The Way of the Fight

by Georges St. Pierre

  Then again, it isn’t much better when you lose. When you’re still the title holder, people say you’re a great Quebecer, a fantastic fighter, and you represent all these great, wonderful, beautiful, perfect, gorgeous things. After my loss to Matt Serra, I realized it’s the opposite. The road back down to reality is slick. You don’t get to choose when the slide ends. You don’t get to decide where it stops. You go down on your backside. There are no stop signs on this road, there’s only rock bottom. People start saying things like, “He wasn’t that good. We knew it all along. It was all luck.” Both positions are extreme, and both are fundamentally wrong. You’re always the same person, and you’re always just trying to get better at something.

  What it means to me is that truth-sayers hold the key. Opinions from people whose emotions matter more than facts are flawed. They aren’t what you need if you want to become greater at something. What you need is competing evidence, a reason to keep striving for even greater things. Telling a person what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear is not really a winning combination.

  I believe that real friends are truth-sayers. They’ll tell you when you’re full of crap, or when you’re being lazy, or when you’re being rude, or when your ass looks fat in those jeans . . .

  MASTER: Whether or not I had ever met Georges St-Pierre, my life would be unchanged: I wake up, I teach Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu all day, and I come home at night. Certain aspects of my knowledge base would be deficient, but the living of my daily life would be the same. I have a belief that all human greatness is founded upon routine, that truly great human behavior is impossible without this central part of your life being set up and governed by routine. All greatness comes out of an investment in time and the perfection of skills that render you great. And so, show me almost any truly great person in the world who exhibits some kind of extraordinary skills, and I’ll show you a person whose life is governed largely by routine.

  That’s why we get along—because John and I are both obsessively compulsive. We will spend hours repeating a single technique, over and over again until I get it right. We will repeat the move. We will sit and discuss it, then start over again. We will block out all other things. We will restart until the world dissolves completely. Until nothing else matters or even exists. We will repeat it until it is mastered, no matter when that will be. One certainty, though: it will be.

  MASTER: What we have in common is that we are both perfectionists. That explains some of our greatest strengths and some of our greatest weaknesses. I’m a stickler for perfection and the application of technique, and sometimes my criticisms can be somewhat harsh. Yet, many was the time that I would show a class a technique, and then I would go away and teach other classes back to back. I would look over at the far side of the academy and see Georges, still working that same technique, having gone through six or seven training partners because no one else could keep up with the intensity of his own training.

  It’s like chewing a bite a hundred times to make sure you taste every single morsel of food: it makes things easier to process. And now I know: this is how I get better. I pick small things and I practice them until they’re perfect.

  I have no choice, because there are two kinds of people who do martial arts: those who practice a thousand different kicks one time each, and those who practice one kick a thousand times minimum.

  You can guess which group I belong to.

  MASTER: As cold as I am to the average person, I’m warm to the exceptional and the gifted. It’s natural, of course, that because Georges has become such a talented person, I should warm to him. But there’s more to it than that. Even for someone as cold-hearted as I, I recognize in him attributes it would take a colder heart than mine not to be impressed by. He’s extremely generous, he’s an extremely giving person, in some ways shockingly naive. He’s got this small-town charm that’s difficult to deny. He’s a genuinely good person who means well. Georges could, with his martial skills, be an absolute killer, but he’s not. He’s a consummate gentleman.

  The juxtaposition between his martial skills and the warmth of his character is impressive when you know him. It exhibits one of the great points that lies at the fundamental structure of all martial arts: control. Without controlling the most chaotic situation of all, which is a fight between two human beings, all control of other people begins with self-control. Georges is this guy with these tremendous martial skills, but he’d never use them in any context other than a professional fight (or if it was entirely appropriate to use them). And so he exhibits tremendous control over the skills that he has; that, I think, is the quintessential expression of what it is to be a martial artist.

  But I’m not perfect.

  I remember one time when I was fighting at the Bell Centre in Montreal. As I was walking toward the octagon, I took a look at the crowd. I have a good visual memory and can replay many of my fights and remember them blow by blow. But what happens right before a fight is often a blur. During my walk out, I rarely ever register the faces of the people or recognize who’s there because I’m so focused on what’s about to happen.

  On this occasion, I remember looking into the stands and seeing a face I recognized, and he was wearing sunglasses. I remember thinking: Why the heck is that guy wearing sunglasses indoors? That’s weird. I think I know him. Oh, that’s Luc Plamondon, the Quebec music star! Why is Luc Plamondon at my fight? And why is he wearing sunglasses? That’s weird.

  What is really weird is that I clearly remember stopping and thinking all these things until I stopped myself and came back into the present.

  Holy crap, I have to fight in three minutes. I need to wake up.

  And so I turned away from him and went on my way, and luckily regained my focus and won the fight.

  But that’s not the dumbest example of how my mind wanders at the worst of times. During one of my championship bouts, and I won’t tell you which one because the other fighter may be offended, I totally lost my focus in the middle of the action.

  I remember it was a very tactical fight, not a swing fest. I was standing over the challenger and had him wrapped up against the fence in a defensive position. Sometimes it can take many seconds to get your opponent in the best place for a submission hold or an all-out attack. Anyway, I remember that he was leaning against the fence and I was standing over him, and my eyes wandered into the stands—which, with arms and legs flying, is never a good idea. I noticed these beautiful long locks of brown hair attached to an extremely beautiful and sexy woman. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, especially when I realized it was Cindy Crawford.

  Holy crap, I thought, that’s Cindy Crawford, and man, she looks amazing. I kept staring at her until I caught sight of the man sitting in the seat next to her. He wasn’t as good-looking as her, and he certainly had noticed how I was looking at his girl. I thought: Holy crap, Cindy Crawford’s husband looks pissed off at me! He came here to see me fight, and here I am checking out his girl. I have to stop this.

  So I took one last good look at Cindy, because she’s so pretty, and then I went back to work. And I won again. Sure, it was risky and dumb, but I don’t think I had a choice. If you don’t believe me, you’ve never stared into Cindy Crawford’s eyes when she’s just a few feet away from you.

  MASTER: On the face of it, Georges shouldn’t be a successful person at all. He was never an outstanding student in school. At the time I met him, he was working odd jobs and didn’t really seem to have much going for him. And yet now he’s a recognized guy with millions of fans and is by all accounts extremely successful. This is largely because he had a tremendous sense of vision, he had an extremely clear idea of what he wanted to do and where he wanted to do it.

  Many people have a good idea of what they want to do in their lives, but they lack the discipline and the patience to work their way there. What anyone, regardless of whether or not they’re interested in martial arts, can take away from the story of GSP is the power of the marriage of vision wi
th discipline. The combination of those two can yield tremendous results. The secret is routine. There’s nothing more chaotic than a fight between two human beings. Who wins and who loses, even with trained athletes, is never certain. Show me the greatest mixed martial artist in the world, and there’s always a chance he’ll get knocked out by an also-ran. In the case of two untrained people fighting, it’s just wild chaos, and usually the more aggressive (or bigger) guy wins.

  The greatest lesson I have imparted to Georges has been to approach life with the outlook of probabilism. We live in a world of uncertainty. In a world of uncertainty, the best a man can do is stack the odds in his favor. To a certain degree, we are all subject to luck, circumstance, chance or fortune . . . call it what you will. Where there is no certainty, we must strive to create a set of conditions where we raise the probability to the greatest degree possible of bringing about a set of circumstances we want. Nowhere is this more true than in Georges’s life, than in the world of fighting.

  Outside the octagon, Georges is a complete gentleman. Inside the octagon, he’s a chess player. Great fighters find ways to be great that are often quite different. Some of them are destroyers, like Mike Tyson, who go in to intimidate and crush. Others are artists, like an Anderson Silva, who seem to float in an ethereal way and somehow, without appearing to be trying, achieve a spectacular victory. Georges is more of a scientist: a cold, rational thinker, bouncing probabilities, looking for ways to subvert his opponent’s attacks before he begins them. Maximizing the likelihood of his own success while minimizing the likelihood of his opponent’s.

  The key is to use the other person’s power. It’s like a chess game. You study each other, and you pick your points, his weak spots and how you think you can exploit them. Here’s an example of the way I fight professionally, especially when the other guy is the challenger: I start with trying to win a small exchange, maybe two. I want to score some points. After a couple of rounds, though, I’m hoping that, like in a chess game, I’m ahead by a few pawns. When this happens, the opponent, if he has a chance at all, will have to open up somewhat. He’ll be forced to take risks. That’s how the game works—when you’re the champion and you’re ahead on points, you don’t have to take risks. The other guy does, especially because he wants your title. He has to come and get it. And what usually happens when a fighter falls behind on points to a champion is that he opens up at the wrong time and eats it really good. Guys like Mayweather and Hopkins, they’ve understood that. Sugar Ray Leonard used his head the same way; he rarely took risks and won a lot of fights.

  Against Koscheck, I relied on my jab to build my lead, and I expected him to open up. It wasn’t my risk to take, it was his, and he, wisely, wasn’t willing to take it. I wouldn’t have either, and I didn’t. You can call it boring if you like, for me it’s a victory. If I’m behind, I’ll take the risk, but you’ll have to get me there.

  In my first fights—against Karo Parisyan, for example—I didn’t have a choice. I had to take chances and go all out. I constantly exposed myself to danger. That’s what it is when you’re just starting out.

  But I’ve changed a lot as a fighter since then. I try to get hit as little as possible. I aim to bring my opponent toward me so I can decide when to attack, or counterattack one of his weaknesses. I use the fencing stance to keep my measure from his lethal strikes and to set up my own attack.

  MASTER: And so the question arises: How will you control chaos? Why is it that when Georges St-Pierre is 22–2, most mixed martial artists are 10–10? Why are Georges and Anderson Silva nearly undefeated? What is different about these guys? How do they control such a chaotic situation? What I always advocated in my teaching of Georges is the high-percentage approach. Minimize the risk while maximizing the risk to your opponent.

  A lot of people have criticized me for the fight against Koscheck. They were disappointed because they wanted to see a knockout, they wanted me to go for it. Well, I didn’t “go for the knockout” against Koscheck, and there’s a reason for it: I didn’t need to. He didn’t go for it against me either, and he probably should have because he trailed for most of that fight. I started that fight with the jab and it helped me build a lead. Then I stuck with the jab and it helped keep Koscheck at a distance, it kept him honest. My jab worked so well that he and I both knew he’d have to take a big risk to get around it. In our sport, at our level, risk equals knockout, and not usually for the guy ahead in the fight. When you take a risk against me or Koscheck, the chances are you’re the one who’ll get knocked out. When people start understanding the science of mixed martial arts better, they’ll also understand this part of the fight game. In boxing, for example, when you look at a Hopkins or a Mayweather, you don’t complain when one of them wins a “scientific” battle. One day, that will be true too in MMA.

  As for me, even if my early fights weren’t studies in science, I knew instinctively that I had to showcase different styles and approaches to be successful. As a young fighter, I was already experimenting with a sudden, unpredictable (but for me logical) mix of styles. Against Spratt, for example, I made sure he couldn’t kick me and I took him to the ground, something everyone told me to avoid. Against Jay Hieron, I was using the ground-and-pound, and when he thought he had a handle on my game plan, I hit him with an unexpected right, out of the mixed karate and boxing method. And for my first fight against Hughes, I went for an early takedown and got him on his back. I was far from a finished product by any means, and even further from legitimate championship material, but I knew my opponents and picked up on surprising elements from a mix of styles to confuse and defeat them.

  The key for me was to understand the use of each of the three fighting stances. The three fighting stances complete one another—they meet and are connected by an invisible thread. Your brain is the one that controls the thread and makes strategic choices. Broken down simply, here’s how my brain works it: take a boxer to the ground, keep a wrestler on his feet, and never waste energy in transition to try and bring someone to ground—it’s too tiring. Think about it. A specialist will use a lot of energy to bring you to his strength. Tactically, you have to manage this so that, even if you don’t end up in his strength area, his energy reserves are depleted compared to yours. I often let guys out of a hold because I don’t want to waste energy trying to keep them down while they just sit there, breathing, resting and thinking.

  On top of that, as I’ve already said, I’m not the kind of fighter who gets hit a lot. Sure, I take some shots and I’ve been hurt, but I try to be as fluid as possible. One of my qualities is that I rarely get hit hard. I’m good at that. It’s very tactical and based on patience. I’d rather pick my spot than take one shot so I can try to deliver five in return. My body is my working tool and I don’t want to harm it, if possible. My favorite fighters are guys like Hopkins, who’s still fighting in his forties because he was able to control the big hits he took and minimize their long-term impact. He can roll with the punches. It’s all about absorption and constantly moving and staying out of the striking axis. Simply getting out of the way. Sometimes you take a shot, but not a direct shot. Roll, be fluid and never stay right in front of your opponent.

  MASTER: Georges is a man of two worlds. He has learned (and continues to learn) martial arts as a traditionalist—the martial art of wrestling, the martial art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, et cetera. But more importantly, he transcended those arts when he became a mixed martial artist. That’s where he became inventive, creative, that’s where he stepped beyond the influence of his masters and became a master himself. He became a master of something that none of his masters were familiar with. Georges is one of the most inventive and creative people I have ever met.

  When you analyze Georges as a martial artist, you must consider his world view. At the deepest level, his world view is steeped in the idea of evolutionary theory. That’s why he’s obsessed with the study of ancient life forms, with paleontology. He’s fascinated by who made th
e grade and who died out. He sees life in Darwinian terms: everything is a struggle for limited resources. All life is competition, in other words. And there’s no more perfect metaphor for competition than the life of a fighter. It is a competition for a very limited resource: a championship belt. The competition is intense and Darwinian in the extreme. You have to keep evolving, moving forward.

  I have a friend who once told me that he doesn’t like scary movies, and I asked why. His answer: because they’re scary.

  Makes sense. He doesn’t invite fear into his imagination and thus his life. I try to do the same thing because, quite frankly, I have an active enough imagination—it doesn’t need someone else’s imagination activating new illusory fears. Fear and the people who promote it drain my energy.

  This all sounds so simple, but the point that needs to be made here is about who we let into our inner circles and the environment we create for ourselves.

  Right before my first championship fight against Matt Hughes, the atmosphere was unbelievably dreary. People looked at me like it was the last time they were going to see me, like I was off to major surgery or about to go to war. And then, to make it worse, I’d turn on the television and catch footage of Matt Hughes on different channels. It seemed like he was everywhere. Like all the channels were showing the great Matt Hughes, my idol, slamming people into the ground. I was already scared as hell, and everyone around me with their words of “consolation” made it worse. Then they’d see Hughes walk by, and they’d point and whisper loudly: “There he is, there’s Hughes! There’s the champ!”

  My dad leaned in close and, with a “comforting” hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes and whispered, “It’ll be okay.”