Jon Fitch still raining icepicks on those steel shores
Jon Fitch has seen a lot in his seven years of professional fighting. He saw stars when he got knocked…
Jon Fitch has seen a lot in his seven years of professional fighting. He saw stars when he got knocked out by Wilson Gouveia in 2002. He saw opportunity when he caught Thiago Alves with an upkick. He’s seen his arm raised against Diego Sanchez, a doppelgänger in Chris Wilson and a welterweight title shot against Georges St-Pierre.
But up until UFC 94, he had never seen grown men in sequins before a fight.
I was standing right behind him in the tunnel as they called him, and I was like, ‘what the hell are these ring girls doing, and why are they wearing sequin dresses?’ he says. Then I realized, Jesus—it’s Gono and his crew.
Unnerving, sure, especially for those who saw the whole choreographed dance step that Akhiro Gono and his cornermen performed on the way to the Octagon. Fitch? He just stared at the ground to keep from laughing. Moments later he came out with his trademark snarl to Johnny Cash’s version of Rusty Cage.
The funniest part of the whole thing was I looked up from my corner in between rounds and you could see this girl walking in and she had a t-shirt and you could see this gold skirt underneath. It was Gono’s corner—his guy didn’t have time to change, and he was still in a dress and panty hose. That was pretty hysterical. Crazy Bob [Cook] in my corner had to keep grabbing me by the chin and making me look him in the eyes because I kept leaning over to look at his corner.
Of course, Fitch’s amusement didn’t prevent him from going on to win his ninth fight in ten UFC contests (22-3, 1 NC overall). He was able to drag out a unanimous decision win over the 15-year veteran Gono with the familiar Octagon control and doggedness that have made him one of the toughest outs in the welterweight division.
At one point late in the second round he gave up his back and shot for an armbar to try and finish the fight. He chased the guillotine in the third but, as he now says almost as a parable, a veteran like that, who knows how to survive and not get finished, is hard to finish.
He brought his lunchpail and scored a victory, something that has become expected of him almost every fight; they raised his arm, and it was onto the Penn/GSP fight.
And isn’t that just like the former Purdue wrestler Fitch? He is the quiet professional, never the spectacle. He is the blue-collar guy from the Midwest who doesn’t try to get into people’s heads with pre-fight talk, and—with a tendency to be brutally honest with himself—he certainly doesn’t sugarcoat things after a loss.
Take the St-Pierre fight, where he enduring five rounds of shutter-speed kicks, knees and fists. Forget lessons on feinting and jabbing, Fitch took a whole chapter out of the fight that borders on eastern philosophy.
I had a lot of defensive flaws that night, he says. And I had the wrong mindset as far as my view on talent. I now believe 100% that ‘talented’ is just a myth, and I think people use it too often to make excuses for themselves for why they can’t do things. People say, ‘oh he’s so talented at being fast,’ or ‘he’s so talented with his balance,’ and you’re basically writing yourself off as never being able to do that.
So what he did was enlist a strength & conditioning coach—or a speed coach—because he knew he had to become a better athlete, to retrain neurons. Some of the things that are attributed to GSP as a natural gift he sees as imminently trainable, that it’s a nurture question, not necessarily a byproduct of nature.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything, he says. Just little things. Like, you wouldn’t think that you’d need to know how to jump correctly, you just think ‘I know how to jump.’ There’s a right way and a wrong way.
GSP has a way of teaching hard lessons, even for guys riding a 15-fight winning streak.