The Way of the Fight

by Georges St. Pierre

  Think about climbing a mountain. If you decide you’re going up Everest, you don’t start with a sprint. You’ll never make it out of base camp if you do that. The secret is twofold: make sure your approach is consistent and steady so that you can maintain the progress you’re making as your journey continues.

  MENTOR: Every day, Georges got better. I weighed 240 pounds and he didn’t, and every day I martyred him and he never complained. Not once, not ever. He just kept coming back. I didn’t try to hurt him in any way possible, but I put pressure on him at the right moments in the right places so he could feel, process and understand the full extent of pain. A fighter must understand the pain he inflicts on another if he is to know any success at all.

  Martyrdom for me meant taking him to the threshold of pain without ever breaking anything. It’s what the Russians do. The Japanese too. I took him to the limit because that’s when we’d discover how mad he really is. He could have been physically strong but weak-willed, which means one day he would have broken. But because he’s traditional and proud, he never even dared tell me “I’m tired” or “I’m hurting.”

  Even though I make the process sound simple, I have often struggled. The Matt Serra loss is a great example. It was my first title defense, and I didn’t prepare for it right. Serra was an 11–1 underdog. Nobody thought he had a chance against me. And I believed them. I thought I was invincible. I thought I was going to easily kick his butt. We spent six weeks sparring and training together as part of an Ultimate Fighter TV show, yet I still underestimated his skills and his power. In fact, I didn’t believe he even deserved to be in the octagon, challenging me for the title I had won not so long before. In truth, I believed what people were saying: that I was the greatest fighter of all time in my category.

  And what happened?

  Well, it turned out it was easy. Matt Serra kicked my ass. And he did it in under two minutes. I tried to duck the blow but got stunned. It was a shot to the back of the head—which, done intentionally, is illegal, but I had caused it, and instead of steadying my emotions and regaining my calm and my senses, I lost all of my composure. The first thought in my blurry head was I need to hit him hard and show everybody my superiority, but I was so shaken up that there was no precision in any of my counterstrikes. But he sure knew where and how to hit me. And so that first shot to my head triggered a domino effect in Serra’s favor.

  Serra is known for his wrestling and grappling. He doesn’t have a reputation as a lethal striker or a big puncher, so I wasn’t expecting that from him. I ignored any danger of him standing right in front of me. That was half the problem—forgetting what I had learned so many years before on that snowy mountain: the element of surprise. The other half was that I didn’t react well to the surprise either. When he first rocked me, I should have stepped back, caught my breath and protected myself. I should have retreated and reorganized. I should have focused on regaining my composure. But instead, I followed my emotional impulse and went for it.

  I wanted to knock him out. I missed with my counter and exposed my head. This isn’t good at the best of times, especially for a fighter like me who tries to avoid getting hit. So he immediately put five or six shots straight on me, one after the other—bang-bang-bang-bang-bang—a nice combination, and then I went down to the mat. And there I was, lying on my back with Matt Serra on top of me, about to strip me of my title. When I went down I had no idea where I was. All I knew was that I was in major trouble. I had no choice but to tap out.

  So what really killed me was my pride. I’ve taken bigger shots from better punchers—people like Josh Koscheck, for example, who can really strike some big blows. But I was expecting those shots because they were known strikers. But for Serra, the pride I brought into the cage reacted before my mind could, and I lost. Now, when my team and I prepare for a fight, we not only plan for every possible scenario, which I replay in my head repeatedly, but I also keep my pride in check.

  It didn’t get better in the moments right after the Serra fight. I was stunned and alone in the center of the octagon. Leaning my head against a towel, I could only feel shame. Shame for letting everybody down, for failing myself and for deceiving my fans. I just wanted to find a place where I could hide, where no one would see me. It was a horrible feeling. And then Rodolphe walked into the octagon and came straight to me. I looked up at him and said, “Rodolphe, this is the worst day of my life.” I meant it too.

  MENTOR: I pushed his limits, and I couldn’t believe how much he could take. I’d see the tears well up in the corners of his eyes, but he stayed silent. He never complained. He just kept treating me respectfully. To me, this meant that he’d never refuse to enter the ring out of fear. I knew that just with a look or a word, he’d hold his head high, fear or not. He showed me what real courage was, which meant that I had a responsibility to him. To help him learn and shine.

  For weeks and months after this fight, all I could think about was revenge. It was a waste of energy. I knew—or should have known—that I wouldn’t get a shot at revenge straight away. I’d have to earn it. I’d have to fight other lesser challengers before getting a chance. It would take time, and patience.

  But Serra wouldn’t leave my thoughts. He haunted me for a long time. I had steps to go through before getting back to where I needed to go.

  Luckily for me, I talked about it. A friend of mine told me it was like I was carrying a brick with me every day, everywhere I went. And the thing about carrying a brick is that it gets heavier and heavier with time. My buddy’s proposed solution was to actually get a real brick, write Serra’s name on it, and carry it everywhere with me. This way I’d realize the kind of weight I was carrying with me everywhere, and the amount of energy it took to keep it slung onto my shoulder.

  And so I literally got the brick and wrote down his name. I took it with me for car rides to the gym. I carried it in my bag. When I went to bed, I placed it on the desk just outside my door, so that the moment I walked out of my room in the morning, I’d see it and be reminded of it.

  I carried that darn thing all over the place. I’d see and feel its weight all the time, and it was driving me nuts. It really bothered me. The easy thing would have been to throw it away, but that would have been a short-term solution. I couldn’t get rid of it by pretending. If I was being honest with myself, I knew I had to keep it for a while. I could have played a game and tossed it away, but that would have been untrue. The demons were still there, and I couldn’t afford to do that. I learned you have to let the trick work on you, and it takes time.

  Then something magical happened. Josh Koscheck began trash-talking.

  At a certain point I realized that, slowly, I’d naturally begun focusing more on Koscheck than on Serra. It was perfect. Without realizing it as it happened, my mind was slowly putting Serra behind me and bringing all of my attention to Koscheck. It was being logical and diverting my energy away from the emotional loss to Serra.

  One night, I looked at the brick and knew it was time. I don’t know how to explain it except that I just knew, I felt it in my gut. So I got in my car and drove from Nuns’ Island, where my condo is, to Île Ste-Hélène, just outside downtown Montreal. It was dark, but the moon was so bright it cut my shadow into the sidewalk. I found a spot on the bridge and observed the light hitting the water, moving in waves. I took a long look around and confirmed that I was alone. I got the brick out of my bag, held it up and took one last good look at Serra’s name. And then I reached my arm back, hurled it forward in a long loop, and tossed that brick as far away as I could. I watched it hit the water—SPLASH!—and sink away where nobody would ever find it. And with it went the demon of Matt Serra.

  It felt really good. It was total deliverance. And it was immediate.

  Eventually, the loss taught me a new kind of patience. It showed me the value of waiting for the right opportunity and accepting life’s cycle. It gave me the time to acquire knowledge about myself to prevent my losing to Serra ever again. />
  MENTOR: People, fans mostly, don’t understand the professional Georges, the champion who keeps winning. They see him in the ring for a twenty-five-minute fight and they complain that he didn’t do much. Well, they have no idea what they’re talking about. First of all, Georges is the champion. Second, inside the ring he’s an assassin, a killer, but he can’t show you that side all the time. When he’s training he can show you how feeble and weak and ridiculous you are as an opponent, because he can afford to. In the ring during a fight, he cannot do that. People don’t understand that. In the octagon, it’s payday that’s coming, it’s his job, and that job, first and foremost, is to win. It’s great if we can earn a payday and make people happy, but it’s not the top priority. That day, he’s risking his life. And if he loses, everybody leaves him behind. People forget that. If Georges loses tomorrow, people will say he’s done. These people have no idea what the word spectacular means.

  At the beginning of my career, my style was much more physical and much less technical, which is natural: I was very naive and didn’t have a great amount of knowledge or wisdom. As I progressed, losses to Serra and Hughes forced me to ask myself what I was doing wrong.

  Throughout my career, I’ve compensated a lot with my athleticism. Sometimes I’ve just overpowered guys. That’s a natural advantage, and I’d never discount that one. I’m a good athlete and I can win with that sometimes, but if I had made this a staple of my strategy, I would never have been a good champion. It would have been a short-term mentality to try and compensate for a mental absence of vision.

  Genetics and athleticism can be a blessing, but for some they can be a curse. If you’re physically so gifted that you don’t need a lot of effort to be the best when you’re young, you can lose out on learning the tough lessons that the little brothers and sisters learn. If it’s always easy, it’s hard to believe that one day it’s going to get harder. Young people at some point need to be tested, because their reaction will determine their path. So genetics is good to those who combine it with a mental outlook aimed at understanding the growth potential in struggle, defeat and hunger.

  MENTOR: Only an idiot constantly tries to knock the other guy out. But to destroy an opponent by repeatedly striking him in the same place over twenty-five minutes, that’s genius. That’s a champion. Not everyone can do that. True sportsmen understand the difference.

  I’ve been down a number of times in my life, but I was ten years old the first time I knocked somebody out. It was on some street corner in St-Isidore, and this kid was giving me a hard time. He wanted to fight, to hit me. He grabbed my shoulders and was trying to yank me down hard, stiffly. I kicked him in the stomach. I kicked as hard as I could, lunging forward, and made a direct contact. I remember the oomph. He went straight down.

  That was the first time, and I’ll always remember that feeling.

  When you really connect with another human being, when you really hit your opponent fully, the most impressive part of the act isn’t actually the impact. Many people are quite mistaken when they think the connection is the thing. The recoil’s the thing.

  Feet determine where you position your body laterally and how you move in relation to the octagon and your opponent. But then your feet have to connect with your brain, and the way they do that is through your eyes.

  The eyes determine the punching angle, another very key element in a successful fight. I got to learn that from an unsuccessful fight against Matt Serra. Serra has a very strong overhand right punch. When I fought him the first time, I fought tall, and that was a bad idea. When you fight tall against a shorter opponent with a strong right punch, you open yourself (and the entire left flank of your head) to his strength because you’re punching down. You leave nothing to protect yourself and that’s what happened against Serra. I got tagged, repeatedly. Thanks to this defeat, though, I learned about punching angles, which I never used to pay attention to.

  The key is always being lined up with your opponent’s eyes, like you’re trying to stay on a level with a wave in the ocean. Up and down, side to side, stay level with his eyes. Like he’s your prey. When you stay lined up with his eyes, you punch straight out instead of down, which increases the power of your impact, maximizes your reach and lets your shoulder protect your face from his overhand right.

  It’s basic geometry, really, and most of you learned that early on in high school. So take a right-angle triangle, turn it on its side so the hypothenuse points from the ground to your opponent, and you’ll see how your eye-level punch is both efficient and direct. Anything else is a lack of productivity.

  As a fighter progresses, again, he or she develops the right to play with the rules and turn them to his or her advantage. When I fight an overhand puncher now, I tend to crouch down. When I fight a good kicker, I will often stand taller. You have to know your opponent, not just yourself. Fighting Matt Hughes, for example, isn’t the same thing as fighting Josh Koscheck. Hughes can slam you down like a basketball, while Koscheck can knock you out with a single overhand right. The difference isn’t subtle, it’s lethal. After landing the strike cleanly, as you pull away, you can feel all of his energy draining out of his body. Like you’ve opened a wound. You can sense all of his force pouring out of his body. You can feel a surge, and your entire being realizes that the opponent has been defeated, absorbed in a single blow. His soul, all his energy, gone—poof!—just like that. In one connection.

  When I look back at my knockouts in MMA, the guys I’ve finalized in professional fights are guys who came in strong against me. Not even Koscheck tried that, not against me. He knew better. A lot of people complained that I didn’t open up my power game against him. Well, neither did he. He didn’t take any risks, so why should I have taken them?

  MENTOR: Georges’ intellect is unique. He is more than my student, he is my teacher. He has given me back so much learning and wisdom. When I left for Korea for a fight one time, I got on the plane and flew for twenty-four hours. I was tired, empty. I got there and climbed into the ring, but I’d lost the desire to fight. I wanted to leave, to be elsewhere. On the day of the fight, I sat alone in my dressing room and I pulled on the gloves, but I was down. When it came to my turn, I didn’t feel like it. But then I heard those fans cheering against me. Some threw objects at me, cans, and when I heard that and heard them wanting to see me get hurt, I thought of Georges. I thought of the things we’d learned together. I thought, Wow, you won’t get to do this tomorrow, or later on, or in a little while. It’s now. Sleep will come later, but this you must face now. Go do what you have to do. And if you get destroyed in fifteen minutes, that’ll be that. But I exploded that guy. It took less than a minute and I destroyed him completely. Afterward, I slept and ate and went home.

  A sports journalist told me two stories about athletes he has written about in his life. The first was about Maurice “Rocket” Richard, the greatest hockey player who ever lived. The Rocket scored over five hundred goals during his career, and was the first man ever to score fifty goals in fifty games. What he accomplished was unbelievable.

  My journalist friend was telling me that the Rocket used to spend a lot of time alone on the ice at the Montreal Forum, practicing his shot. One day, a television crew came to film him, and they asked him, “Rocket, what’s the secret for scoring all those goals?”

  Rocket stopped what he was doing and looked at them, and then he said, “I shoot the puck at the net.” Then he got the bucket of pucks out and started shooting pucks at the net. They all went in. That was his great secret.

  The other story was about Mike Strange of Niagara Falls, a great amateur Canadian boxer who won gold medals for Canada at the Commonwealth Games. It was 1998 and my journalist friend was writing a feature about Strange during the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Strange was known as a technician, a scientific boxer, and my friend wanted to write a story about that, the precision and the art of boxing. So he asked a long question about technicalities and science, because
he wanted Strange to talk about the scoring system in boxing and how to win on the scorecards.

  Strange looked at him and said, “Hit and don’t get hit. That’s how you win a fight.”

  So the geometrists can discuss triangles and Pythagoras and his theorem all they want, but please never forget that a big part of it is really simple. It’s a straight line and it’s right in front of your eyes, so just follow it.

  MENTOR: Georges is always willing to go out. He’s always the first one in the ring, the last one out. He’s the last one in the showers but the first to be by the door, clean, dressed and ready to go. He always makes time for life. He trains three hours, then he eats and finishes with an enormous chocolate cake so you think you’re home free and you can relax, but then he says, “We have to hurry to the next training session and start before digestion begins or else we’re screwed.” And then your spirit fails and you can’t believe he’s still going. And then he goes to lift weights and do jumping jacks or some other insane activity, and then you go eat again. He takes you to an oyster bar or something and you think, Okay, THIS time we’re okay because nobody can eat oysters and then train, again. But then you finish eating and he takes you to yoga. And so you think, It’s yoga, how bad can it be? But he takes you to some goddamn hot-room yoga for two hours at night after oysters, and while you’re puking your oysters into the garbage can, he’s just going through the exercises and stretching.

  Another fighter who reads this story will see himself and the one time he got up and decided he was too tired or too sore to train. The money’s in the bank. It can get done tomorrow. One day off won’t hurt. Whatever the excuse is, it exists. But not for Georges.