Overeem and Arlovski: The Inner Turmoil of the 'Chinny' Fighter

More than any other sport, fighting is a meeting ground between cutting edge science and old wives' tale. The modern fighter might train at altitude, spend hours on injury prevention, and—apologies if you believe that USADA came in fixed everything in a world where the collective desire to win outweighs any single body's spending on detection—take a medicine cabinet full of performance enhancers and masking agents. But that same fighter might also abstain from sex before a fight in the belief that it will sap his manly powers. It is the equivalent of going to a private clinic and being surveyed through your camp by the Soviet team behind Ivan Drago, then walking to the hut at the edge of the woods to check what the cunning folk think as well.

Nowhere is superstition more rife than regarding the subject of 'chin'. Chin in combat sports tends to mean ability to absorb a shot to the head more generally which is why you will hear folks talking about a fighter's 'chin' being shot even though he was clearly hit in the top of the head before he folded. If a fighter can be knocked out or put on wobbly legs more easily than most, he is said to have a 'glass chin' or to be 'chinny'. The whole science of the knockout is very vague because you can't really strap electrodes to a test subject's head and then administer blunt force trauma to find out exactly what is going on. At any rate, for hundreds of years men have been trying to better their chins. Jack Dempsey chewed pine tar, others performed wrestler's bridges. There is evidence to suggest that many knockouts come from the rapid turning of the head, so improving its musculature might be the best idea for improving the ability to take a shot. Certainly it can't hurt. Unlike what these guys down in Brazil are doing.

This brings us to Andrei Arlovski and Alistair Overeem who meet at this weekend's UFC card. I used to council caution in jumping to the conclusion that a fighter's chin is shot, but with Arlovski and Overeem it is clear that they cannot take the kind of heat that heavyweights dish out. In their defense, not many folks can take a good heavyweight punch and men like Ben Rothwell and Roy Nelson are exceptional in that regard. But Arlovksi and Overeem share a similar problem in that their inner turmoil over acknowledging their inability to take the big shots has proved more detrimental to them than that physical shortcoming alone ever could.

Acceptance and Denial

They say that one of the worst things that can happen to a fighter is finding out he has a good chin. A coach wants that to be a bonus when things go wrong. Fighters who recognize their sturdy jawline and come to rely on it often age the worst and have the sharpest declines. Think of Chuck Liddell who was able to fight with his hands low for his entire career without mastering the grace of foot or mobility of upper body which would normally enable a fighter to do this more safely. One day he could take the blows, the next day he couldn't. But for Overeem and Arlovski it is their acknowledgement of their shoddy ability to absorb power that has caused the truly awful performances.

Andrei Arlovski has the most startling right hand in UFC heavyweight history. It comes quick and it can knock out just about anyone it catches. There is Andrei the fighter who is adequate on his own, and then there is this force of nature which strikes out in a blink, seemingly using Andrei's right hand as a conduit. That right hand alone is what elevates Andrei to top ten status. It is the difference between the guy who can consistently win on the regional circuit and the guy who can knock out any man alive. Once he started learning to box, however, he began standing back and behaving too patiently. It wasn't helped by his famous flying knee attempt against Fedor Emelianenko which led to him plummeting face first into the mat. Timid and thinking that a more measured approach would protect him, Arlovski began to sit back and flick out jabs and big, scary bruisers would walk in on him and knock him out.

Brett Rogers as a boxer? He's atrocious. Sergei Kharitanov? He's an excellent banger and creative with his right hands, but he can't check a kick, lacks cardio, hasn't looked like a serious grappler in over a decade and eats far too many punches. But it didn't matter. They were known as big bangers and that clearly panicked Arlovski whose offensive mind effectively shut down against both. Flash forward to Arlovski's performance against Browne and the post fight revelry of the old time UFC fans who cried "Andrei's back!" What stopped Browne simply walking in and knocking Arlovski out? Arlovski's right hand which was thrown a dozen times a minute.

He was winging it overhand, shooting it straight, and even knocked Browne down with a backhanded blow which would make the Norfolk Butcher proud. He was almost completely one handed but due to aggression and the number of ways that he was throwing it, that wasn't to his detriment! The same was true against Antonio Silva, who had bested Arlovski during that streak of losses after Emelianenko. Leaping in to double up on right hands. Nothing fancy, just letting that tremendous force go. A right hand obsessed Arlovski is the most dangerous Arlovski. A cautious, kickboxing Arlovski who pumps out jabs and left kicks to little effect is the guy who can be bum rushed, countered, or simply accomplish nothing over an incredibly tedious fight.

Of course that's not the answer to all of Arlovski's problems. He was dropped by Browne in that fight and damn near knocked out. In the Miocic fight, Arlovski was knocked out as he ate a shorter right hand while pawing out a jab to set up a swing at the body, and before that he had been missing right hands and eating counters in his squared up position. We'll talk more about that in a minute.

Arlovski's next opponent, Alistair Overeem has suffered similar losses when his confidence was shaken. Against Ben Rothwell, Overeem attempted to throw one punch at a time and get out, looking almost as strange as in that punch-and-run performance against Sergei Kharitanov years ago. It looked like Overeem wanted to grab something from the bottom of a pool without getting wet as he reached in with wild swings and quickly got out of the way. Rothwell had no reason to worry and soon found the mark, sending Overeem into even more of a panic as he ducked after Rothwell's hips again and again.

The worry over an inability to take big shots makes fighters strike in a way in which they think they will get hit the least. Of course the ordinary technical method of striking—from the guard and back to guard, active and mobile—is designed to limit the number of good connections an opponent can get in. Trying to reinvent yourself as a defensive genius by allowing offence to drop off, or trying to reinvent striking science by diving wildly in and out are less useful to a fighter than taking what he already had and making slight adjustments to keep themselves safe.

Of course on the other end of the spectrum is outright denial. Overeem didn't adjust after Travis Browne had already grazed his chin with a front kick three times, and there was zero reason for him to be ducking down to waist height with his hands down every time Antonio Silva swung at him. Similarly more aggression from Arlovski does wonders in keeping his opponents from walking in on him, but he still exposes himself to counters a great deal when he gets into set patterns and stands still after winging a blow onto the opponent's guard. This looseness and wildness in mid range is something you don't want to see from a fighter who struggles to take the big blows.

The balance is hard but the secret is in the difference between acknowledgement and worry. A fighter can't hope to do his job without getting hit, he must accept that and attempt to mitigate it without losing sight of what he does well. If he worries, he will be paralyzed by the fear of getting knocked out and fight in a way which actually provides more opportunities for this. If he refuses to acknowledge that he wants to avoid as much damage as possible, the fighter winds up providing opportunities through negligence. A fighter can be aware that he wants to avoid getting hit with the big blows and still actively fight. The purpose of all fighting technique is to avoid getting hit often or cleanly after all. It is abnormal behavior in terms of disregarding the opponent's power or actively running in and out from it which gets both men into trouble.

In the specific case of Arlovski, he could do with learning is what Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira picked up in his later fights—the value of the clinch in taking away the issues of speed which all too often get an ageing fighter lit up on the feet. Swing a right hand, miss, fall into the clinch. Arlovski floated around the top of the rankings on takedown defense statistics within the UFC for years and that was little to do with his footwork, the man is sound in the clinch. Punch and clutch, punch and clutch, double up on the right hand once the opponent recognizes the pattern and begins to anticipate the clinch.

The idea of punch and clutch is to fall into a clinch immediately after throwing a power punch, denying the opponent the chance at a return. Fedor Emelianenko, Floyd Mayweather, Roberto Duran, there are tons of terrific fighters who have done this and left their opponents feeling as if the fight is somehow unfair. Here's Gunnar Nelson instantly attacking with a trip off of a left hand. Wouldn't have mattered if his left had landed or not, he'd have been too close to eat a counter. If the trip had failed he could simply re-establish distance and try again.

And here's Fedor showing the combination which should replace the entire curriculum for every self defence class—how to start and stop a fight on the pavement in under two seconds. Right hand lead, straight into the clinch before a return, into a takedown attempt and a punt to the head for good measure.

Because the fighter's body crashes in after his punch, it can be easily turned into a takedown attempt or even a simple shove backwards. Giorgio Petrosyan has maintained his good looks with this in kickboxing but it goes woefully underused in MMA. Push a man backwards to break his balance and his guard will move, just for a moment. That's when Peter Aerts would hammer in the head kick—leading him to have the most head kick knockouts in kickboxing history—and where Arlovski was able to knock out Silva with another right hand. Arlovski was still loose in this exchange, but it shows the value that punch and clutch could have for him if he were to use it consistently.

Note the difference between punching and clutching with slight deviation of the head from the center line, and what Overeem does when he's panicking—ducking wildly and slowly after his man's hips with his head down. This was the exact moment that Overeem was stunned by Bigfoot Silva and Ben Rothwell, and dropped by Remy Bonjasky.

In Overeem's case, his clinch is a much more powerful offensive weapon—the knee strikes that he used to drop Paul Buentello and Travis Browne are the best we have seen in MMA—but he has also shown himself to be more than adequate on the outside. His performance against Junior dos Santos might have been one of his best on the outside because he didn't show himself to be timid or swing wild and run away—he controlled distance, pounded in some hard kicks, and stepped in with his hands on occasion just to show he could. And it just so happened that on one of the first occasions he did this he knocked Dos Santos out. The man with power who makes himself difficult to hit is a nightmare, the man who is worried about getting hit and starts panicking is a dream fight.

It is a fine balance to strike and unfortunately when fighters begin to battle with abnormalities of durability—be it an iron jaw or a glass one—their mindset becomes a larger factor than it already was in the bout. Timidity and recklessness both stem from an understanding of this physical attribute. The same is true of fighters with 'heavy hands', they become lazy and forget the science that was getting them the connections, while those with 'pillow fists' tend to remain more disciplined in their form and combinations throughout a fight.

When Arlovski and Overeem meet this weekend it will be a match of 'glass canons'. Both could deck the sturdiest sponge for punishment in their division with a single blow, but they share a combined seventeen losses by knockout. It could be good, it could be dire, but get back here Monday and we'll talk about anything of note that does happen.