By Sergio Non, USA TODAY
If you had to pick a single instance that marks the rise of the latest wave in mixed martial arts, it arrived on the point of light heavyweight Jon “Bones “Jones’ knee.
Five seconds into his March 19 fight with Mauricio “Shogun “Rua in Newark, Jones leaped forward and smashed his left knee into the face of a man once called the best fighter in the world. The moment his head snapped, Rua, usually known for explosive flurries, melted into a plodder, lunging with single punches, reaching vainly for low-percentage leg locks or simply gasping helplessly on his back.
Less than 15 minutes later, one final burst of strikes from Jones sent Rua to his knees on the floor of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s cage as referee Herb Dean stepped between the fighters to halt the slaughter.
“From the corner, we could see the knee hitting right on the jaw and heard the noise, “Rua’s manager, Eduardo Alonso, told Fight-Hype.com. “Right there, it felt strange. “¦ It was Jones’ night, though.”
The past 12 months have been his year, too, judging by a four-fight winning streak capped by the win against Rua that crowned Jones, 23, as UFC’s youngest titleholder. His ascension to the top after three years as a pro fighter comes amid a wave of turnover at the championship level.
News from MMA
Two years ago, the No. 1 fighter for every weight class in the USA TODAY/SB Nation consensus rankings was a veteran who started fighting in 2003 or earlier. Now most of the leaders are relative youngsters.
In addition to Jones:
“¢ Two other UFC champions, featherweight Jose Aldo and bantamweight Dominick Cruz, are 24 and 25.
“¢ In the 205-pound division, ex-Penn State wrestling star Phil Davis only started fighting professionally in October 2008 yet already finds himself facing No. 1 contender Rashad Evans in August.
“¢ Heavyweight titleholder Cain Velasquez, 28, had two pro fights when he joined UFC in 2008. His next opponent, Junior dos Santos, is a 26-year-old with five years of professional experience.
“¢ One of UFC’s top contenders at featherweight, Chad Mendes, had his first fight two weeks before Davis.
“¢ Anthony Pettis, former champion of World Extreme Cagefighting, is 24 and had a title shot in his hands before a June 4 loss.
They bring a combination of youth and athleticism rarely seen in mixed martial arts until now. Look no further than Jones to see how quickly a talented athlete can gain ground. Name a way to dismantle someone, and he has probably done it.
Jones never won a Division I title in wrestling yet deposits NCAA All-America wrestlers with ease. He lacks outstanding jiu-jitsu credentials yet outgrapples black belts. He’s never had a professional kickboxing match but staggers Muay Thai practitioners with knees and spinning elbows.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, my favorite fighter to watch of the young, up-and-coming crowd is Jon Jones, “dos Santos says. “I think Jon Jones surprised the whole world with his talent and his excellent fighting execution.”
Jones stands out as a clear-cut example of mixed martial artists’ growing breadth of skill. But even fighters strongly identified with a particular style have evolved.
For the first two years of his UFC career, Velasquez, an All-America wrestler at Arizona State before training in MMA, looked like a ground-and-pound machine who lacked the power to knock out other heavyweights. But his fists in February 2010 earned him a title shot when he knocked out former champion Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, a man legendary for an iron chin. Velasquez repeated himself nine months later by pounding out Brock Lesnar to win the championship. The two fights lasted 6 minutes, 32 seconds combined.
In other cases, hard hitters have gone in the other direction. Aldo made a name for himself using almost every knockout weapon available but showed a new look last year in defeating featherweight superstar Urijah Faber by tenderizing his left leg with repeated kicks.
“We really, before that fight, hadn’t seen a lot of Aldo’s leg kicks, “says Mendes, a teammate of Faber. “We just didn’t really know how devastating they were. “¦ That right there just took Faber out of his game.”
The featherweight champion switched strategies again in his most recent fight, an April 30 decision against Mark Hominick. Although Aldo started by kicking Hominick’s legs and traded punches from time to time, he started shooting for wrestling takedowns in every round. Aldo’s ability to dump Hominick to the mat neutralized the challenger’s strengths as a kickboxer, set up a particularly fearsome ground-and-pound attack in the fourth round and ensured the champion had enough of a lead to cruise through the final five minutes, when he hardly bothered to defend himself against Hominick’s desperate assault.
Mixed martial arts, by definition, demands multidimensional fighters in theory, yet in actual practice most of them specialize. Many competitors were wrestlers or grapplers who merely tacked on striking skills later. Some were brawlers or kickboxers who learned jiu-jitsu. Some mastered one particular strike ” usually a looping overhand or hook ” but only a few displayed a wide array of punches. Almost none were particularly good defensive boxers.
That’s starting to change. After several years in which only Georges St. Pierre and arguably Anderson Silva qualified as well-rounded major champions, several UFC titleholders and contenders are versatile combatants.
Jabs and sophisticated striking footwork, once practically non-existent in MMA, have become essential tools for champions such as Cruz and UFC lightweight champion Frankie Edgar, who typically outbox opponents. In the heavyweight division, long dominated by wrestlers and jiu-jitsu masters, heavy-hitting dos Santos was fighting for a No. 1 contender’s spot on June 11 against Shane Carwin.
“Before the growth of mixed martial arts and its evolution, just having jiu-jitsu or wrestling could work, “dos Santos says. “But the fights got harder as people’s skills developed, so a good fighter, a serious fighter, needed to have a bigger repertoire in order to step it up and have an advantage.
“I believe that right now the stand-up game is the advantage.”
Wrestling gets defensive
Not that the latest generation of fighters has ignored wrestling. In fact, mat work seems more firmly entrenched than ever.
“Wrestling’s so key these days, “says Bob Cook, one of Velasquez’s primary trainers. “I don’t think you necessarily completely have to come from a wrestling background, but you have to have a good ability to be able to learn and have a natural feel of the balance and the things that play a big factor in the wrestling.”
But it’s often used to shake off takedowns these days rather than attempt them.
Chuck Liddell and Mirko “Cro Cop “Filipovic were pioneers in using wrestling mainly as a defensive tactic, to stay on their feet so they could measure wrestlers and grapplers for knockouts. Now, almost every champion and contender in UFC and Strikeforce, with the notable exceptions of Silva and Nick Diaz, has become adept at stuffing takedown shots.
In the most extreme example over the past year-and-a-half, Japanese superstar Shinya Aoki, one of the most imaginative grapplers in MMA, went 0-for-21 on takedown attempts in five rounds against Strikeforce titleholder Gilbert Melendez when they fought in April 2010. Often emotional, Aoki was so frustrated he broke down in tears after the bout.
Dos Santos turned away all seven of Roy Nelson’s takedown attempts when they fought in August. Nelson, an acclaimed grappler with a low center of gravity, thanks to his ponderous belly, had trouble just grabbing hold of dos Santos, who repeatedly battered him with punches to make him pay for his attempts to clinch. In one of the enduring images of the fight, dos Santos landed a right knee to the torso that sent waves of flab rippling across Nelson’s belly.
“I have the utmost confidence that my boxing is my most efficient game, “dos Santos says. “But eventually, as the sport of MMA continues to grow, something else is going to need to come in. “¦ I believe it’s just a natural evolution of the sport.”
Flashy moves
Some techniques are starting to seep in, such as teeth-rattling kicks formerly derided as nothing more than flash.
Silva toppled Vitor Belfort with a front kick in February. Lyoto “The Dragon “Machida retired MMA icon Randy Couture in April with a knockout reminiscent of a crane kick from The Karate Kid movie. Pettis ran up the side of a cage in December before leaping forward to smash his foot into Ben Henderson’s face near the end of a close fight to secure a decision victory.
Hints of more exotic grappling holds have popped up in recent months. On the same card as Silva’s knockout of Belfort, Jones used his long arms to lock up an unusual variation on a guillotine choke from top position on Ryan Bader in February. The win propelled Jones into the March title bout with Rua.
Sometimes they happen the same night on different cards.
At Bellator Fighting Championships’ show March 26 in Tunica, Miss., Nik Fekete wound up unconscious after light-heavyweight Richard Hale rolled into an inverted triangle choke, a move so exotic it swept submission-of-the-year honors from every major website and poll when lightweight Toby Imada debuted it two years earlier.
Less than an hour after Hale put Fekete to sleep, featherweight Chan Sung “Korean Zombie “Jung achieved his own milestone more than 2,000 miles away in a UFC show in Seattle by forcing Leonard Garcia to tap out with a spine-wrenching hold known as a twister in jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts. The move has roots in amateur wrestling and has been employed on small MMA shows by female fighter Shayna Baszler, but it had never been used to submit someone on a nationally televised fight card until Jung-Garcia.
Jones thinks the dam has broken for fancier techniques in MMA. He compares it to the flood of sub-four-minute miles in track after Roger Bannister’s groundbreaking achievement in 1954.
“After the first person ran the mile in four minutes, everyone realized that they can do it, and now everyone’s doing it, “Jones says.
“Seeing guys like Anthony Pettis throwing that kick off the cage, seeing guys do spinning back fists or spinning back kicks and stuff, it’s just opening up people’s minds. They’re realizing, ‘Hey, why don’t I work on a cool, special move or a signature move?’ I think in the future it won’t even be mentioned in interviews. Everyone’s going to be having real cool tricks that they do.”
Wrestling Gear
