With UFC 100 only days away, I thought it would be a good time to discuss some cool techniques that T.J. Grant busted out against Ryo Chonan at UFC 97.

I'll be back with another Frank Mir Judo Chop before UFC 100, don't you worry, just wanted to talk about T.J. for a minute. His opponent this Saturday, Dong Hyun "Stun Gun" Kim is getting a fair bit of attention so I thought it would be timely to remind everyone that T.J. Grant has some game of his own. He's a BJJ purple belt under Jorge Gurgel and has won 12 of 14 fights by submission.

In his match against the tough veteran Chonan, Grant pulled off not one but two techniques that I thought were Judo Chop worthy. One was a textbook ankle pick he pulled off in the second round. The other was a very interesting variation on a gift wrap he got in the third.

Ankle pick is a pretty broad term that can refer to anything from a single leg takedown that grabs the opponent's ankle to the move that Grant pulled off which involves going for a single leg on one leg, then reaching over and grabbing the opposite ankle to put the opponent on his butt. There are all kinds of other variations too, like these, this, this or this. But they all have one thing in common -- they involve grabbing an ankle and picking it up off the floor to force the opponent to the ground. Its a staple move in wrestling and jiu jitsu and I wouldn't be surprised if Kim has seen lots of ankle picks in his judo experience as well.

The gift wrap is a slightly different matter. Its a jiu jitsu move that's used to set up arm bars in grappling, but in MMA it becomes a beautiful way to  score punches against a helpless opponent. The first time I ever saw it was in a Rickson Gracie fight. Carlos Newton won his comeback fight from the gift wrap not long ago. T.J. didn't land the classic gift wrap on Chonan, that involves wrapping the opponent's own arm around his head, instead, Grant stuffed a granby roll attempt by Chonan and trapped one of Chonan's arms and whaled away.

More geeking out in the full entry, with animated gifs.

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In reply to suggestions Chuck Liddell should retire after his April 18th loss to Mauricio "Shogun" Rua, John Hackleman explains his position to Sherdog:

“If Chuck was getting the s--t beat out of him by a bunch of nobodies and getting knocked unconscious all over the place, I would try to influence him to retire,” he continued. “But since I don’t see that –- Rashad was the only time I’ve seen him actually knocked unconscious –- if he really wants to still fight, and I think it’s in his heart, I don’t think anyone, including Dana, should take his livelihood and his love away.”  

Dana White, however, disagrees: 

"Obviously, John Hackleman didn’t pay his house off yet. John Hackleman needs some money, because anybody who claims they care about Chuck Liddell even a little bit would not be making these f--king statements," White told Sherdog.com Thursday.

HT: weoweoweo

We're more than a week removed from the much debated Anderson Silva vs. Thales Leites title fight.  The ridiculous generalizations spawned from the affair are disconcerting to say the least.  Some feel that those who wanted Silva to work harder for a finish could only be ill-informed, "bloodthirsty" newcomers to the sport of MMA.  Similarly, some on the other side have levelled outlandish claims in an attempt to refute others who saw something appealing in Silva's performance.  I can't say that I'm surprised by ill-conceived and uninspired arguments, but they're irritating, nonetheless.  It doesn't matter the situation.  If you're supporting a sport with your enthusiasm and money, you have a right to air your grievances, whether it's with your voice, your dollars or both.

Although combatants on both sides of the issue have cooled down, there are still some questions surrounding Silva and the less than aggressive strategy he employed against Leites.  Jake Rossen makes several salient points regarding the roles of fighters and fans alike:

Silva -- or any fighter -- isn’t at blame. They do what’s appropriate in the rules. If he had gotten a point deduction for passivity, perhaps the fight would have played out differently. Better: Since Leites was told to stand up after flopping to his back, where’s the fairness in forcing Leites to play Silva’s game? If Silva didn’t want to engage standing, why not bring him to the mat in the same way Leites was brought to his feet?

None of this happened, of course, and Silva was allowed to cherry-pick only the most opportune times to land strikes. The fight is almost MMA’s version of "The Blair Witch Project," hailed as brilliant minimalism by some and an eye-gouging disaster by others.

There’s no accounting for taste. And if Silva ends his next bout with a vicious knockout, this will all be forgotten. But if his stature in the sport now compels him to compete with no momentum and no aggression, seeking only to preserve a sterile legacy, then observers can do worse than simply deduct points -- they can deduct revenue.

An athlete competing to win in a way that's most conducive to the individual's career is hard to fault.  We're talking about the highest level of MMA where even the largest of underdogs is able to inflict significant, possibly long-lasting, damage to the body of his favored opponent.  With this in mind, it's hard to expect any fighter to throw caution to the wind in attempt to score a highlight reel finish.

The most vexing variable in the Silva/Leites equation is Anderson Silva, himself.  He's faced the best that the UFC middleweight division has to offer, and he's dispatched all comers in impressive fashion except for his last two challengers.  In fact, the last two men to face Silva, Patrick Cote and Leites, are at the bottom end of competitors - from a body of work perspective - to challenge middleweight champ.  Coincidence?  I'm not sure, but it's hard to believe that Leites presented such a danger to Silva from his back that the only viable option was to wait for him to stand.

Silva is very much a victim of his own track record.  Significant deviation from the aggressive tendencies of old will be met with a tepid fan response at best.  In short, if Silva wants to earn the big paydays and cement his legacy as the best ever (two career goals that seem to be of great importance to him), he really has to do more that win the fight.  He has to win over the fans, something Silva hasn't excelled at as of late.  Some may contend that this isn't fair; MMA is a sport that shouldn't be perverted by seemingly non-sporting aspects.  This is a respectable postition that somewhat ignores reality.  Sports are only viable if fans exist.  The steep costs associated with the loss of fans are nothing to minimize.  Even someone who holds the purity of sport in high regard like myself understands that the sport must also appeal to as many fans as possible.  I know this fact isn't lost on Dana White and the others charged with piloting the UFC.

"UFC, of course, would thrive more if all main event fights were exciting, if all fighters went all-out and played aggressively on offense and loosely on defense, taking chances that often would lead to a big KO but sometimes would lead to a preventable loss had they been more conservative.

...

Had Anderson gone balls-out and "put on a show for the fans" - as the fans in the arena, as Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg addressed (Goldberg was more measured here and had his best outing as an announcer in a while after increasingly shaky performances in recent years), and as commentators and bloggers have called for since - he might have lost. He probably wouldn't have lost, but he might have. His odds of winning by fighting the way he fought was about 99 percent. His odds of winning if he fought the way the critics of the fight wanted, he had a 90 percent chance of winning. He had a lot to lose, so why increase his chance of losing ten-fold?."

-- Wade Keller, arguing what can only be described as the MMA equivalent of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Emphasis mine.

Believe me, no one wants to move on from this Anderson Silva debate more than me. The problem I keep running into is that dictrators from the point of view that Silva half-assed it do not appear willing to at least faithfully represent the viewpoint of the other side. And that's all evidenced by this false notion that the choice Silva faced was to coast as he did, safely ensuring victory while nullifying Leites's attacks or to compromise his safety in an aggresive Wanderlei Silva-style push towards the finish.

We keep getting introduced to the idea that in order to pursue the fight Silva had to substantively risk his belt and health. After UFC 90, I gave Silva a pass because while he held back, Cote is possessive of big power and technical striking. Being more reserved in the stand-up had very real value in that bout. Even if Cote lost in the exchanges, Silva would've had to deal with a fresh, competent striker who could land damaging blows even if Cote was ending up far worse off. Carefully planned strikes and avoiding damage had a place.

But that's not what happened at UFC 97. Instead, we had a Thales Leites who remained largely flat-footed, offered literally no jab and either flopped to guard or covered up when struck. On top of that we have a Silva throwing one punch hooks to the body or right hand leads with no follow up (or playful and utterly worthless side step trip attempts). Leites was as close to being helpless - particularly in the championship rounds - as one can get in professional modern MMA. The notion that Silva had to compromise his defense in order to throw two or three unanswered shots at a time instead of one against a defenseless Leites is pure fantasy. In fact, Silva's best round is round three as he was able - at will - to crowd Leites against the fence and land multiple strikes against a Leites who just absorbed the punishment or ran. Those who believe Leites is to blame or mostly to blame have a case, but the notion that in trying to pursue the fight against an opponent who could do nothing to protect himself except cover up and almost zero offensive skills standing that Silva was therefore upping his risk to more than a negligible degree is simply not supported by the evidence (and except for the second round, all takedown attempts were shrugged off as if Leites was a child). The idea that it was either play it safe or truly risk physical safety in this fight is a false choice that did not exist and is being invented solely to support a viewpoint.

So, look, if you believe Leites is mostly to blame, fine. If you believe Silva was well within his rights to do what he did, fine. And if you believe this was a satisfying performance from the champion, fine. We don't need to rehash those arguments. But please stop championing the false choice that Silva was either playing it safe defensively or risking more than a negligible amount by offering more effort. That simply isn't correct, particularly for an adept striker with pinpoint accuracy able to work at the distance of his choosing with the timing of his choosing against an opponent who was flat footed, bewildered and covering up.

A number of fighters are now stating their disapproval regarding the UFC 97 main event.  The latest among them is Michael Bisping, who is one win away from a title shot against Anderson Silva:

I wasn’t impressed at all with the main event. You never want to disrespect fellow fighters, much less two contesting a UFC world title, but I think both guys should hang their heads in shame, quite honestly. Leites probably won the first two rounds but nothing happened in the fight.

I fought on the first card in Montreal last April, and the Canadians are tremendous supporters of the UFC. They deserved a hell of a lot better than they got from these two. I've seen more aggression from my fiancé when she hits the January sales.

It was very frustrating for me to be sitting on my couch seeing Anderson Silva, who keeps saying how he’s gone through the middleweight division. I would have fought harder than both of them put together, and so would a lot of other middleweights.

If Bisping can get past Henderson, he'll have a chance to put his money where his mouth is in the fall.  Bisping wasn't exactly aggressive either in his last fight, so perhaps he doesn't have much room to talk.

I will say that the one impressive thing being overlooked about the UFC 97 main event was the way Anderson Silva shut Leites down on the ground.  Leites got the fight where he wanted and couldn't do anything with it.  I believe that once he realized that Anderson was tougher on the ground than he expected, he checked out of the fight mentally.  This is just another point worth bringing up once someone brings up Takase or Lutter.  Anderson totally shut down a world class grappler who had top position.

Since the final horn, we've seen a long series of back-and-forth articles about the performances of Anderson Silva and Thales Leites in their bout at UFC 97.  Silva, the Zuffa-heralded pound-for-pound king, has been chastised for his tentativeness to work towards a finish while others have blasted Leites for continually flopping to the floor when Silva applied pressure - even Chuck Liddell had something to say about it.

I've been sitting on a quality article I read about strategy between mismatched college football teams (though it applies to all sports) for some time now.  The article proves poignant after the events on Saturday, and gives good reasons why Silva took a reserved approach while providing the logic behind the idea that Leites needed to be more aggressive to have any chance at victory.

Excerpts from Smart Football:

But is that true in college? Or in high school? Think about when Florida plays the Citadel. The Gators have a massive talent advantage compared with the Bulldogs. As a result, what is the only way they can lose? You guessed it: by blowing it. They can really only lose if they go out and throw lots of interceptions, gamble on defense and give up unnecessary big plays, or just stink it up.

A fan or some uninitiated coach might see this as a lack of effort, but another view might be that Florida used an unnecessarily risky gameplan that cost them a victory. And since we know that they would win almost every time, what did they gain by being more aggressive? Even if they gained in expected points, this is something like the difference between a forty-point and sixty-point victory, which ought to be irrelevant.

It's a well-worn belief that underdogs -- i.e. the kind of severely outmatched opponent that cannot win without some good luck -- must employ some risky strategies to succeed. This has long been believed but now we have a reason, though it also teaches us that there is a price to this bargain. The underdog absolutely must take the riskier strategy, whether by throwing more and more aggressively, by onside kicking, or doing flea-flickers and trick plays. They have to get lucky. In the process, however, they also increase the chance that they will get blown out, possibly quite badly. But isn't that worth the price of a shot at winning? Florida might pick off the pass and run it back for a touchdown; they might sack the quarterback and make him fumble; they might blow up the double-reverse pass. If so, then things look grim. But what if they didn't? And if the team didn't do those things, how can it beat them by being conservative? By waiting for Florida to make mistakes?

After two rounds, it became apparent to most watching that Leites needed some sort of extraordinary event to take place if he had any hopes of winning.  His lone highlight, a takedown Leites landed in the second, hinged little on his ability to wrestle.  Silva, for the most part, gets put on his back because he's unafraid to lose position following a strike, and that's essentially what happened on Saturday night.

With conventional technique having little success, Leites needed to attempt some sort of aggressive and unorthodox attack.  Interestingly enough, we only have to look back to Silva's fight with Ryo Chonan in Pride for a perfect example of this.  Silva, fighting on an injured ankle, looked to be plodding his way to a decision victory until Chonan submitted the Spider with a flying heel hook.

Leites essentially had this decision to make: fight conservatively with self-preservation in mind and win 0.1% of the time (roughly the amount of time Silva blows his knee or some other fight-ending injury) or throw the kitchen sink at Silva and get knocked out 97% of the time but coming out victorious that other 3%.  Again, rough estimates, but the point should remain clear.

As for Silva, he touches on this issue with Tatame.

One way or another he fought well, came well prepared, but I would have a lot to risk. I’m not risking something that took a long time for me to win. I think the fans are talking, criticizing...Each one has their opinion, I have to respect their opinion...I try to fight and don’t get hurt and this is working over all these years.

It's been just over 2 years since Matt Serra beat Georges St. Pierre and I think it's safe to say that loss still sits in the back of the MMA consciousness.  We also need to remember Anderson is 34 years old - older than Wanderlei Silva, older than the Nogueira brothers, older than Vitor Belfort.  Even disregarding the self-imposed retirement talk, his window as a peak athlete shrinks by the minute.  And it's only been very recently that he's been making big time, PPV-laden money.

For better or worse, Silva has plenty of incentive to maximize his win expectation even if that sacrifices his knockout or submission expectation.  I can't really say I blame him for trying to protect his assets either.

Josh Gross asserted that Anderson Silva spread the Vaseline applied to his face onto his body upon entering the cage at UFC 97.  MMA media avoided GreaseGate II thanks to the controversy surrounding the performances of both Silva and Leites that night.

To clear up any potential story, Sherdog spoke to Yves Lavigne about the incident.  Excerpt:

“I saw he had a little Vaseline on his chest and I wiped it from his chest and arms, as I saw him touching them as well,” Lavigne told Sherdog.com on Tuesday.

Lavigne said he then motioned to Leites’ corner and was given a “thumbs up” of approval.

“I took care of it, and the other corner felt OK with it,” said Lavigne.

Lavigne rightfully took a lot of abuse over his handling of the Brown-Sell fight at UFC 96.  The above anecdote, however, shows why he's still regarded as one of the top referees in the sport.

"Since the start I was very motivated [to fight Chuck Liddell] and it was important. I’ve trained hard, very focused, more prepared physically and mentally, so I got there ready to show my work and everything I’ve trained," says Shogun, pleased to introduce himself to the American fans. "Actually, I haven’t fought well in the UFC, so I knew I needed to show my potential to the American fans, and it all depended on me. It wasn’t easy, but I could show them… I’ll train even more to keep this focus."

Going to a two weeks trip with his wife to relax, the Brazilian put his UFC future in his manager’s hands, but gives some tips to the matchmaker Joe Silva. "Nobody spoke yet (about my next fight), but my goal is to win the next one. I’m already focused for the next fight. I’ll fight anyone, but a rematch (with Forrest Griffin) would be welcome. He’s a good fighter and it’d be a good fight. I’ll fight anyone, but it’d be cool to fight him again, I’d love it."

-- Mauricio "Shogun" Rua speaking to Tatame

I must say I've been impressed by the humble, affable, no-excuses "Shogun" we've seen following this huge comeback win. He clearly understands that he got off on the wrong foot with UFC viewers and it sounds like he's doing everything in his power to change the fans' perception of him. It's too soon to say if a rematch with Forrest would go much different from their first dance - though Rua certainly looked to have his legs back on Saturday - but trying to avenge one of the two losses  he's got left on his record seems the logical next step for a man whose stock within the company just skyrocketed.

UPDATE: In writing this, it slipped my mind that Forrest is going to miss most of 2009 with his hand injury. My next choice for "Shogun" would be someone like Keith Jardine, with an eye on avenging the Griffin loss down the line.

UPDATE #2: Michael David Smith from MMA Fanhouse reminds me that the reason I didn't remember that Forrest is out for most of the year is because he isn't. So, with Griffin is already paired up for the summer, I'll stick with Rua-Jardine for now.

This is obviously the first time I've done one of these articles about the winning fighter but I think there is a lot to learn here that we're going to be seeing pop up in Shogun's future fights.  Check the gif below out and I'm sure you'll see the points I'm going to harp on:

Both guys throw wide left hooks and both guys leave their right hand at about waist height.  Shogun has a couple things going for him here.  1) He keeps his chin down whereas Chuck's is fully exposed.  2) He is quicker than Liddell to get his punch out, which is a function of Chuck's punching speed being all but gone.

It was not only one time where Shogun threw a punch where his other hand was not in a solid defensive position.  For the entirety of the short fight Rua was winging wide punches with his guard down.  It's the kind of thing that Liddell used to feast on but with significantly diminished reflexes he was never able to take advantage.

And this is where Mauricio's technique has me worried about his future.  The top 3 light heavyweights in the world in the Consensus Rankings right now are very good at counterstriking.  I can see any of Evans, Jackson or Machida eating these kind of reckless strikes alive and probably finishing Rua inside of three rounds.  Even some guys outside of the top 10, specifically Cane and Cantwell, would stand a good chance of beating this version of Shogun.

Were I training the next guy to take on Shogun we'd be working a lot on step-in, counter hook techniques.  Mainly when the wide shot start to come take a step toward Shogun while keeping (in the case of a wide left hook) your right hand pasted to the side of your face.  This will allow your arm to absorb his arm while his fist ends up behind your head.  During the step in let a short counter left hook go.  It's a simple boxing technique that is the best way to deal with a wide puncher.  Also if a fighter trusts his timing enough Rua is open for a straight right, but it's far more risky to try as it leaves your chin a bit more exposed.

Regardless, Rua's wild style is cause for concern in a light heavyweight division loaded with talented counterstrikers and I'm not ready to declare that he is "back on top" until I see him hang in there with someone who isn't a slowed down shell of his former self.

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“He won the fight and he did what he had to do, so I give him that...The guy is so talented, it’s scary. Guys can’t do anything against him. People go to leg kick him and he stops the kicks with his feet. Instead of checking the kicks, he sticks his foot out and stops the kick with his foot. It’s like stuff from ‘The Matrix.’ The guy is incredible.

“My issue is, why not finish him? Where is the killer instinct? We haven’t seen that for a while? Why isn’t he letting his hands and feet go? He got on the ground and was beating the [expletive] out of Thales, but then he stood up and backed off and made it look like Thales was doing something wrong.”

-- UFC President Dana White asking some very reasonable questions.