Tomorrow I will travel more than 3,000 kilometers, as the crow flies, to witness a little piece of combat sports history at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) debut Toronto event (Happy 32nd birthday to me!). Roughly 55,000 mixed martial arts fans will pack the Roger’s Center, and maybe a million more will tune in to pay-per-view to watch UFC Welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre (affectionately known as GSP) defend his belt – most likely successfully – for the last time.
A two-time Rogers Sportsnet Canadian Athlete of the Year, GSP is not retiring; rather, he’s so good that he’s cleaned out the welterweight (156-170 pound) division and needs to move up a weight class to find another fighter who can give him a run for his money. His background is in karate, his wrestling is world class, his jiu-jitsu is strategically sound and he follows carefully orchestrated game plans for each match-up, capitalizing on the specific weaknesses of his opponent. GSP is known for being a gentleman’s fighter and a highly intelligent and principled person.
The middleweight (171-185 pound) division, to which GSP will be rising, is currently dominated by a lightening-fast, creative and playful fighter from Brazil named Anderson Silva. This guy pulls off moves that look like they’re from The Matrix and in most of his fights he is visibly bored, filling the time with showy capoeira dancing and general mockery of his opponents. His striking is spookily accurate and he regularly embarrasses even elite fighters. In the GSP-Silva fight, the odds are on Silva.
There is no set formula for fight match-ups in UFC. They tend to arise both from the art of matchmaker Joe Silva (no relation to Anderson) and from political will among the fan base. The projected superfight is being held partly in the service of an abstract question dear to the hearts of combat sports fans: Who is the best Pound-for-Pound fighter in the world? That is, if all questions of natural physique are held constant, who wins the contest of skill?
That’s about as complex a question as, Who is the most mentally healthy person in the world? Or what is the best economic system? Of course, the complexity of these questions does not deter psychologists and economists from coming up with test batteries and growth indicators, attempting to quantify the gestalt and reverse engineer the zeitgeist. Likewise, combat sports analyzers are data-happy with take-down ratios (the number of times a fighter successfully tackles his opponent to the ground, divided by number of attempts), strike accuracy and so forth.
But we should not lose sight of the fact that these rules-of-thumb are only loose approximations of the real world. Universal theories are for physicists, not sportsmen. One cannot devise a flawless algorithm for success in an art. Our tendency to quantify the complex and chaotic world of human psychology and biology is ultimately doomed.
Take reach. Reach refers to the distance between the left fingertips and the right when the arms are stretched apart. It is a figure used to determine which fighter will have an easier time finding their effective striking range. In the case of this superfight, GSP has a one-and-a-half inch reach disadvantage, which is practically no disadvantage at all. He has, however, unusually broad shoulders, which count as part of his reach. So Silva, who is all arms, can effectively punch a lot farther.
Weight classes in boxing, wrestling and mixed martial arts are intended roughly to isolate skill as a factor in the fights. If one’s opponent is approximately the same weight, the thinking goes, the fight will come down to technique and conditioning. It will not end with a giant sumo wrestler sitting on a wiry muay thai practitioner, waiting out the clock.
But these arbitrary divisions – seven-pound classes in boxing, fifteen-pound classes in MMA – are not fool-proof, and their worth is tested in careers like GSP’s, when the same man fights in two or more divisions, gaining or losing the weight to make the cut. If I had my way, everyone would stay put in their adult weight class, but there’s a long tradition of adjusting one’s size in order to fight one’s opponent-of-choice.
As it is, 170 pounds on a fighter does not mean what it would mean for you or I. A Welterweight might walk around at 190 pounds in everyday life, then cut 20 pounds of water-weight the day of the weigh-ins, by suiting up in garbage bags and sweating it out on an exercise bike in the sauna. After they make weight, they’ll rehydrate using an IV, or just drinking the water back into themselves. It’s a silly, unhealthy dance, an artifact of the one-day lag between weigh-ins and fights.
When GSP gains 15 pounds of muscle, will he even be the same fighter? Will he be GSP times 110%? Can you match up two differently-sized people by adding more person to the smaller man? If he acquires it the wrong way, he’s creating a liability – it will be less of a gain in strength than it is a blood-sucking cardio drain.
He can never return to the lower weight class: boxing history has shown that fighters who jump up and down in weight lose their reflexes, a scary prospect. Muscle and nerve do not integrate in the same way on different builds. His frame will never change, and he will never gain in height. For the first time — in the fight following this week’s event — I’ll be rooting for the underdog. Win or lose, the GSP we know today will never fight again.
One of Jessa Gamble’s many hats belongs to the Yellowknife Boxing and Wrestling Commission.
Image: The Octagon, Wikimedia Commons
Not relevant to your point, Jessa, but “coming up with test batteries and growth indicators, attempting to quantify the gestalt and reverse engineer the zeitgeist” is flat-out good.