Life, Art, and Mixed Martial Arts

The news thrilled fight fans across the world—and across martial disciplines. The long-anticipated match at a catch weight of 154 pounds pitting McGregor, the UFC’s lightweight champion with a record of 21-3, against an undefeated Mayweather, at 49-0, who was the best pound for pound boxer in the world before stepping away from the ring 23 months ago, is supposed to answer the question, who’s tougher—boxers or MMA fighters?

McGregor is 12 years younger than Mayweather, he’s a southpaw, and left-handers have given Mayweather some trouble in the past. He’s a bit bigger than Floyd and, according to his MMA sparring partner, has the power to do a lot of damage. And yet the Dublin-born star is a huge underdog, because the two sides have agreed to a boxing match, not an MMA free for all in which McGregor would get to use his other pugilistic skills, like kicking and grappling. McGregor just doesn’t have much boxing experience.

Freddie Roach, the top boxing trainer in the world—he also handles MMA fighters—recently said it would take three years to get McGregor up to speed in the ring. One of Roach’s boxers, South African champion Chris Van Heerden, made pretty easy work of McGregor in a sparring session last year that was widely viewed on YouTube by fight fans. Yesterday Van Heerden tweeted: “People telling me Mayweather will have his hands full trying to land on McGregor—STOP IT! I respect McGregor BUT I ain’t Floyd and I landed.”

It’s kind of a shame that McGregor won’t be allowed to use his MMA arsenal, even as I suspect fight promoters were eager to avoid a replay of the 1976 Muhammad Ali exhibition with judoka Antonio Ioki, a circus in which the latter keeps sprawling to the ground in an effort to bring down Ali. MMA is a great sport, even the Ur-sport. If the world’s memory of competitive athletics were to be wiped out, mankind would be able to re-engineer MMA from basic human instinct—along with perhaps women’s beach volleyball. MMA is also deeply rooted in American culture.

Meryl Streep made headlines at the Golden Globes in January when, in ripping into President Trump and his stance on immigration, she took a shot at MMA. “So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners,” said Streep. “And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” In fact, Hollywood and MMA are related, via the same foreign-born American icon—Bruce Lee, the progenitor of both mixed martial arts and the modern Hollywood action film.

There’s an old saying in martial arts, attributed to some Asian sage, “put all the masters of different styles in one room and they will agree. Put their disciples in one room and they will all disagree.” What that means is that masters understand that all real forms of fighting observe the same principles. Their disciples, however, are consumed instead with proving the style that they’ve devoted their lives to learning are superior to all other forms.

China was recently in upheavals after a local MMA fighter finished off a tai chi master in about 10 seconds—a result that was seen as a scandal tarnishing a jewel of traditional Chinese culture. The fact is that tai chi, or wushu, is a very serious and lethal martial art when the practitioner can really fight. Film star Donnie Yen, for instance, recently in Rogue One, is a wushu master, and adept in lots of other martial arts, including boxing. He can fight. His mother Bow Sim Mark may be one of the greatest martial artists who ever lived. You wouldn’t want to make that Boston native angry.

Bruce Lee understood that fighting wasn’t about particular styles but rather what was most effective in getting the job done. As he famously said, “Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.” Interestingly, one of the places that Lee borrowed from was Hollywood, in particular certain forms of fight choreography. If you look at the fight stances he uses in his pictures, they tend to be much wider than regular fight stances, where it’s important to stay light on your toes in order to change angles. The stances Lee uses in his pictures often come from fencing. He knew they looked clearer, more defined, and more dramatic on film, which is obvious to anyone who’s seen an Errol Flynn picture.

Lee also gave back to Hollywood. Indeed, without Bruce Lee the modern action film does not exist. Consider the fight scenes staged in barrooms in old-time Western films. You’d have to be halfway through a bottle of rye not to be able to slip those wild haymakers Hoss and Clem are throwing. Now fast forward to, say, the Jason Bourne movies—the action is tighter, the distance is closer, and the punches sharper and shorter. It looks like they are really fighting and any mistake would be deadly and that’s why they have to improvise with whatever comes to hand, like a rolled-up magazine. This is Bruce Lee’s legacy in Hollywood. In fact, much of contemporary fight choreography is based on escrima, a Fillipino martial art, with open hand, sticks, and knives, or machetes, that was popularized by one of Lee’s friends and students, Dan Inosanto. It’s a beautiful and very fluid style, which makes it great for film. Here, for instance, is Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt training Kerri Russell’s character with escrima sticks in Mission Impossible III.

Lee’s influence on MMA is well known. You could almost say that the UFC started as a kind of laboratory testing out his principles about fighting, with combatants trying out the efficacy of their forms on people who were looking to take their heads off. It came as a surprise to many when a family of relatively small Brazilian fighters employing their own form of jiu-jitsu destroyed much larger competition in the UFC, but the Gracies provided one of the building blocks of MMA (David Samuels has an excellent story here on the Gracies). There are very few MMA fighters today who do not spend a considerable amount of time working on their Brazilian jiu-jitsu ground game.

That’s one reason why McGregor is at a disadvantage with Mayweather. All the time he’s spent working on other parts of his discipline (like kicks and clinches, and knees and elbows, etc) have absorbed hours—make that years—that might otherwise have been devoted to striking, which is how MMA fighters typically describe what boxers do. As Mayweather understands—and he learned from his father and uncle, both excellent professional boxers—there’s more to it than just punching the other guy.

Every time you get in the ring with someone who throws punches professionally, you can get badly hurt. You decrease the chances of getting hit if you avoid mistakes, since any mistake can be costly. For instance, watch here where Mayweather is faked out of his famous shoulder-roll position and eats a big right hand from Shane Mosley. That could have been it for Mayweather but he managed to keep Mosley off him long enough to recover.

It’s always like that for a boxer like Mayweather—a three-minute round is a series of maybe a dozen skirmishes where you’re always fighting for an angle to get a position on your opponent. You jab to get an angle, or throw a lead right and step over for an opening where there might be another opportunity for another punch. Or there’s not. So move again. Jab. Move. Change the angle. Jab. Don’t let your opponent get the angle where he might be able to get off a good shot against you. If you lose one skirmish badly enough, you can get knocked out. Lose more skirmishes than the other guy and you lose the round. If you lose too many of the hundreds of skirmishes over 12 rounds, you lose the fight.

This is why lots of fight fans dislike Mayweather—they say he’s too conservative. Sure, he doesn’t want to get hurt and he wants to win—so he’s thinking how does he win each and every skirmish all night long. Or how does he force his opponent into making a mistake before he does? Floyd is the kind of counterpuncher who not only finds openings after his opponent misses, he exploits what his opponents perceive to be their strengths.

And this is the other reason McGregor is at a disadvantage. Even if he could use his MMA skills in the August fight and, say, attempt a takedown, Floyd has been gauging distance and angles his whole career. For instance, see what happened when Ricky Hatton rushed in a little carelessly— Mayweather moved just a bit and put him down with a check-hook.

Still, Floyd Mayweather knows that Conor McGregor is a tough fellow. And he knows that anything can happen when you get in the ring with another man who makes a living out of hitting other men hard.