Cro Cop determined to get it right
Just days after his 35th birthday, Mirko Cro Cop Filipovic will try and erase the biggest blight in his fighting…
Just days after his 35th birthday, Mirko Cro Cop Filipovic will try and erase the biggest blight in his fighting career.
At UFC 103 on Sept. 19, in Dallas, in his first fight of a new contract, he’ll try and navigate his way through the often shark-infested waters of the UFC heavyweight division. Filipovic faces the latest Brazilian phenom, Junior Dos Santos (8-1), a man taller, heavier, and 10 years younger.
Yes, the heavyweight division is very hard at the moment, said Filipovic (25-6-2). Some new fighters are coming in like Junior, like (Cain) Velasquez. And it is getting stronger and stronger every day. As MMA, the sport, is spreading all around the world, new fighters are coming from different kind of sports and training. And it will be tougher and tougher to take the belt. But I don’t want to think too much in the future.
It’s hard to blame Cro Cop for taking such an attitude, since rehabbing his image in the United States is a one-match-at-a-time proposition. Filipovic’s UFC tenure has been such an up-and-down affair that it’s almost enough to make one forget how successful he was in Japan.
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Filipovic started his career as a successful kickboxer in Europe, then got all the way to the No. 2 spot in the heavyweight division in the Japanese K-1 promotion by 1999.
But his real fame came as the first fighter to successfully transition from K-1 to mixed martial arts in Japan, during the height of the PRIDE Fighting Championship era. His success would be equivalent to a true boxing world title contender going into MMA, and becoming a top contender in that sport as well.
Filipovic became almost a household name in Japan, and to this day is still the second-most famous foreign fighter in the country behind Bob Sapp, who he vanquished with one punch in a 2003 kickboxing match that was viewed by more than 30 million people on television.
Filipovic was thought of as a coldhearted killing machine, with his time in the Croatian special police forces – hence the Cro Cop nickname – played up big in publicity. Even though he lost a few fights along the way, and Fedor Emelianenko was the heavyweight champion during this time, Filipovic was one of the money machines of the sport. His 2002 fight with Kazushi Sakuraba drew MMA world records of 71,000 fans paying $7.4 million.
His 2005 decision loss to Emelianenko, built around his lifelong quest to become a world champion, may have been the climactic heavyweight championship match of the Pride era. Emelianenko was the superior fighter that night, but it was also clear Filipovic was the star of that show and the one people were paying to see.
Filipovic’s greatest success was in winning the 2006 Open Weight Grand Prix tournament, where he stopped both Wanderlei Silva and Josh Barnett in the same night.
But PRIDE itself was on its way down for the count. The company lost its network television coverage in Japan, and couldn’t survive without it. A talked about rematch with Emelianenko fell apart. At the same time, the UFC, awash in cash coming off the Ken Shamrock vs. Tito Ortiz series, made the decision to aggressively go after PRIDE’s top stars when their contracts expired.
The signing of Filipovic, announced on the same weekend as the record-setting Ortiz vs. Chuck Liddell UFC 66 match, was the symbolic moment that moved the center of the MMA universe from Tokyo to Las Vegas.
Many felt it was little more than a formality that Filipovic’s combination of takedown defense and striking talent would make him UFC champion, giving the company the heavyweight knockout artist of a caliber they had never had before.
But it didn’t happen. Filipovic was not the same fighter in the UFC as he was in PRIDE.
