On Saturday June 23, Lyoto Machida won the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) light heavyweight championship after stopping champion Rashad Evans in the second round with a flurry of blows that, according to the moment’s conventional wisdom, he should not have been able to throw.
To save you the suspense, let me address right now why philosophers and other such deep thinkers should be drawn to the UFC and mixed martial arts: More than any phenomenon of today’s culture, the UFC provides one of the most direct, immediate and sometimes brutal example of paradigm change. What is accepted practice at one moment can change in a flash. Truths do not gradually blend into new truths. What happens is that old truths are blasted away in the blink of an eye. In the UFC we see this kind of explosive change all the time. In fact, what makes the UFC so interesting is that it has condensed hundreds of years of evolution into two decades. Sometimes, the creature called Mixed Martial Arts changes form perceptibly in the space of one five minute round.
In the early nineties, when the UFC emerged onto the martial arts scene, it was on the fringes of legality and was compared to human cockfighting, but it very quickly answered the question that had always been bandied about in fighting circles: can a wrestler beat a boxer? The remarkable Royce Gracie of the Gracie Brazilian jiu jitsu dynasty (a style of jiu jitsu that emphasizes ground fighting, joint locks and choke holds, as well as a highly effective method of fighting while lying on your back) proved that striking techniques were all but useless when faced with an opponent who could take you to the ground. The boxers often found themselves pinned helplessly to the mat being pounded, choked or joint-locked into submission. The early UFCs were quite startling because weight classes had not yet become part of the sport and Royce Gracie would regularly face and defeat opponents who outweighed him by a hundred pounds or more. This was the first big shift, and it threatened to render strikers obsolete.
But like any organism threatened with extinction, the strikers learned to adapt in two ways. First, they learned the very techniques that had defeated them. The popularity of Brazilian Jiu jitsu exploded (walk downtown in most medium to large cities these days and I guarantee you will see a martial arts school claiming to teach Brazilian Jiu jitsu, grappling, or mixed martial arts). Second, the strikers learned to defend against techniques that were once a practical guarantee of defeat. For example, the once undefendable technique called the rear naked choke, which consists of taking an opponent’s back, hooking your legs around his, putting the arm around his neck and securing it with the other arm, tightening until the opponent loses consciousness or gives up by “tapping out,” can now be defended by the clever maneuver of attacking not the choking arm but the supporting arm, so that the choke cannot be locked up.
rear naked choke
Many a striker has survived until the end of a round by preventing his opponent from cinching up the hold. They also learned a technique called a “sprawl” which involves throwing your legs back and outward as an opponent rushes in to take you down to the mat, in effect creating a tripod from your two legs and the opponent’s entire body.
In a properly executed sprawl, the defender ends up with the attacker’s head under his arm and his legs position such that he can knee or strike at will. In fact, the strikers have made a spectacular comeback in UFC. Once they could defend against ground techniques, being taken down was no longer a foregone conclusion, and spectators were treated to several highlight-reel head-kick knockouts worthy of a Van Damme film — George St Pierre’s knockout of Matt Hughes, Gabriel Gonzaga’s of Mirko Cro-cop, and the devastating knockout of Sean Salmon by Rashad Evans.
By the beginning of the 21st century there was a new kind of mixed martial artist, a hybrid of striker and grappler who constantly developed and refined his techniques. The great fighters of the last few years — George St Pierre, Anderson Silva, Lyoto Machida — have all been great combinations of strikers and grapplers. They fuse the effective techniques of Jiu jitsu, wrestling and Muay Thai (which has evolved into probably the key — though not the only — striking style in mixed martial arts, with its powerful leg kicks, and crushing knees and elbows).
On Saturday May 23rd, we may have seen a something new. Indeed, there was an unmistakable sense that some threshold had been crossed. As Rashad Evans lay beaten and panting on the mat, the commentator Joe Rogan announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Machida era,” and Machida himself exclaimed triumphantly “Karate is back!”
I have watched the fight at least a dozen times already and I have the sense of watching a magician performing a trick. I see what has happened. I just don’t know how it happened. Machida, who learned his karate from his father, Yoshizo Machida, fights from a karate stance, which keeps his body out of the range of most techniques his opponent will use. He is also (somehow) able to strike very explosively and fluidly from that stance, using the footwork techniques that his father developed to allow him to fight taller men. He should not be able to do this so effectively because he is breaking one of the main rules of striking, which is that you cannot strike effectively when you are leaning away from your opponent. It was clear that no one — commentators, fight experts, or Rashad Evans’ trainers — could penetrate the style. Evans was clearly confused throughout the fight, like a man engaged in a battle with a hologram that could hit but not be hit (indeed, Machida’s proclaimed goal of being hit as little as possible is itself a shift in the often reckless UFC ethos of toughness and the willingness to endure punishment). In fighting there is no leeway, no grey area, no fudging results. The better idea walks out of the octagon. The weaker idea is carried out.
And I say very deliberately that it is the stronger idea that wins. Combat is theory embodied. Fight trainers are second to none in their tendency to commit to certain theories of fighting. Is it better to be a devastating striker, or a solid wrestler? Is it better to do a few techniques perfectly or many techniques competently? Is aggression more effective than counterattack? Most of the great fights in history have taken place nowhere else but in the imaginations of fight theorists (In fact, there is a new series called Deadliest Warrior that pits fighting styles against each other based on computer analysis of weapons and techniques, styles that are historically and geographically worlds apart: Maori vs Shaolin, Apache vs Gladiator, Ninja vs Spartan, and so on). The uniqueness of mixed martial arts lies in the fact that it provides, finally, an indisputable proving ground for theories.
Lyoto Machida has, once again, shifted the ground under mma’s feet. By introducing a striking style based on karate, he has made himself much more difficult to hit, introduced a far more powerful form of counterattack, and raised the strategic value of defense and mental focus. What we will see in the next year or two is Machida (and eventually other young fighters using his style) beating challengers who are still using older (and now outdated) striking styles.
There is very little that is peaceful and serene about truth’s progress. What is true today will, with one blow, suddenly become untrue, but will struggle along nonetheless being defeated and defeated until it must pass from history. This is where we live, among new truths that rearrange the terms of the world, and old truths that keep struggling, sometimes gaining a victory (someone may score a lucky victory over Machida), but existing now only as the memory of a world that was once the true world.