Congratulations Stipe Miocic.
Cleveland’s sports drought is legendary; their last championship was in 1964. As in the last time that city hoisted a world trophy was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Stipe’s right hand was the nourishing rain, bringing hope to the parched wasteland of Cleveland fans’ dreams.
Walt Whitman eat your heart out. Despite it all, it was bittersweet because Fabricio Werdum was an elite fighter than got slept because he couldn’t break his worst habit.
Werdum has never had the best defense when striking. He tends to keep his head on the center line, throw naked kicks right in front of his opponent and pump 1-2s without a general idea of what he wants to do with them. But his biggest flaw is one that seems to be shared by many Brazilians: dropping his non-punching hand when flurrying.
Jose Aldo and Renan Barao managed to dominate their divisions without shoring up this weakness because they rarely ever flurried; both the Nova Uniao greats picked away at their opponents with thudding leg kicks and used ramrod straight punches to punish them for coming closer. Fabricio is a bit of anomaly because he had none of the finesse displayed by his Brazilian compatriots and got hit a lot.
But Fabricio never bothered learning to keep his hands up because he didn’t need to.
You know how in RPG video games, each character class starts out with advantageous traits? Fabricio Werdum ended up with “Ground Wizard” and “+30 Resistance to Head Trauma”. That’s like giving your Woodsmen “Deadeye Accuracy” and “Mastery of Whale Song”; two cool skills that have very little to do with each other. But Fabricio made it work by realizing it meant he never had to worry about being on the ground.
Werdum could throw with almost reckless abandon because he’d recover quickly from knockdowns and few fighters want to be in his guard.
Many opponents are hesitant to trade with man who can charge forward with combinations and suffer almost no visible damage. Werdum was never forced to pay for his biggest flaw and he opted to add new skills instead of trying to alter his muscle memory.
But you can’t spend your entire life/career compensating for weaknesses rather than fixing them.
James Harden proved you can’t make up for non-existent defense by renting out the foul line, I proved that you can’t make up for a lackluster GPA with fantastic test scores and Fabricio Werdum proved that you can’t compensate for bad defense with striking volume. Eventually the bad habits get ingrained and they’re hard to break.
If you want proof, look at what happened before Stipe sent Werdum’s soul into cheap seats. The now ex-champion flurried Stipe towards the fence and was starched by a powerful right hand.
As we’ve covered, Werdum eats punches like few other heavyweights can and immediately charged forward again. Then something cool happened.
Werdum smothered Stipe’s right hand across his body on the next flurry.
There is a certain admiration to be had for a fighter who immediately makes adjustments after losing an exchange or scramble. Many fighters, even at the elite level, will usually have to be “beaten” a few times before they make the necessary adjustments. They’ll allow their leg to hacked to pieces before checking or get taken down multiple times before learning to stop throwing kicks and knees. Werdum had the mind of a champion and adjusted immediately by swatting the troublesome arm across Stipe’s body.
And then years of muscle memory and bad technique came back to haunt him.
After parrying the counter hand, Werdum threw a right hand and when he did, he allowed his left hand to drop away from his chin. The right hand which he had taken the trouble to parry whipped outside his field of vision and severed him from his consciousness.
He didn’t even throw his left hand, meaning that if had just kept his hand near his chin he would have survived. A wonderful, on the fly adjustment undone by a bad habit.
*I appreciate you guys rolling with me on this one, first piece in a while!
