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The Jinx of the Invincible
by Bachir Ayoub, Team IronLife.com Writer
With Cro-Cop’s recent KO at the hands of Kevin Randleman, brings to light something that is constantly happening in MMA. The second someone is deemed unstoppable or invincible, they get there asses handed to them. It seems to be a going trend that when a person is deemed unbeatable a defeat is not far behind. It happened to a Gracie killer to a Huntington Beach Bad Boy and now it has happened to the devastating striker from Zagreb. Now if you look fairly closely you can see a commonality within most of the trend of beating the unbeatable.
Starting with the most recent Cro-Cop fight, you can see a connection between the two KO’s he has received in his MMA and K-1 career. Now putting his defeat with Mino to the side, Mirko’s knockouts at the hand of Michael McDonald and Kevin Randleman are fairly similar. First, his opponents have a striking (excuse the pun) resemblance to one another. If I were Cro-Cop, the next time I see a black dude with blonde hair I would run in the other direction. Both KO’s were largely due to the one part of Mirko’s game that is always complemented, and that his cool calm approaches to every fight. Now if you win people are going to call you confident, if you loose people are going to call you cocky. The suddenness of the Randleman KO looked even more devastating because of the lack of a response by Mirko. He took the punches on his feet, took the shots to his face while he was on the floor (not that he had much of choice) and he got handed his second KO and his second career KO. How will Mirko’s most recent loss affect his career? In my humble opinion it will hurt his personal pride rather than his skill level. For anyone that thinks that this is it for Cro-Cop, I have only one thing to say. The day that you can permanently part someone’s hair with a roundhouse kick, you can start critiquing Cro-Cop’s skill and approach to fighting. I can only give advice to Mirko’s next opponent and that is keep your hands up, your chin low and put your family doctor on notice because you’re in for a long and painful night.
Is Cro-Cop the first case of the seemingly unbeatable being beaten, hell no. Look at Matt Hughes, during his title run it looked like anyone who stepped up was going down. It only took a lighter fighter who couldn’t win the lightweight title to fight at his natural weight and defeat the most dominant fighter at that weight class, seems like a simple equation right? Or how about this, the most dominant jiu-jitsu heavyweight being handed his ass for the whole fight while spending most of the time on his back, you can ask Fedor or Mino how that happens. There is one thing you can take away from all those fights and the whole invincible fighter being beaten, and that’s that even with the best game-plan anything can happen.
Anyone who has been caught on the chin by a phantom punch after dominating the whole fight knows what I’m talking about. You may walk into a fight saying that nothing or no one will get in your way and you end up being knocked or choked out. Now for people that have never fought, they’re going to say that the above mentioned fighters have had they’re ride on top and now have to deal with losing because it will happen often. It’s easy for someone to criticize a fighter after he looses because they have either never been in a fight before or they have never experience the rage after you loose. The only advice I can give to those fans, is that no one is unstoppable and no one is invincible. The next fighter who thinks that he is invincible will be living la Vida corner man, just ask Rico Rodriguez.
* Article by Bachir Ayoub, Team IronLife.com Writer .
* Back to This Issue's Frontpage
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