Where did it go wrong for Filipovic?
MMA Live: 9-24-09
In the wake of his loss to Junior dos Santos, Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic told the world that the places in his mind once filled with a focus on kicking opponents in the head had been replaced by thoughts of fishing in Privlaka.
Given the dismal turn the former K-1 standout's career has taken in the past two years, it comes as little surprise that he's thinking about calling it quits. Nonetheless, the stark and one-sided beating he took from Brazilian heavyweight prospect dos Santos on Saturday at UFC 103 has led fans and pundits alike to wonder how we came to this point, where MMA's formerly most-feared striker has been relegated to a disappointing also-ran in a division he was supposed to reign over with impunity.
The answer is much less simple than you might think.
Most discussion of his decline has centered on the physical, which is understandable, as it is certainly the most visible component.
It is important to consider why Cro Cop was seen as the ideal K-1 fighter to cross over into MMA in the first place: While he was never a large heavyweight, he's always been a physical specimen, and not just in a superficial beach muscles sense, though obviously the size of his legs goes without saying. Rather, he was explosive and athletic in a way that even far superior K-1 contemporaries like Peter Aerts and Ernesto Hoost were not. This made him far more apt to tussle with potent wrestlers and capitalize on the hunt-and-kill nature of MMA -- a nature that suited his striking style better than styles based on volume and workrate.
There can be no doubt the physical attributes that made him the posterboy for K-1 converts have diminished. His reflex and strike speed lags, and he struggles to explode away from the clinch as he once was able to when desperate fighters latched onto him. Though some are quick to say that Filipovic is "only 35," that misses the fact that age -- especially in MMA -- is extremely relative.
Cro Cop has been training and fighting for nearly two decades at this point, and all that work has taken its toll on him. In recent years, he's had surgeries up and down his body to fix nagging issues from a deviated septum to a busted foot to a faulty elbow to nagging knees. That process isn't about to stop, and if anything, it will only be exacerbated.
But it's wrong to view Cro Cop's current predicament strictly as a product of wear-and-tear. If anything, his physical depreciation has served to highlight the technical flaws of his game that have always been present and often ignored.
Part of what has been difficult for fans to digest is that Filipovic hasn't just looked awful as of late: He's looked awful on the feet despite being hailed as the greatest striker in the sport for years. However, chinks in the armor have always been present. Apart from his bouts with Mark Hunt, the southpaw Cro Cop has circled left on orthodox fighters since his K-1 days. Circling into your opponent's power tends to be a major no-no, but it has always given Cro Cop the best chance to land his left cross and left head kick, by far his two best weapons. When fighters with real striking skills have opted to be aggressive against him, though, he's suffered as a result.
He walked into Fedor Emelianenko's right hook repeatedly, and shortly after, barrages of left hooks followed. Hunt's right found him repeatedly in their MMA rematch. In one of the most brutal starchings the sport has ever seen, he walked right into Gabriel Gonzaga's shin at skull-level. And Saturday night, Junior dos Santos pelted him with both hands, but especially rights.
Maybe most critically of all, for all his striking acumen, Cro Cop has never been a quality counterstriker. At his best, whether in K-1 or MMA, he attacked first, hurt his foe, then finished the job. When ambushed, he's always pushed opponents away and circled out wide to reset. Even against Josh Barnett, whose game plan in their second bout was haphazard punch-swarming to set up the clinch, Cro Cop was still almost entirely defensive. Even his punches on Bob Sapp and Wanderlei Silva were not really pure counters as much as fighters walking directly at him with their hands down.
The point about counterpunching is especially relevant, as it is the method through which the cleanest chances for damaging blows in combat sports are created. It is no coincidence that virtually all of the top fighters in the sport right now are adroit at either slipping punches to counter (Emelianenko, B.J. Penn) or parrying punches to counter (Lyoto Machida, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson). At this stage in the sport, it's not good enough to just endlessly circle left, hoping to set up a roundhouse kick to the dome.
There's also been a noticeable reduction in his actual striking arsenal. His bouts at this point are reduced to a few sparse punches and failed attempts at the left head kick. However, his brutal salvos of leg kicks and body kicks mostly appeared when his opponents stopped moving, as in the cases of Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira or Silva, or when he was facing rigid and awkward opponents like Hidehiko Yoshida and Hong Man Choi.
So, where were all these deficiencies in 2003, when he was putting the boots to hapless foes, and why are they so painfully vivid now?
Obviously, the aging process plays a formative role in exposing these flaws, but it's actually a quintessential double whammy: Cro Cop's physical decline also coincided with the general improvement of heavyweight MMA and more consistent fights with top heavyweights. Your baseline heavyweight in an elite promotion in 2009 is a bit less likely to circle face-first into the strike that his opponent is synonymous with. Some are even talented and brazen enough to throw strikes against a former K-1 World Grand Prix runner-up, and aggressively so. Even if they wanted the fight on the floor, as Gonzaga and Alistair Overeem did, the ability and willingness to trade strikes in a way that the likes of Heath Herring, Ron Waterman and Mark Coleman couldn't made those takedowns that much easier.
Perhaps a better question is why so much was expected from the man upon his arrival in the UFC. After all, the reaction to his decline is not simply a tough-but-necessary acknowledgement that his better days are behind him, the way many now view Randy Couture's performances. Instead, the response is one of sullen dejection and disappointment, not because he's past his prime but because that fact means he cannot and will not fulfill their lofty expectations for him.
It is hardly a new hypothesis that many of Pride's fighters attained a staggering aura of invincibility due to the crafty and lopsided pro-wrestling-style matchmaking of parent company Dream Stage Entertainment, but it is still an important one. It is fairly telling that one of the most famous moments of his MMA career is decapitating masked Mexican luchador Dos Caras Jr. For that matter, it is perhaps even more telling that his signature K-1 moment is destroying Sapp. Perhaps no fighter in MMA's short history has been better suited to the YouTube generation and the highlight reel, and that's largely due to the brutality he was able to dish out against sacrificial lambs.
This is not to say the man's résumé is without merit. However, the question is how that merit was distorted as people convinced themselves he would rule the UFC with an iron fist. Victories over Herring and Igor Vovchanchyn were strong wins six years ago. Now, though, we know Herring to be a dependable if flawed gatekeeper-to-the-stars, and Vovchanchyn was marginalized as an elite fighter the moment his contemporaries developed half-decent boxing and top games. Aleksander Emelianenko has gone on to be a strong heavyweight, but at the time Cro Cop dispatched him, he was an out-of-shape novice with a special surname.
The best wins of Cro Cop's career are over Silva -- a longtime light heavyweight now bound for 185 pounds -- and his trifecta over Barnett, the only perennially top heavyweight he's defeated in his eight-year career, though I imagine that trio of W's doesn't look too damn good right now given Barnett's recent indiscretions. Beyond these fights, when you think of Cro Cop against elite fighters, you think of him losing. And in some cases, you think of him losing to non-elite fighters, as well.
At the time, each of those losses could be justified in some absolving fashion. He lost to Nogueira, the second-best heavyweight of all time, due to his inexperience on the ground. Against Kevin Randleman, he simply "got caught." Against Fedor Emelianenko, he simply bumped up against the best heavyweight we've seen yet. Against Hunt, he was burned out and unmotivated after his fourth fight in six months. All of these explanations were reinforced by the fact that somehow, losing in Pride was not at all indicative of the success one might have stateside against the likes of Andrei Arlovski and Tim Sylvia. Interestingly enough, during his Pride tenure, Cro Cop was part of the "Big Three" along with Emelianenko and Nogueira, but historically, he actually fits in much closer with his hypothetical victims Arlovski and Sylvia, two other quite successful but often faltering heavyweights.
His victory in the Pride Openweight Grand Prix three years ago, in which he notched the two best wins of his career in a single night, came specifically at a point where the hackneyed UFC-versus-Pride suddenly wasn't such a landslide any more. Pride was crumbling under the Shukan Gendai scandal surrounding the promotion's underworld ties, and "The Ultimate Fighter" generation brought the UFC prosperity, and as a result, some of the sport's best fighters. Those who parroted the superiority of Pride for years, as well as the neutral parties who wanted a UFC heavyweight division in which Justin Eilers didn't fight for a heavyweight title, placed unfortunately high expectations on a fighter who they desperately wanted to believe was a superhero instead of an aging, fallible heavyweight standout.
He will be the owner of a scintillating highlight reel for the rest of time, but his actual résumé won't position him as the dominant heavyweight it was assumed he would always be, in the ring or in the cage. He should be remembered just as much for his impressive victories as for his failures when it counted the most -- to Hoost, Andy Hug and Mike Bernardo, to Fedor, Nogueira and Gonzaga. However, he should not be scorned for failing to live up to the unrealistic expectations of those whose hearts skipped a beat whenever Simon LeBon's voice filled a Japanese arena.
Jordan Breen is a contributor to Sherdog.com.
