Issue 087

April 2012

Trash-talking your rival is fine, but when the best fighters step into the Octagon they keep their emotions in check.

Can fighters succeed when they are fueled by hate? Does genuine hatred for an opponent restrict a combatant from performing at his or her best? How do fighters keep that hatred at bay? Or should they even consider doing so?

Can such a force – destructive in ‘real’ life – be channeled in a sporting, or fighting, environment? Fighters Only tracked down one of combat sport’s most sought-after psychologists, peak performance coach Brian Cain, who delivered his expert view on how that anger can make certain fighters ‘tick’.

 Let’s be honest: hatred helps to sell pay-per-views. You only have to study the UFC’s business model. It’s predicated on spectacle, and arguably follows a line from the WWE. Some of the ‘hate’ is merely pre-fight build-up which gets the fans enthusing over the contest. But deeper forces are actually at work, some natural, others invented.

Cain, a sports psychologist specializing in focusing the mind of elite competitors in a range of sports, has helped several fighters, among them Georges St Pierre. He offered a fascinating, detailed analysis for Fighters Only of the different mentalities found in the fight sport industry.

“In the mental game of boxing, MMA and combat sports, it’s never either good or bad. It’s always both good and bad – it’s going to be good when you hate somebody and you get to punch them in the face, but the downside is that when you get into a fight with a personal vendetta you can get out of control emotionally and throw away your game plan,” Cain says.

“That’s the trap of fighting out of hate. You get into the Octagon or the game and you get into a street fight. Look at Donald Cerrone and Nate Diaz recently. I don’t know if there was a hatred between those two, it seems like maybe there was, but I don’t know. In my view, what went on before the contest affected the man I would see as the more accomplished fighter.

“For me, that was Cerrone. In my view, he was the more skilled fighter [on paper], but Diaz used the mental aspect of the game to his advantage because one of the things we found out was that it’s not the best fighter who wins, it’s always the guy who fights the best on that night. Diaz made it his night.”

Does Cain recognize a methodology in the chaos that the Diaz brothers create? “What’s good for some is not for others, it’s good and bad and I want to make that point really clear. What the Diaz brothers have figured out is a system and a routine that they follow to keep themselves motivated for a fight and to go out there and perform at their best. It works for them, it may not work for someone else. With some fighters, if they make it personal and they get into the hatred game then they got out of control emotionally. One of the most important factors in performing at your best in MMA is emotional control.”

As observers and fans we often look at the behavior of fighters immediately after a contest. We admire it when we see Stephan Bonnar and Forrest Griffin, literally, fall into an embrace after 15 minutes of exhilarating action in which they knocked six bells out of each other – there is something comforting, reassuring even, that this really is sport. We are reminded in that moment. 

But when Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber’s last fight – a brilliant technical five-round bout – ended, they barely looked at each other and simply went their separate ways. It was a chilling moment. The battle is done, yet the two protagonists refuse to admit the war is over.

Eric Del Fierro, Alliance MMA head coach, admitted to Fighters Only that he was genuinely concerned by the mood of Cruz when he fought Faber. “Dominick was in perfect shape, he had no injuries but he was emotionally attached to the fight. He literally made it into a street fight, more so than he had done with any other fighter,” he reveals. “That caused him to make some mistakes and that was my concern as a coach. A lot of the time in the corner we were trying to get him to settle down.

“Right now, he is displaying the true mark of a champion, cleaning out the division. With Urijah, he made mistakes because he was so emotionally attached, he wanted to hurt Faber, he wanted to go in and stand with him and have a war. As a coach I cover all bases, I have all my guys go to a sports psychologist and have these guys reading books that I read to help myself, to better myself. Dominick is the kind of guy who’s a fighter’s fighter, an old school boxer. People wanted to get inside his head and talk trash to him, and he got emotionally involved. That really did concern me.”

Cain refers to this as “hate management.” He explains: “Some guys need to use that, make it personal, make it about hatred to get more jacked up and more fired up to train and compete and then after the fight they say, ‘OK, that was just an act I was just doing that to get mean.’ 

“Some guys take it in to the hatred game but it becomes too much for them so they have to take an approach of, ‘When I step in to the Octagon I’m fighting against myself, I’m competing against myself this is about me and this is professional, not personal. I don’t care who you put in the Octagon with me this is going to be professional and I’m going to fight my fight and perform at my best and I’m going to have to keep my game plan very matter-of-fact and not emotional.’

“My recommendation involving a fighter would not be fighting out of emotion it would be fighting out of logic. It would be fighting out of training. What that does is makes this more consistent, rather than conjuring up the emotion of hatred.

“It’s harder in combat sports – when you get hit in the face – than sports like soccer and the other thing is that physiologically, the emotions of hatred and fear are processed in very similar ways and that’s a dangerous road to walk.”

Cain believes there’s no question people fight differently out of hate and fear. “When you start fighting out of fear, then there’s the fear of losing because there’s the ramifications of ‘what if?’ ‘What if I lose? What if I lose to a fighter who is my nemesis? What if I lose this fight and don’t get my shot. What’s going to happen to my career?’ What they need to focus on is what is… the facts. I don’t care who you step into that cage with, you have to win by fighting your fight.”

What about the contest between Rampage Jackson and Rashad Evans? Is that an example of such a situation? Evans famously walked into the Octagon after Jackson had beaten Keith Jardine, and called his rival out. Jackson insisted – famously – that there would be some “black on black crime.” It amped up the contest. Evans went with the flow, but in his mind he had a plan – he would throw Rampage a curveball.

“That’s a classic example. Rashad at that time, being with Greg Jackson’s camp – and Jackson being the master of the mental game in MMA – those guys know how to play both sides of that and they will get guys to very infrequently make the fight personal. A guy like Rashad is good at playing the game but when it’s time to fight he goes in there and fights his fight, sticks to his gameplan and doesn’t let emotions take him out of his gameplan.”

We certainly saw that against Jackson, who was left bemused, frustrated – and beaten – by Evans when the fight eventually took place. Jackson, in his words, had gone in there looking to administer “a beating” but was exposed as one dimensional. In a sense, Evans had made the fight easier by making Jackson think the hatred was mutual. In fact, it wasn’t.

Arguably, Georges St Pierre has made mastery of this method. Accused of being boring by some fans, adored by legions of others, emotional detachment is the way he plays it. Although Cain will not divulge the detail of his working relationship with GSP, he explained: “Georges St Pierre is a professional. He’s a professional athlete versus a fighter. As a professional athlete Georges realizes that you train, then you compete, you learn, and you’re always trying to get better.

“Georges St Pierre is not trying to win one fight, he is trying to be the best fighter there’s ever been. It’s a completely different mental approach than 90% of the athletes, MMA, major league baseball, NFL, whatever I’ve worked with. Georges’ approach is about excellence and longevity and I think that’s what’s going to make him one of the best champions of all time.

“It’s not about any one fight, it’s not about any opponents. It’s about him, and his development, and his career, and him substituting what he does in training and becoming the best martial artist he can be.”

There are also the fighters who can polarize fans, and create hatred with their comments, and believe it enhances them.

British middleweight Michael Bisping reckons he performs better when he is “pissed off” with an opponent. “I thrive on an opponent trying to get under my skin. I like to feel emotional about it, angry inside. Hate? It’s not quite as strong as that, but the strong feeling of dislike is something which spurs me on. Whether I do or not, I believe I fight better in that kind of situation, because I like the idea that I’m in there, facing adversity, angered against my opponent.”

It therefore begs the question, did Chael Sonnen deliberately chose to use a softly-softly approach with Bisping when they were matched at the 11th hour late in January, for a title eliminator fight in Chicago? It was a tactic at odds with Sonnen’s desire to undermine champion Anderson Silva at every turn ahead of their UFC middleweight contest in 2010 in Oakland, California.

Cain believes it’s very possible Sonnen made that choice. “I think Chael Sonnen is one of the best in the business at that. Dana White has said that Sonnen is the best fight promoter since Muhammad Ali. I think he may be very accurate in that statement and Chael knows how to get under people’s skins. Chael knows the people that fight out of hatred, he goes in there, and has a routine that he uses to fight his fight and perform at his best. That’s one of the advantages Chael has had in his career. He knows how to get other fighters to make it personal, while he keeps it professional. He’ll talk the talk but when it comes the time to step in the cage, that guy knows exactly what he’s doing and how to fight his fight.”

To cross over to boxing momentarily, is Cain’s assessment that Ali’s mental approach won him many fights? “I think that’s a part of what made Ali great, for sure. I think he’s one of the most confident athletes there’s ever been and he was very vocal about his confidence. Some people may see that as arrogance. But you know what? Some of the best athletes in the world have to be extremely confident all the time and part of their being extremely confident all the time is that they have to play that game with themselves and talk themselves into it because the bottom line is that no athlete is confident all the time. It just doesn’t happen. Confidence comes and goes but the best fighters in the world realize that confidence is a choice and they act confident and they talk confident and they fight confident. 

“My belief is that it is more of a choice than something they’re born with. It’s a choice that they make and it’s a mental trait rather than something they’re equipped with.”

Jon Jones, the UFC light heavyweight, comes to mind in this way. “I don’t know Jones personally, so I can’t speak for him but I can say that you need to be a different guy when you’re in the Octagon. As a professional athlete you have two selves. You have your real self and you have your performing self. And your performing self is who you are when you step in that Octagon and you’d better be cocky, you’d better be arrogant and you’d better have a load of confidence. But when you’re outside of that cage you’d better be a humble champion who people can respect. Some athletes are the same person all the time.

“I try to train athletes that you have your real self, who you are when you’re outside of the cage, when you’re in public, when you’re with your family, when you’re in the community, and then the person you are when you’re your competing self or your professional self.

“Who you are when you’re in training and who you are when you’re in the Octagon, you can’t afford to be the same person as who you are when you’re in your regular life otherwise you’d be getting arrested because you need to be really confident, you need to be really aggressive and you need to have a finishing mentality. 

“That’s just something that the great ones, like Georges, are able to turn on and turn off in their routine and I think the best fighters of all time have routines that they use to help them get in to the mentality that they need to be. But I don’t buy into this mentality that you are who you are; I buy into the mentality that you are who you need to be.

“If you need to be confident and cocky then that’s who you need to be. If in a certain situation you need to be humble then that’s who you need to be. And you need to be the person that is needed for the moment, not who you feel like being.”

That characterization could be extended to Sonnen, but also the likes of Tito Ortiz, Josh Koscheck, Ken Shamrock, who are happy to feed on the hatred that they can generate in fans, as well as their opponents. 

Cain adds: “Tito Ortiz, earlier in his career, was great with the mental game.” Who can forget the hate, grudge, animosity Ortiz created with Chuck Liddell? Or Ken Shamrock, come to that?

“I don’t know but I think a lot of it is selling fights,” reasons Cain. “A lot of it is marketing so again in WWE wrestling it’s not the same as in MMA but guys talk up the fight and then they realize, ‘Hey that’s part of the deal, that’s part of it.’ And they know the UFC will compensate you for how you sell a fight.

“So if you’re a smart fighter and you want to make money you’re doing that stuff, even if it’s not your personality, you’re going to work to sell a fight because that’s what’s going to put money in your pocket. A professional athlete’s got to get paid. Fighter ‘X’ doesn’t like fighter ‘Y’, it’s a personal thing, and it’s developed into ‘a hatred’.”

Del Fierro was not surprised in the least when Faber and Cruz turned their backs on each other after their title fight. Did the absence of a handshake surprise him? “No. These guys literally dislike each other, and they both have their reasons. They can be social, they can be professional, but they’ll never be friends. But you know what? As a fan, I couldn’t ask for a better fight. I tell Dominick, it’s what’s going to cement you in history – a trilogy like Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell, like Tito and Chuck, Matt Hughes and BJ Penn. Great trilogies.

“This trilogy could cement the bantamweight division, and I hate to say it, but Urijah brings out the best in Dominick. He is a motivated individual anyway, but so focused when he trains to fight Urijah. It feels different.”

Psychologist Cain believes that the emotion of ‘hatred’ can be harnessed, but also has a theory that as fighters mature, as they have families, as their self-doubt leaves them, they become more ‘professional.’ Does hatred, therefore, eventually leave the fighter? “I think that’s a very distinct possibility. As you mature and get more experience you realize that emotions are inconsistent and if you’re a professional athlete, you don’t make it personal you make it professional and it’s not about the guy you’re stepping in to the cage with. It becomes about you and doing what you need to do.

“But there is more capacity for hatred in the combat sports world because it’s such a short fight and it’s one-on-one. And because it’s one-on-one the opportunity for emotion to appear as a factor is much more than any other sport.

“But the more experienced you are in the game, the calmer you fight. That’s why you never see Randy Couture fight out of emotion. Totally professional. GSP the same. They realize that emotion costs you in reality. Certain guys can get away with it in the short term, but long term you can’t fight out of hatred. To have a long career, to be consistent, the bottom line is that you can’t fight with emotion forever.”

The Diaz brothers

Why do Nick and Nate hate?

No other fighters in MMA use the word hate more than the Diaz brothers, Nick and Nate. The Stockton bad boys have built up a reputation as guys who despise everyone outside of their inner circle and fight for one reason alone: to survive and get paid. One man knows them better than anybody else and coach Cesar Gracie reveals the anger they portray is as real as it gets. 

“Nick and Nate Diaz do have a particular mind-set. Once an opponent signs on the dotted line, that is enough for them to know that the issue is ‘on.’ They don’t need any extra motivation once they know who their opponent is, or even who their rivals are around them. They think in a team mentality, too, and believe their backs are against the wall,” Cesar tells Fighters Only.

“They are not spiteful, hateful people in any sense of the word, and that is proven day-in, day-out in the gym. But they know that the person stepping in there against them in the cage is coming to knock their teeth out. That’s how they visualize it. They have found a way of thinking that it is the same mentality as a street fight being transferred into a cage.

“It really is rags to riches. They know that their lives can change, their profile increases if they win, so these guys in front of them are stopping them getting on in life. It has been interesting to see that Nick has got under the skin of Georges St Pierre, that the way Nick is, and what he has said about GSP has made him angry. That’s great for Nick. It’s not that he sets out to do that, but just what he draws out of his opponents. If you take Nate, too, in his fight against Donald Cerrone, you could see that he had an effect on Cerrone in the build-up, with that real animosity Nate showed towards him. You can call it an intelligent way of psyching out your opponent, but I don’t think it is something conceived or made up. It is genuine emotion which fuels Nate, and Nick’s, approach. It is a facet of these guys’ game, which has developed naturally over time. But you can also see that there is sportsmanship there, too, because Nate was genuinely humble to Donald after the contest.”

Bubbling feuds

A selection of imminent UFC battles that are likely to see blood boil and tensions rise:

Vitor Belfort vs Wanderlei Silva 

When they fought way back in 1998, Belfort finished Silva in just 44 seconds. These two Brazilians will renew their rivalry as the coaches on The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil, and their second battle promises to be a heated stand-up war.

Dominick Cruz vs Urijah Faber 

After two fights, Cruz and Faber stand equal with one victory each. They will look to settle the score later this year, assuming they can survive 13 weeks together as coaches on TUF 15.

Jon Jones vs Rashad Evans

Once close training partners, Jones and Evans have developed a serious dislike for each other since Jones became the 205lb champ. Rashad wants that gold, and he’d gladly go through his old friend to get it.

Georges St Pierre vs Nick Diaz 

Following his win over BJ Penn, Diaz said he believed GSP was afraid to fight him. According to UFC boss Dana White, the welterweight champ was furious, saying: “I’m going to put the worst beating on him you’ve ever seen in the UFC.” 

Rashad Evans vs Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson

These two former champions had arguably the most hate-filled rivalry in UFC history, though their eventual meeting at UFC 114 failed to live up to expectations. With both men at the top of the light heavy-weight pile, it is likely they will meet again.

Infamous battles

Chael Sonnen on Anderson Silva

“I can drag Anderson Silva out of a hotel and beat him up anytime I want. I’ve made a commitment to wait and I’m going to make sure millions of people watch me.”

Don Frye vs Ken Shamrock (Pride 19)

A pre-fight confrontation between these two almost got physical, and their subsequent contest was one hell of a war.

Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson vs Wanderlei Silva (Pride: Final Conflict 2003, Pride 28, UFC 92)

Silva destroyed ‘Rampage’ in their first two meetings, but Jackson had his revenge in their third fight when he knocked the Brazilian out cold with a powerful left hook.

Wanderlei Silva vs Ricardo Arona (Pride: Final Conflict 2005, Pride: Shockwave 2005)

Silva and Arona fought twice in just four months, going 1-1. Part of the intense Chute Boxe and Brazilian Top Team rivalry.

Don Frye vs Mark Coleman (UFC 10, Pride 26)

After he suffered his first loss to Coleman, Frye said: “All that hate and anger towards him took more years off my life.” He lost a decision to Mark for a second time at Pride 26.

Jens Pulver vs BJ Penn (UFC 35, TUF 5 Finale)

Penn had his first ever title shot against Pulver and lost via decision. He got his own back five years later, submitting his hated adversary with a rear naked choke.

Tito Ortiz vs Ken Shamrock (UFC 40, UFC 61, UFC Fight Night 7)

The hatred between these two ultra-competitive athletes was born when Oritz flipped him off after defeating one of his Lion’s Den team members at UFC 19. Tito went 3-0 against Ken, finishing him in all three fights.

Frank Trigg vs Matt Hughes (UFC 45, UFC 52)

“I have a better family, I have a better upbringing and I’m twice as good looking as he is”

Frank Trigg on Matt Hughes. Need we say more?

Chuck Liddell vs Tito Ortiz (UFC 47, UFC 66)

Once his friend and training partner, Chuck grew tired of Tito’s antics and was eager to fight the reigning 205lb champion for his title. Two furious fights followed, Liddell winning both by TKO.

Josh Koscheck vs Diego Sanchez (TUF 1, UFC 69)

Koscheck really got under Sanchez’s skin prior to their rematch at UFC 69, Diego forcefully shoving his opponent when they squared up at the weigh-in,

Nick Diaz vs Jason ‘Mayhem’ Miller (Strikeforce: Nashville)

The only conflict on our list that wasn’t an actual sanctioned fight, a war of words broke out between these two following the infamous ‘Nashville Brawl’ between Miller and the Cesar Gracie team.

Matt Hughes vs Matt Serra (UFC 98)

Coaching alongside him on TUF 6, Serra harbored a real hatred for Hughes. He even hangs a picture of him punching Hughes in the face at his gym in New York.

Dan Hardy vs Marcus Davis (UFC 99)

‘The Outlaw’ delighted in infuriating Davis prior to their bout, mocking the American’s Irish roots. Marcus made his feelings on Hardy clear: “I hate Dan Hardy.”

Brock Lesnar vs Frank Mir (UFC 81, UFC 100)

Possibly the most intense heavyweight rivalry in MMA, Lesnar and Mir had not one but two grudge matches, winning one apiece.

Michael Bisping on Jorge Rivera

“He’s an old man, and I’m in my prime. I’ve got better and he’s gone down hill. This is a free pay-day for me”

Michael Bisping vs Jorge Rivera (UFC 127)

Rivera angered Bisping with a series of online videos leading up to the fight. The Brit was punished for spitting at Jorge’s corner after the fight, not being given his win bonus despite TKO’ing his opponent.