Issue 089
June 2012
Miesha Tate wasn’t brave to hold out against Ronda Rousey’s armbar, she was foolish, and it could have come at the expense of her career.
I’ve been getting asked the same question a lot recently, ‘Do you think Miesha Tate should have tapped earlier to Ronda Rousey’s armbar in Strikeforce in March?’ And, whilst people are praising her courage and heart for not tapping, I personally think it was foolish. If you’re caught, there’s no sense in getting injured because of pride.
In the wake of perhaps the most anticipated women’s MMA fight in history, there’s been a lot of commentary about the incident. In my April column, I discussed the situation where a fighter doesn’t tap to a submission from the perspective of the fighter applying the lock. This month I want to look at the other side of the coin.
‘Tapping out’ allows a competitor to save him or herself from damage when trapped in a position s/he cannot escape. There’s no shame in tapping to a well-applied submission, whether in a jiu-jitsu match or an MMA fight. It’s often better to live to fight another day, rather than risking an injury that might mean time off training, tricky rehabilitation and perhaps ongoing joint problems
On one side, a fighter has to weigh-up the risk of injury. On the other, there’s the possibility that s/he can escape the lock and go on to win the fight. A clean submission is not always a fight finisher. The human body is remarkably resilient. Anyone who has watched Georges St Pierre’s UFC title defense against Dan Hardy knows that the space between catching a submission and causing fight-ending damage is sometimes wider than you’d expect.
If you don’t tap, then it’s always possible that you might be able to escape. Even deep in an armlock there are sometimes ways of taking the pressure off the elbow joint, or changing the position slightly to make it harder to break. Maybe your opponent doesn’t have quite enough leverage to finish it cleanly. Perhaps they’ll adjust the position or switch to a different technique, giving you room to escape. Perhaps they’re tired. Maybe you can hold on until the end of the round. But maybe not!
This kind of last-ditch defense is something that’s hard to truly prepare for in training, for obvious reasons. Have you ever found yourself tapping to a partner’s slightly iffy technique, but thinking, ‘I wouldn’t do that in a fight?’ Or found things you nail everyone with in the gym become harder to finish as soon as you step onto a competition mat? At the highest levels of competition, you’d better throw out any submission that doesn’t have the potential to do some serious damage.
Rousey is well aware of this. As a judoka, the pinnacle of the sport is the Olympics – an event which comes every four years. It’s something an athlete may only get a single shot at. That kind of pressure breeds crazy risk taking for a chance at victory; and also the single-minded ruthlessness it takes to break an arm without a second thought when your opponent doesn’t tap.
Given Rousey’s background, it might seem crazy for Miesha to gamble her arm, when her chances of escaping the lock looked to be slim, only she knows what was truly at stake for her in that fight, both in terms of her MMA career, and also on a personal level. The sacrifices she has made and the hours in the gym that brought her to this point.
Miesha’s gamble didn’t pay off, but even in the cold light of day she doesn’t appear to regret making it. Getting her arm broken was a risk that she was willing to take in order to stay a champion. In my view, that’s what is worthy of respect.
