"
Couldn’t you get absorbed into Condit’s masterful game plan, his ability to execute it and shut down another fighters game and all those awesome kicks? My friend says he loves Penn cause he always comes to just square up and fight. Yea fighters can do that, but they risk getting beaten down like Penn was by Diaz.
by J_Maddux on Feb 5, 2012 10:37 PM EST reply actions 1 recs
No, I didn’t get absorbed by his gameplan obviously. He won, and he did his job. It just wasnt appealing to me. Like I said, I can’t speak for anyone else.
by vile(nt)green on Feb 6, 2012 10:01 AM EST up reply actions
I'm sad for you
Because what this shows isn’t that you’re dissatisfied with “point fighting”, as you call it, but that you have unrealistic expectations. Watching a guy fighting technically according to a brilliant gameplan is a totally different kind of experience than what pretty much everyone expected from that fight, but that’s the nature of the game. Unexpected things happen during fights; this sounds pretty basic, but it’s worth repeating. Sometimes they’re “holy shit what in the hell just happened”, a la Anderson-Belfort, and sometimes they’re “formerly pathologically violent fighter figures out that in order to win the biggest, most important, and most lucrative fight of his life he can’t fight chaotically”. We got the latter, and while it may not have conformed to our expectations, I (and many others) found it to be pretty enjoyable.
Crying doom and gloom for the entirety of the sport when Nick Diaz finally runs into an opponent too disciplined to be sucked into his kind of fight is frankly an overreaction. One could look back on almost any year in MMA history and find fights that promised massive amounts of violence and didn’t deliver because one guy chose to fight smart. Is this becoming more pronounced? Maybe, but I kinda doubt it.
Proud member of The Voices in Paul Harris' Head, BECW Season 2.
"By doubting we come to inquiry and by inquiry we perceive the truth." -- Abelard
by Patrick Wyman on Feb 5, 2012 11:05 PM EST reply actions 6 recs
this reminds me of one of my favorite sports quotes
it’s about football (err, soccer), but all the same:
If your love of soccer has brought you to a point where you’re no longer really able to see the game as something wonderful and amazing except in narrow moments of unequivocal triumph, then you are doing it wrong, no matter how many kills you rack up on the internet. — Brian Phillips
A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand -- Nabokov
by mollcutpurse on Feb 6, 2012 3:15 AM EST up reply actions 1 recs
That's an amazing quotation.
Pretty fitting.
Proud member of The Voices in Paul Harris' Head, BECW Season 2.
"By doubting we come to inquiry and by inquiry we perceive the truth." -- Abelard
by Patrick Wyman on Feb 6, 2012 11:57 PM EST up reply actions
That is perfect.
We get spoiled easily.
What's this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?
by Kwisatz Haderach on Feb 7, 2012 2:03 AM EST up reply actions
I’m not crying doom and gloom for the whole sport, moreso the title pictures of several divisions. I think I said that somewhere in there. Like I said, I enjoyed several of the prelim fights. Dunno how that translates to me being all Chicken Little for MMA.
by vile(nt)green on Feb 6, 2012 10:04 AM EST up reply actions
Incorrect.
The spate of decisions on the main card was one of the main pieces of evidence you employed to support your overall point. How you found Jorgensen-Barao or Nelson-Werdum to be unsatisfactory is beyond me.
Proud member of The Voices in Paul Harris' Head, BECW Season 2.
"By doubting we come to inquiry and by inquiry we perceive the truth." -- Abelard
by Patrick Wyman on Feb 6, 2012 12:14 PM EST up reply actions
I never used the decisions as a point against the likability of the card. I cited the predictability of said fights. I
by vile(nt)green on Feb 6, 2012 1:24 PM EST up reply actions
Not sure where that extra I came from. Galaxy tab keypad ftl
by vile(nt)green on Feb 6, 2012 1:25 PM EST up reply actions
There's no moral order at all. There's just this: can my violence conquer yours?
by ElliotMatheny on Feb 7, 2012 3:34 AM EST up reply actions
Fight like last night are why we need unlimited time fights
Let them fight as long as they need to until a stoppage. I don’t care if it’s by exhaustion. Let them fight until true closure!
The majority of bellyaching has been “yo shit judges” and “aw that feller ran away”. Unlimited fight time means we get the real closure we desire, even if it’s a 5 hour wrasslethon.
Have you ever watched Shamrock-Grace II?
Or better yet, Severn-Kimo? Maybe Gracie-Kikuta? If you haven’t, have a read:
Shamrock-Gracie II.
Severn-Kimo.
Gracie-Kikuta.
Unlimited (or even just much longer) time periods opens up the possibility for a hellhole of mindless torture. Imagine watching a 70-minute Leonard Garcia fight?
Share for share, share alike, you'll get struck each time I strike.
but really, i wouldn't mind that
because they have that blade hanging over their head, they know they have to finish this fight at some point, even if it is by forcing the opponent to submit via exhaustion. it’s great.
it would be so real / so brave
or you might get guys who take people down and grind on them for 2 hours
before one guys taps to exhaustion.
To have a Cannae you must have a Varo
-George Patton
"The complete man must work, study and wrestle."
-Aristotle
Yeah,
It is like people don’t remember that Helio’s old fights were like an hour of him controlling his opponent on the ground until they were too worn out to resist a sub. Taking away a time limit means that control becomes more and more important because why engage a dude with KO power on his feet when you can run a top control clinic on him until he can’t even lift his arms to resist a choke?
On the other hand, I would be down with this just to laugh and laugh as Jon Fitch slowly turned every WW contender’s brain into mashed potatoes after about 45 minutes of Fitching them.
El Santo inspired me to be a submission grappler.
...my knee jerks and kicks a strawman right in the junk. :(
yeah go back and watch Severn/Royce
15 straight minutes of Dan trying to cross face Royce from inside his guard and then a triangle choke for about 30 seconds…
To have a Cannae you must have a Varo
-George Patton
"The complete man must work, study and wrestle."
-Aristotle
Lol, I was getting a bit dejected at people’s shitty flame-war-begging attitudes in some of these responses, but that genuinely made me laugh. I’m not trying to say every fight has to be a killer, but moreso that it seems like a good portion of the major title fights have become nothing more than technique exhibitions with very little chance of a finish. I guess the level of skill is finally coming to a crest for the elite. Regardless, it no longer interests me.
by vile(nt)green on Feb 6, 2012 10:11 AM EST up reply actions
No, no we don't.
BECW season 2 member of the Intellegent Northern English Picking Team.
Draft number: 72.
by Sweet Scientist on Feb 6, 2012 3:07 PM EST up reply actions
Carlos fantastically out-moves Diaz
In what was, arguably, the best display of game-plan implementation ever seen in the octogon, and you are disappointed, this confuses me.
There is no other way to beat Diaz, his whole game is based upon getting you into a corner, and wearing you down.
Carlos could not have gone in trying knock him out, because he would have lost.
I’m a huge, almost obessive, Diaz fan, but Condit’s complete mastery of him last night is worthy of our respect and admiration, and I fail to see how it could turn you off the sport.
"All the time he's boxing, he's thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him." - Jack Dempsey
by Drunken cutman on Feb 6, 2012 11:46 AM EST reply actions 1 recs
Glad to hear this from a boxing buff like you, DC
It seems like so many people were wooed by the few hand combinations Diaz was able to put together. When in reality, Condit was the guy landing the much better strikes.
People talk about how Condit refused to fight… just look at the numbers. Rewatch the fight. Who landed the better, cleaner, higher amount of strikes? I believe that it was Carlos.
There's no moral order at all. There's just this: can my violence conquer yours?
by ElliotMatheny on Feb 7, 2012 3:37 AM EST up reply actions
Indeed
In boxing, the idea that aggression and forward movement hold judging merit is generally absent, and it does confuse me a bit when it becomes such a large part of MMA fan discourse.
I strongly recommend any MMA fan to watch both Cotto vs Margarito fights, as they are oddly similar to Diaz vs Condit, but with a higher level of boxing skill involved.
Here’s a novel idea – we have standups or separations when a ground fight appears to reach a stalemate, so why not lie fighters down when the standup stagnates?
"All the time he's boxing, he's thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him." - Jack Dempsey
by Drunken cutman on Feb 7, 2012 8:20 AM EST up reply actions
I think stronger warnings and point deductions for inactivity standing would work better.
Obviously that wasn’t needed for the Condit/ Diaz fight, because they had a very high workrate (Condit threw an average of 66 strikes and landed an average of 32 per round; Diaz threw an average 52 strikes and landed an average of 24 strikes per round).
There's no moral order at all. There's just this: can my violence conquer yours?
by ElliotMatheny on Feb 7, 2012 2:29 PM EST up reply actions
I Don't and Won't Pay
I like MMA better than any other version of martial arts I’ve ever seen
It has the levelest playing field
anyone can win in the blink of an eye
and underdogs do come out on top
I don’t really ejoy watching a LNP snoozer ala Shields or Fitch
nor do I enjoy watching someone piddy-pat their way to a jab-win
but with each ebb there is a flow
for each snoozer there is a thriller
I simply do not feel the urge to pay money for a pig in a poke
the PPV part may end up all snoozers
while the freebies are thill a minute
and I won’t die if I don’t see it live.
It’s just someone else fighting their heart out
and as much as I appreciate them
it really isn’t worth a penny to me
Your main issue seems to be the hype of the fight, not the fight itself. Thus, the solution is easy: don’t believe the hype.
I pay little attention to the promotional discourse, and I try to analyze the fights myself, and I get hyped up trying to figure out what will happen. Then I get really excited when I am surprised (best recent example is when BJ Penn took John Fitch down at the beginning of their fight, I was jumping up and down my living room, and it was just a takedown, but an unexpected one.)

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