How Important is "World Class" in MMA?
by jpcampbell710 on Aug 18, 2010 7:35 PM EDT
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PrintI recently read an article in Sports Illustrated that was talking about athletes that missed the 1980 Olympics due to the boycott. Two of the names struck a chord with me. Renaldo Nehemiah and Willie Gault. Both were considered world class and missed their opportunity at Olympic Gold in track. Both were successful (to varying degrees, which is not vital to the post) in football. Neither would be considered a world class wide receiver. It brings me to MMA. A complex sport that uses many different small things put together. Football has throwing, running, kicking, physicality and many other things. Basketball has running, jumping, passing a ball. Baseball has running, throwing, and a huge test of hand eye coordination. A player can be a good or great player in their sport without being a world class runner. A world class jumper, etc. They could even be considered world class in their complex sport, without being world class at the individual discipline that composes a part of the sport.
I've read numerous tweets from King Mo about people being world class or not world class in one specific discipline. It really makes me think about what it means and how it is used in discussions about MMA. It makes me wonder how important being world class at one discipline is in MMA.
Merrium Webster defines world class as: being of the highest caliber in the world.
My personal opinion is that wrestling is the most important discipline in MMA. The ability to decide and dictate where the fight takes place is invaluable. You can strike with a grappler, and grapple with a striker. We have seen over and over again that controlling the location the fight takes place will often lead to victory. Judges place a high premium on who controls the fight and we have seen time and time again that the person with top control for the majority of a fight tends to get the nod from the judges. We can turn this discussion to judging and how they over emphasize top control and give a lot of weight to hammer fists and non damaging shots from the top. I personally feel that the judging criteria should be more like what they had in Pride (total damage and trying to end the fight had more weight than controlling the position the fight takes place in). I don't want to turn this into a discussion on wrestling though. We have seen that many times and I don't want to rehash that.
Given all of the different disciplines, most people would agree that there are a few key disciplines that tend to work better, when modified for MMA. Muay Thai & Boxing are typically the top striking arts used in MMA. Freestyle and Greco Roman are two of the more successful wrestling styles. Jui Jitsu and Catch wrestling for submissions. There are others I am not mentioning. Karate, Judo, Sumo, and many more. The point is that you typically have to have more than 1 dimension to win in today's MMA. I think most announcers throw the "World Class" moniker around much more than necessary and much more often than it is true. I think some people put too much emphasis on being world class. There are many examples of "world class athletes" in one discipline getting beat by someone that is not world class in any one discipline, but are more well rounded. Joe Warren losing to Bibiano Fernandez. Rolles Gracie losing to Joey Beltran. Demian Maia losing to Nate Marquardt. These are all fights in the recent years that were won by the more well rounded fighter.
I think the announcers sometimes say that an MMA fighter is world class in one discipline, meaning that in the MMA world, they have adapted that discipline better than most to MMA. That doesn't mean Anderson Silva would win the K1 tournament. GSP wouldn't win the Olympics in wrestling more than likely. But they have both translated those arts to MMA and become world class at MMA and world class IN MMA using that portion of the sport.
With all of the above said, i would say that being world class in one discipline definately gives you a leg up on the competition, but is not a guarantee of success in the complex sport of MMA.
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Good topic.
I think most people would agree with you that a world class skill can give a fighter a competitive advantage. But the aspect that you didn’t address, which I think is even more important than a world class skill base, is a world class athletic base. Combine the high level athletic base with high level combat-specific lifelong training, and it starts to become apparent just why guys like Jon Fitch run roughshod over their competition. Most non-wrestlers haven’t faced a pacing like what he can put them through for fifteen minutes in their entire lives.
This is the real reason, to my mind, that wrestlers are so dominant in MMA. Their skill base is absolutely on par with the other main skills, such as BJJ, Muay Thai or boxing. There is an argument to be made that it is superior in some ways to those skills, but the thing that really sets wrestlers apart is their lifelong commitment to physical conditioning and athletic effort.
Most athletes of competitive sports condition their bodies very well, and run their cardio up to very high levels. But, as Carwin recently displayed, it’s not always about cardio. Lactic acid buildup is a bigger problem in wrestling/MMA than any soccer player could understand, no matter how good their cardio conditioning is. Even NFL players (who are universally accepted World Class physical specimens) really don’t understand just how different five minutes of sustained maximum effort is, compared to 10-15 seconds forty or fifty times in two hours.
Guys have come in to MMA with bodybuilder physiques every year since the inception of the sport. But what separates those guys from a top shelf wrestler is that the wrestler has been dealing with combat conditioning since he was in early grade school. I think this is as much of a reason for the disparity between top level BJJ players and top level wrestlers as any other component in the respective arsenals.
Good article.
If I was a hungry man with a gun in my hand and some promises to keep...
You are absolutely right about world class athletes. Someone like GSP strikes me as someone that would be good at almost any physical activity/sport they try. I look forward to the coming years as more great athletes that grew up taking jiu jitsu classes, wrestling, and other martial arts choose to fight instead of the big three sports. I think we are only scratching the surface of the hispanic and african american talent in this sport & could possibly see an explosion as fighters like Cain V & King Mo rocket to stardom.
by jpcampbell710 on Aug 20, 2010 8:12 AM EDT up reply actions
Yeah, good call on GSP.
And I should clarify something from my above post. I’m not saying that the practice of wrestling improves physical conditioning beyond what mortal man can achieve anywhere else. But anyone who’s worked the mats with wrestlers has a better understanding of the term ‘meat grinder’ than they ever did before.
It’s basically this massive attrition device that weeds out everyone except the absolute upper tier of conditioned athletes. The workouts help, probably more than other activities simply because it’s 100% effort for sustained periods, which is better for combat prep than any other sport in the USA. But it weeds out the people who can’t handle max effort for basically six minutes straight.
If I was a hungry man with a gun in my hand and some promises to keep...
Yeah, the environment is a lot different trying hard to make a team amongst competition and taking a BJJ class at a strip mall gym where you are paying them and they will put up with people not doing their best.
by jpcampbell710 on Aug 21, 2010 9:08 PM EDT up reply actions
“World Class” is just a catchphrase.
It’s like when people say some is a blue chip football player.
It is due to the fact that there are so few statistics and it is very hard to quantify someone’s skills.
watchkalibrun.com
I agree that 'World Class" gets tossed around a whole lot more than it should.
So I agree with your assessment of the phrase’s usage. Hyperbole is just something we have to deal with when dealing with promoters.
That said, I do think that there is a legitimate use for the term “World Class,” and it applies to things like BJ Penn’s BJJ, Randy Couture’s conditioning/wrestling and James Toney’s boxing. It doesn’t need to be only top-of-the-heap examples that get christened “World Class,” but it should only by applied to people who display a dominant, game-changing ability or skill.
If I was a hungry man with a gun in my hand and some promises to keep...
I agree with the post mostly.
But I have to disagree with the Marquardt/Maia reference. in that situation you could look at the reverse about Serra/GSP 2. Flash KOs are Flash KOs and IMO shouldn’t be used as reliable data in this sort of discussion.
re:world class
it is all relative
for on any given night any given fight any given tournament
any one can win or lose
it happens all the time
your examples show that
and
being “world class” in one martial art or skill
does not make you one in another
MMA is developing into its’ own skill
that combines many others
so just wrestling just BBJ just boxing or karate
will not be enough the majority of the time
Being "World Class" is mosly insignificant at this point and time.
As proven by one of the most decorated boxers in history being completely dismantled by a true Mixed Martial Artist. The UFC (and modern MMA) was founded as an experiment regarding the principles of discipline vs discipline to see which combat pedigree was the most effective. The Wrestler meets the Boxer, the Judoka meets the Karateka, etc. As the spectacle evolved into the sport it is today, the homogenization of the different disciplines has created its own brood of “Mixed Martial Arts” leaving the pure pedigree combatants at a disadvantage.
None of the base elements are practiced in their true form in MMA, but have been modified to eliminate disadvantages in bad stylistic matchups. There is a world of difference between traditional and no-gi Brazillian Jiu Jitsu, the sweet science of boxing has been greatly modified in stance and distance, and freestyle wrestlers have had to modify their stance and shot to coincide with the stance in striking. All of the pure disciplines have been stripped to elements that supplement the other styles, resulting in modern Mixed Martial Arts.
In a comparison to turn based strategy video games, where each specific unit has a strength and a counter, i.e. melee units are nullified by missile wielding units, MMA has taken the strengths of each discipline and eliminated its weakness. The result is a homogeneous combat art all its own that is vastly superior to all others, in which a mostly mediocre Mixed Martial Artist 9 times out of 10 will effectively defuse the “World Class” boxer/judoka/BJJ/wrestler as illustrated time and time again.
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