A Moment Tells a Whole Story: UFC 292
A fight can sometimes tell a layered story, yet other times it's simple and straightforward, and what you see is what you get. For UFC 292: Sterling vs. O'Malley, single moments told the whole fight.
In the short fight between champion Aljamain Sterling and challenger Sean O'Malley, there was a moment preceding the fight ending sequence where the champion recognized he had fucked up.
Even if you recognize you've been exposed, sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.
The champion was chasing the challenger with his hands down, face leaning forward while changing stances. It was a trap set up by the challenger, which the champion recognized, but much too late. Bracing for impact, he shut his eyes, but why did he not dodge the blow if he saw it coming? Because his eyes were closed.
In champion Weili Zhang's domination over challenger Amanda Lemos, the spotlight was on the stats—Zhang's 288 total strikes against the challenger's 21. But the real story was something more subtle.
Whenever the two fighters got close, Zhang immediately contended for better head positioning, and Lemos failed to recognize it as a threat. Zhang used her head and her wrestling to literally control the direction of the fight. Where the head goes, the body goes. No longer feeling autonomy over her own body, Lemos swung for the fences whenever they were in open space, unwittingly playing into the champion's counterattacks and grappling.
In Neil Magny vs. Ian Machado Garry, the story of the fight was Garry's leg kicks, and Magny's inability to defend the leg kicks. Magny's playbook has been rushing his opponents, clinching, and tiring them out. But having read his playbook, Garry kicked Magny whenever he advanced. It became a riddle Magny couldn't unravel.
The motif of leg kicks endured, as that was the narrative for Pedro Munhoz, which Vera took a red pen to with jabs. Given Vera's edge in height and reach, his punch would get to Munhoz before the kick.
The leg-kicking saga persisted as Brad Tavares battered former middleweight champion Chris Weidman with leg kicks. Even before his two-year hiatus following a broken leg, Weidman was already on a decline. Going into this bout, he had only won two of his last eight bouts, now plummeting to two out of his last nine.
With access to every UFC fight, punctuated by five-minute rounds, there's ample time and content to unearth the weaknesses in every fighter's armor. But as Aljamain Sterling discovered, even if you recognize you've been exposed, sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.
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