Wrestlers Boxing Badly
Submitted by Matthew Polly on January 30, 2012 - 2:55pm
(Matthew Polly is the author of Tapped Out, his odyssey through the strange and wonderful world of MMA. Sometime during that journey he met us in Montreal and after a dozen double jack n cokes we cemented a relationship where he provides us with content even though we are the Khloe Kardashians of the MMA world. Here are his thoughts on le merde we witnessed this past Saturday.)
UFC of Fox 2 cemented a question I have been worried about for awhile: Am I doomed to spend the majority of my MMA time watching elite wrestlers and grapplers box and kickbox badly?
Demian Maia has apparently been attending the Hendo Remedial Boxing for Wrestlers Academy where they wait until the third year to teach the jab. God gave us two hands for a reason, Demian. At least Chris Weidman had a late call-up and a brutal weight cut as an excuse his Ambien-sponsored sleep-boxing performance. Their match felt like one long slow-motion replay.
I can understand why Phil Davis finds it hard to throw a punch with those Popeye shoulder muscles, but his kicks wouldn’t have passed a suburban karate studio’s orange belt test. Each one begged, “Please catch me!” And I’ve seen better footwork from cerebral palsy victims. Anyone who has ever said that he’s the next Jon Jones needs to put down the crack pipe.
Rashad Evans continued to prove the exception (along with Frankie Edgars) to the rule about wrestlers being ugly strikers, but one wonders if this is only because they are undersized for their divisions and have no other choice. And someone still needs to explain to him the difference between boxing and shadowboxing, because he seemed completely unconcerned about landing a punch. If Davis knew how to maintain or regain guard, it would have been an impossible fight to score.
While Bisping was the only legitimate striker on the Fox card, it was hard to tell from his performance. He was mostly content to pull a Tank Abbot and press a surprisingly weak Chael Sonnen against the cage. And what was up with those half-hearted spinning kicks? Is he eyeing a post-fight movie career as the next Jason Statham?
I’ll refrain from bagging on Sonnen because at least he attempted to do what wrestlers who can’t strike should do and ground and pound. Also, after eeking out a decision victory, his Pro Wrestling Q&A with Rogan was sufficiently self-destructive that there is little need to pile on. He’s gone from telling jokes to becoming the joke.
I am hoping Saturday was just an off night. But it increasingly seems to me like the ground game has become, if not irrelevant, than at least an afterthought. Clearly the quick restarts by the referees and the lusty boos of the fans have made clear to fighters where the money lies. But it also seems that this latest evolution of MMA has produced a crop of fighters who are great at sprawling but terrible at brawling.
Maybe the UFC has a job for Chuck Liddell that requires some actual work after all.
(pic via Heavy's UFC on FOX 2 gallery)
Run Gina Run
Submitted by Matthew Polly on January 19, 2012 - 9:55am
(Matthew Polly is the author of Tapped Out and American Shaolin and various nuggets of awesome here on Fightlinker. We sent him out last week to interview Gina and check out her movie. Now here's his review of Haywire, coming out Friday January 20th.)
“Well, there is one group that will be happy with that,” said Jim Genia, the author of the excellent Raw Combat, after the press screening of Haywire mercifully ended.
“Who?” I asked. “It was worse than Colombiana.”
“Strikeforce,” he said. “They’re getting their fighter back.”
It pains me to write that Jim is probably right. I’ve covered Gina for years, I trained in the same gym for six months while she was preparing for Cyborg, and I interviewed her for Haywire. She has never been anything but unfailingly polite, going out of her way to talk with me when MMA fighters of much lower levels of fame couldn’t be bothered. I knew she wanted this movie to be her big break in Hollywood. I did too, because she deserves it. She’s fought for nine years in an industry where Dana White couldn’t be bothered with WMMA, Gary Shaw grossly underpaid her, and Scott Coker pushed her into a match with an opponent everyone knew was juicing. But I haven’t seen a one-and-done like Haywire since Cindy Crawford’s Fair Game.
It didn’t have to be this way. Director Steven Soderbergh revived the movie careers of Terence Stamp (The Limey) and Jennifer Lopez (Out of Sight) and cemented George Clooney as the Cary Grant of our times. But like Anderson Silva circa Demian Maia, Soderbergh seems bored with the entire process, filming experiments like Solaris, Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience (another bit of stunt casting with porn star Sasha Grey) that satisfy no one but his most diehard fans.
Soderbergh has even made noises about retiring from movies. On the basis of Haywire he’s half way to Florida, having already given up on basics like plot, character development, narrative logic, and realistic dialogue. All that he seems to still care about is style and cinematography. Haywire is a visually stunning movie. I felt like I was watching Picasso put lipstick on a pig.
(More after the jump)
Interview: La Femme Gina
Submitted by Matthew Polly on January 12, 2012 - 8:59am
(I managed to bribe Matthew Polly into into hitting up the NY premiere of Gina Carano's Haywire with the promise of a popcorn n soda budget. Being the intrepid writer that he is, he also snagged an interview with the Gina herself! Tapped Out is the tale of Matt Kerouacing his way through the MMA scene, and it's on bookshelves now. Pick it up!)
It is traditional before a transcribed interview for the reporter to write a brief introduction of the subject. But no one reading this blog is unfamiliar with Gina Carano. I expect many of you go to sleep every night beneath a poster of her on your parent’s basement ceiling. I know I do. Not only has she put on fights of such technical skill that they shamed many of the men on the same card (Kimbo) but her girl-next-door looks and charm turned her into the “face of women’s MMA” and the first MMA star, with the exception perhaps of Chuck Liddell, to break out in the mainstream media world.
She is now the first MMA fighter to star as the lead actor in a major Hollywood movie, Haywire, which will be released January 20th. It is directed by Steven Soderbergh, who surrounded Gina with such an all-star cast— Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas— that actresses across Malibu will be turning in their yoga mats for 4-oz gloves.
The call-in interview was scheduled for ten minutes. After eleven, the movie publicist shut me down before I could get to the hard-hitting question I had prepared for my closing: Channing Tatum or Michael Fassbender, who is the better kisser? Now we will never know. But if you want to find out whether she plans to fight again, what she thinks of Cyborg’s positive steroid test, or if her voice was dubbed over, you can read the full, unedited transcript after the jump.
(And thanks to you Jackals who pitched in questions for the interview. As you will see I actually used a few of the less pervy ones.)
Just When I Thought I Was Out
Submitted by Matthew Polly on January 9, 2012 - 10:53am
Dearest Jackals,
After the release of Tapped Out, I promised myself I’d do everyone else a favor and take a break from MMA. Spend a little quality me-time at local dive bars and the NYPD drunk tank. But just when I thought I was out, Ryan pulls me back in with an assignment to review Haywire and interview Gina Carano. How could I resist when all of my loves are so tightly wrapped in such a seam-bursting package: MMA, white people in kung fu flicks, another Soderbergh rookie female lead (let me give you the boyfriend experience, Sasha Grey), and Gina Carano’s voluptuous… smile.
But what to ask Gina? Where do I begin? I’m so nervous. And that is why I am turning to you, dearest jackals. Fill the comments section with the questions you want me to put to the face of WMMA. I’d ask you not to be too pervy, but we all know that’s impossible. But try to throw in at least a couple that I might actually be able to use.
Best,
Matthew Polly
(Matthew Polly is our resident big dick swingin' auteur who's latest book Tapped Out just came out at the end of 2011. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and pick it up! Or you can enjoy all his other Fightlinker works and samples from his first book right here.)
American Shaolin: The Sacred and the Profane
Submitted by Matthew Polly on November 29, 2011 - 4:55pm
(To celebrate the release of our good buddy Matthew Polly's new book Tapped Out, we'll be sharing some choice excerpts from one of my favorite books - American Shaolin. Polly trained in China with the Shaolin monks back in 1993 - before it was cool, as the hipsters would say - and this book chronicles all the ridiculous situations he got himself into.)
(excerpt from Part 2, Chapter 6)
When Carlos arrived, Deqing volunteered to teach the foreigners, so he took over from Monk Chen, one of the older monks who had taken over from Cheng Hao. Two foreigners were better than one, and at least Carlos would leave relatively soon and give him a tip for his troubles.
Deqing’s success at Shaolin had been built on a relentless love of hard training, and as he’d watched me he felt that the Shaolin method for training foreigners—all smiles and encouragement— was too soft. He was going to train us like they train their own Chinese students: “To curse is to care, to hit is to love.”
Now, there was a good reason for the variation in methodology besides cultural differences. We were older and obviously self-motivated or we wouldn’t be here. A rough guess was that of the 10,000 or so teenage kungfu students in the Shaolin village, about half had been sent by their parents rather than volunteered. They were the type of hyperactive boys who refused to study and got into fights. Shaolin was China’s version of a reform school; kungfu was their Ritalin.
But I agreed with Deqing that at the very least it was an appearance problem, so I didn’t mind when he brought out the stick and whacked us. What did bother me was how he conducted stretching time. Deqing’s approach was hands-on and feet-on. When we were in the split position, he’d climb on top of our legs and bounce to the point of breaking us. Then he’d have us lie on our backs, pin one leg and push the other toward our faces until we screamed for mercy.
But it wasn’t the pain as much as the fact that we were objects of amusement for the other monks that infuriated Carlos and me.
After the first day of screaming, we began to gather a crowd. The younger monks would suddenly appear in the training room at stretch time, take a seat, and wait for the entertainment to begin, holding their breaths until we started begging for mercy and then laugh and laugh. Actually, only one of us begged for mercy.
(“Please, master, you’re going to break my leg. Please, God, I beg you!”) Carlos was tougher than me and therefore able to refrain from screaming anything coherent.
“They sure enjoy watching the foreigners suffer,” I said to Deqing once, after a session.
“They don’t have TV,” he replied, not catching my hint.
After a week of this, it occurred to me that none of them spoke English, so I switched from begging to cursing in my native language, running through the gamut of four letter words, spicing it up with Oedipal accusations and questions about Deqing’s parentage, and promises to commit an astounding variety of X-rated acts to various parts of his anatomy. I had to stop, however, when Little Tiger, following one of my tirades, yelled, “Fack youah, madafacka, fack, shat, madafacka, I kah you.”
As the banner in the performance hall said, “Cultural Exchange Mutual Benefit.”
American Shaolin: The Show Must Go On
Submitted by Matthew Polly on November 19, 2011 - 3:12pm
(To celebrate the release of our good buddy Matthew Polly's new book Tapped Out, we'll be sharing some choice excerpts from one of my favorite books - American Shaolin. Polly trained in China with the Shaolin monks back in 1993 - before it was cool, as the hipsters would say - and this book chronicles all the ridiculous situations he got himself into.)
(excerpt from Part 2, Chapter 2)
I had defied my father to come to Shaolin, because I wanted to go to the most isolated, cutoff, far-flung, off-the-map place in the Mandarin-speaking world. And like most people who are not careful of what they wish for, my dream was granted. And, after the initial thrill of success passed, I was completely miserable.
No friends, no family, not even any English-speaking strangers— Shaolin was total immersion. At some point within the first month I started talking to myself, which wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that I was also answering myself. I’d never imagined how crucial English was to my sense of a unified self—part good and part bad, but all of a whole. I started to experience two versions of me: one English-speaking and one Chinese-speaking.
Matt was a clever, thoughtful boy. Bao Mosi was a verbally impaired dunce, always nodding his head and smiling and saying “right, right, right” when he had no idea what had just been said to him and was desperately hoping his brain would be able to translate that last comment before the speaker veered off onto another track. Bao Mosi was constantly working under a ten-second delay.
“Are you [something]?” one of the monks would ask. “All of us are going to [something] [something]. Interested?”
“Right, right, right . . . okay,” I would respond.
The Wushu Center had the only phone in the entire village capable of making international calls. It worked in about one out of every ten tries. The price was $8 per minute. The Wushu Center also had the village’s only international fax machine. The price was $20 per page. After failing several times to reach home by phone, I sent a short fax message per my mother’s demand that I reassure her of my continued survival.
Mother, your son lives still. But the natives grow restless. Please send more wampum. And some Peter Pan peanut butter. Food here is terrible. Will call when possible. Love, Little Lord Fauntleroy
Any letter or package from home took about thirty days to arrive: five days from America to Beijing, seven days from Beijing to Zheng Zhou, fourteen days from Zheng Zhou to Shaolin, then about a week for the Faulknerian drunks in the Shaolin post office to get around to telling me, the only American in the village, that a package had arrived from the United States. That is, if they hadn’t developed a hankering for Peter Pan peanut butter. All my packages and letters were opened, some never made it, and if they did, the stamps were gone, because foreign stamps were collectibles.
I was so lonely that for the first and last time in my life, when not under threat of being grounded, I wrote letters. And not little notes, I wrote twenty-, twenty-five-, thirty-page, single-spaced trea-tises. I sent them to everyone—my parents, my friends, my ex-girlfriend—mostly, it pains me to say, my ex. Inspired by the example of all those married convicted felons, I had hopes of rekindling her affections with the power of my words. Fortunately, I have managed to repress all of those words, because they were most likely of the desperate, heartbroken variety, which are never particularly attractive. Nor, in general, is a college dropout who joins a Buddhist monastery. She sent a single Dear John letter back. Unfortunately, I remember every single one of its I-love-you-but-I’m-not-in-love-with-you words.
(the rest after the jump)
American Shaolin: The Challenge Match
Submitted by Matthew Polly on November 15, 2011 - 10:55am
(To celebrate the release of our good buddy Matthew Polly's new book Tapped Out this Thursday, we'll be sharing some choice excerpts from one of my favorite books - American Shaolin. Polly trained in China with the Shaolin monks back in 1993 - before it was cool, as the hipsters would say - and this book chronicles all the ridiculous situations he got himself into.)
It had been a calm night at the Shaolin Temple before the fight started.
A French photojournalist named Pierre was throwing a small banquet at the Shaolin Wushu Center’s restaurant for several of the martial monks and Shaolin’s “expat community,” which consisted of two Norwegians who were visiting for the week and Shaolin’s two American students, John Lee and myself. Pierre had been assigned to take photos of the Shaolin monks for a French magazine, and I had arranged for my friends and instructors Monk Deqing, Monk Cheng Hao, and Coach Yan to pose for him. The session had gone so well that Pierre had invited us all to dinner.
We were seated around a large table in the middle of the restaurant, which was built by the government and reflected the Communist Party’s taste in architecture: oversize, poorly constructed, and rectangular. Maoist aesthetics are a tyranny of straight lines. The restaurant had the dimensions of a high school basketball gymna-sium and was only three years old, but already rundown. It was usually only filled at lunch when droves of tourists made day-trips to visit the Shaolin Temple, famous throughout the world as the birthplace of both Zen Buddhism and the martial arts. The only other guests that night were a group of six Chinese men sitting at a banquet table a hundred feet away. A dozen waitresses were lounging around arguing with each other about who had breakfast duty the next morning.
We had finished the toasting phase of the banquet, where much thanks is given and much baijiu is choked down. (Baijiu is Chinese rice liquor that tastes and affects the digestive system like a combination of sake, moonshine, and Liquid Drano.) We were just settling into the main course when the waitress who was serving the other table came over and whispered something to Deqing and Coach Yan.
Deqing’s face immediately went red with rage. He and I had become close friends over the last nine months of my stay, so I was used to his mood swings. But I had never before seen him this angry.
“He really said he wants a qie cuo?” Deqing asked, gripping his glass so tightly I though he might shatter it. “Challenge match?”
(The rest after the jump)
Not Ready for Prime Time Players
Submitted by Matthew Polly on November 13, 2011 - 4:54pm
Goldberg, Rogan, and White must be terribly disappointed that they all went to the same Men’s Wearhouse, bought collared black dress shirts off the same rack, and only got to enjoy their new BFF look for 1 minute and 4 seconds of activity. It’s not like the UFC was not warned that putting two heavy-handed heavyweights on as the only fight for an hour-long broadcast was dangerous. The two kids in the TapouT commercial, Carlos and Giovanni Ruffo, lasted longer and were more memorable.
Dana was as nervous as I have seen him since UFC 30 when he used to have some stubble on his skull. That he loves the sport, the success, and the attention so much is what mitigates against his many flaws. That he spent nearly forty minutes on live TV constantly reminding himself not to use the word “fuck” as a noun, verb, or adjective is why many of us wonder if he is ready for primetime. His left hand was visibly shaking like a drunk with DTs both before the match (when he was trying to be charming) and after (when he was trying not to scream). If Brock Lesnar displays more poise and self-restraint than you, you may want to rethink being the face of MMA.
Speaking of faces, how is it that of all the people on the broadcast, “Big” John McCarthy had the smallest, most proportional skull? He did his job with the skill and restraint we’ve come to expect from him over nearly twenty years. So did the Fox production team who even in the mawkish, sepia-toned, Olympic profile segments managed to cover the fact that the audience had been dick teased for 58 minutes and 56 seconds. The lead up episode of Cops was more action packed.
All in all, a huge missed opportunity.
(Matt Polly is our bigwig book writin' contributor who's latest tome 'Tapped Out' comes out this week! Are you excited? Because we are, and I've already read the thing three times.)
BOOK CLUB: Big John McCarthy – Let’s Get It On
Submitted by Matthew Polly on October 31, 2011 - 10:06am
(Matthew Polly is our resident big shot book writer, and his new book Tapped Out is being released on November 17th. So close yet so far! For now enjoy his review of another MMA book, Big John McCarthy's "Let's Get It On")
Hopefully, the return of “Big” John McCarthy as a referee for UFC on Fox 1 marks the official end of his banishment from the Octagon and his permanent return to his rightful place as the best referee in the sport. It is certainly a position he has earned. McCarthy has been part of MMA since before UFC 1 and inside the cage since UFC 2. He is responsible for most of the early rules, helping turn spectacle into sport. Shit, he coined the term “mixed martial arts.”
But then he did the unforgivable. He quit the UFC and joined the Fight Network—a Rebel Alliance outpost in the remote, frozen tundra known as Canada. Even worse as a pundit and commentator, he expressed his views, suggesting that Dana White plays fast and loose with the truth and the Nevada State Athletic Commission has a tendency to hire (boxing) referees who are unqualified for MMA matches. After the Fight Network collapsed, he tried to get his old job back but was treated like a pariah by the NSAC and Dana White, who doesn’t seem to realize that being called a liar is a badge of honor for a fight promoter.
While in exile, Big John followed a time-honored tradition and wrote his memoir with the help of skilled MMA journalist Loretta Hunt, who knows a little about what it’s like to be on Dana’s bad side. The book has something for everyone. For hardcore fans, Big John recounts in detail his life as a referee and as a Los Angeles police officer. For TUF noobs, he provides a very, very extensive refresher course on the history of MMA, going into such detail that by page 226 he was still describing UFC 14 and I began to worry that this 418 page book was only the first in a trilogy.
By the end of the book, it is impossible not to like Big John. Sure, he might be a little short-tempered and rough around the edges, but he is fundamentally a good man. He loves his wife, his kids, and his parents. He believes in fairness, impartiality, loyalty, and trust. And he is self-critical, spending nearly as much time writing about his few mistakes in the cage as he does his many, many successes.
Which raises the question: Can a good man write a good memoir? The most entertaining memoirs tend to be written by chatty, catty, gossipy, vindictive, self-centered narcissits (see Donald Rumsfeld). Since the very beginnings of MMA, McCarthy has had the best seat in the house and clearly knows where all the bodies are buried. But if you are looking for dirt, read Dana’s mother’s screed, because Big John ain’t talking.
(More after the jump)
You Might Be A RoidBall...
Submitted by Matthew Polly on June 29, 2011 - 10:32am
It is so sad, so heartbreaking. So many fighters live in denial about their problem steroid addiction. (“I didn’t know it was in my supplements.” “I felt weak and moody during training camp, sniff-sniff” “A ‘doctor’ said my hormone level was deficient, as did my wife, heh-heh.”) To help our flummoxed fighter family find its way past roid rage and towards acceptance, we here at Fightlinker offer a simple 12-step diagnostic to assist them in better understanding their disease. It’s like the Michigan Alcoholism Screen Test meets Jeff Foxworthy.
1) If Muscle and Fitness or Men’s Fitness or any of those other homoerotic publications have asked you to be their cover boy, you might be a roidball.
2) If your nickname is “The Muscle Shark,” “The Specimen,” or “Cyborg,” you might be a roidball.
3) If you are a white guy with the musculature of a black guy, you might be a roidball.
4) If you are a Brazilian gal with the musculature of a 1980’s East German Olympic swimmer, you might be a roidball.
5) If you are a 35 to 45-year-old former American collegiate wrestler with the musculature of an 18-year-old, you might be a roidball.
6) If you have been busted before, you might be a roidball.
7) If you were a pro-wrestler, competed in Japan, or competed as a pro-wrestler in Japan, you might be a roidball.
8) If you have bitch tits, you might be a roidball.
9) If you tweak your nipples before fights so as to avoid looking like you have bitch tits, you might be a roidball.
10) If your career took a dive and never recovered after steroid testing was introduced, you might be a roidball.
11) If you are the kind of scumbag who engaged in money laundering and mortgage fraud and then snitched on your co-conspirators to get a lighter sentence, you might be a roidball.
12) If Dana White threatened to banish you from the UFC forever only to allow you to compete again when your marketability increased, you might be a roidball.
(Matthew Polly is a scholar, a gentleman, and a regular contributor to Fightlinker.com - which of those doesn't belong with the others? His last book, American Shaolin, detailed his time living with monks in China and training kung fu. His new book coming out this fall will be about living in Vegas and trane-ing UFC. While Vegas wins in the fake boobs department, I hear the snake booze in China was better.)
