Lol it’s honestly not a bad deal for how obscure it is, and I don’t even collect in any capacity.
I’m curious to know what else is on there.
By this point it’s obvious that Georges is a smart dude who understood that intelligence is just as important as technique and skill in a fight. During his first fight with BJ Penn at UFC 58, a fight he won, he took a lot of damage. After St. Pierre’s win over Jon Fitch at UFC 87, BJ got into the cage to promote a rematch. The fight was set for UFC 94 in January of 2009. In discussions with his coaches during the preparation for the rematch with BJ Penn, Georges said that BJ had speed beyond belief, and that he had trouble dealing with that speed, and struggled to find the target of BJ’s face. At that point, his head coach Firas Zahabi hired a data analyst, who studied fighters and their reaction times. According to him, out of all the fighters he studied, BJ Penn had the fastest reaction time. St. Pierre wanted to make this fight completely different from the first one, a desire to win by pure dominance, leaving no doubts about who was the better fighter. Georges and Firas came up with a strategy of feinting a lot, using a larger variety of weapons, and firing blanks. The idea behind doing this was to overload the nervous system of BJ Penn by making him think and react to what Georges was doing, therefore tiring him out and dragging him into deep waters. Anyone who knows BJ Penn as a fighter and is familiar with his tendencies would tell you this is a smart strategy for beating a prime BJ - as good as any fighter we’ve ever seen at lightweight.
Mind Over Matter
As for St. Pierre, he sought to sharpen his fighting mentality by putting stark focus on something only the special ones do - becoming psychologically bulletproof. As a kid, Georges trained in Kyokushin Karate to deal with school bullies. As a result he became enthralled by the idea of being the strongest kid in school, even holding the chin-up record at his high school, École Pierre-Bédard. This interest carried over into college, where Georges studied kinesiology. He was a black belt in Kyokushin by the age of 12, and modeled himself after Jean-Claude Van Damme. I think we can all agree that getting a black belt at the age of 12 is a little concerning, particularly in the age of McDojos. In St. Pierre’s case, though, we can rest our little heads at night knowing that the black belt he received wasn’t the result of a bribe. In his late teens he started training in wrestling, something he had never done before. I repeat, he had NEVER wrestled a day in his life. Georges worked with Victor Zilberman and Guivi Sissaouri extensively, the latter of which captured multiple world championships in freestyle wrestling, even winning a silver medal at the 1996 Olympics. By the time of St. Pierre’s debut in MMA in 2002, he was regularly outwrestling guys who had been wrestling for years. He even used his wrestling against Justin Bruckmann in his second professional fight to win the UCC Welterweight Championship. This was but a narrow glimpse of the man who would form a legacy that even the widest of lenses couldn’t capture.
Not even close.
By Georges’ third professional fight, he was already being cheered on like a superstar. His opponent, Travis Galbraith, was a perfectly respectable fighter on the Canadian scene, going 5-1 and earning a spot in the UCC. The fight results show a win by TKO via elbows, but those weren’t just any elbows. Georges had Travis in side control and was posting his forearm on Travis’s chin, slamming his head to the canvas. So when his head hit the mat, not only was he taking the force of the elbow on his chin, but he was taking the force of the mat on the back of his head. In order to get Travis to the ground, GSP employed an unconventional tactic - a high crotch double leg is common in MMA, but the way he did it is not. The takedown Georges utilized is called a snag double leg. This technique is a bit different from other doubles in the sense that instead of driving forward with your hips and creating an angle, you’re using your head to drive into your opponent’s chest to push them forward, while also pulling their legs towards you, essentially sweeping their feet out from underneath them. What makes this double leg effective for MMA is its lack of set up - it only requires close proximity, as your knee doesn’t need to drive into the ground like it does with traditional wrestling takedowns. This worked perfectly for GSP, who simply caught Galbraith’s kick and used it to grab both legs. Simplicity at its best. Two fights later against Pete Spratt, the kick catcher strikes again. This time in the form of a snatch single leg, followed by complete domination on the ground. Pete standing up only tightened the choke, and GSP got his Goldenpalace.com finish in less than four minutes.
I realize the title of this article gives off the impression that I’m only talking about one particular fight. The problem is when I started writing this article, I just couldn’t stop my wandering brain, and my obsessive nature took over. It isn’t even me typing [write] now. Ultimately I’m a massive fan of Georges St. Pierre, and I think he’s the best fighter in MMA history, and one of the most important supercomputers ever created with the intention of destroying elite cage fighters. I will get to his masterclass over Bisping, but I’ll cover some other big ones first.
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