Opinion: When Supreme Will Meets Supreme Skill

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Last week saw an exceptionally rare, nearly unique matchup in the history of MMA, a fascinating fight pitting two extremes against one another. Of course, realizing this required a degree of imagination and abstraction. It's very easy to look at A.J. McKee going up to lightweight to face Spike Carlyle as a heavily favored martial artist facing a tough but less skilled veteran, but to do that would be to miss seeing the fight for what it really was. I've written about Carlyle before. With more time to think about it, his victory over Dan Moret is the most amazing MMA fight I've ever seen, of the thousands in almost 30 years of fandom. Not the best or greatest, but the most amazing. I had never before seen a fighter so badly dominated, at such an obvious skill deficit, and so completely exhausted that he had to lean over with his hands on his knees, magically come back to win—and not even by decision, but by choking out far superior grappler who had never before been submitted.

Carlyle was a highly impressive 14-3 going into the fight against McKee, and was on a streak of five straight wins, including at least three in which he had been the betting underdog. I've seen most of his matches and consider myself a fan, and yet I can't figure out how Carlyle actually wins. He's usually technically inferior to his opponent in every major aspect of MMA, yet he's the one with his hand raised at the end. His strategy boils down to turning the fight into a wild brawl, going for huge knockout strikes on the feet, often very sloppily, and then getting into a series of grappling exchanges. Carlyle isn't a “good” grappler as we normally think of it, but he excels at scrambles and is endlessly tough, able to wriggle out of submissions, tank a bunch of brutal ground-and-pound, and turn into his opponent, somehow ending up on top even when he is taken down. Obviously, this approach takes an inordinate amount of energy, and the cardio demands are exacerbated by Carlyle being a huge, muscular lightweight. He is often badly tired by Round 2—though less so than during his featherweight stint in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. However, this is where Carlyle's endless toughness again comes in. He wills himself to continue fighting, with an unshakable belief that he will triumph. He might have to take portions of a round off and sustain heavy damage, but he doesn't care, as Carlyle will muster all his remaining energy for a last charge. If it doesn't work, he will rinse and repeat for the full 15 minutes of a fight, as no one has ever stopped “The Crucifixion.”

Carlyle is the absolute extreme of toughness in modern MMA. All-time, no one will ever surpass 140-pound Yuki Nakai fighting 230-pound Gerard Gordeau, being repeatedly head-stomped and getting his eye gouged out with the Dutchman's toe, submitting him anyways, then continuing to fight multiple times that same night in a tournament, submitting 250-pound Greco-Roman wrestler Craig Pittman before falling against the legendary—and at 185 pounds, still much larger—Rickson Gracie in the finals, and then hiding his blind eye for a decade for fear it would hurt Japanese MMA. By modern rules and standards, Carlyle is the ultimate in heart and fighting spirit.

Carlyle's opponent was also an extreme, but in a different category: talent. Like Carlyle, I've written about McKee before, and stand by my assertion that he may well be considered the greatest fighter of all time by the time he retires, though fighting in Bellator instead of the overhyped UFC may obscure that reality for some. His talent is completely off the charts, with a young Jon Jones the only comparison I can make. McKee is phenomenal at every aspect of fighting with a speed, accuracy, explosiveness, and power that is mind-boggling and unprecedented, along with frequently textbook perfect technique. There are two ways to look at his first professional loss, the rematch for the Bellator featherweight title against Patricio Freire. One is that he didn't take the fight as seriously as he could have, and often looked sloppy looking for an opening for a spectacular knockout that never came. Another is that despite being off his game, McKee barely lost a decision to one of the greatest fighters in MMA history, who executed one of the most brilliant, well-disciplined game plans in championship fight history that night. A Top 20 all-time legend in Freire had to walk a tightrope for 25 minutes to barely edge him out. McKee is just that disgustingly talented.

What happened when these two extremes met? For starters, it was a very good, exciting fight. Round 1 was among the most exciting stanzas I've seen all year, with Carlyle fighting like even more of a wild berserker than normal. This was absolutely the correct choice, too. There was no way he could ever defeat McKee in a slower-paced, more methodical fight. He had to turn it into an insane brawl where hopefully McKee would break under the strain or make a mistake. Round 1 had its twists and turns, and after getting the worst of it on the feet, Carlyle was in top position for a while, preventing McKee from getting back up. Unfortunately for Carlyle, while no one in the world may be as tough as him, McKee is still a lot tougher than the average pro, not to mention very intelligent and well-disciplined. He reversed and got dominant position, taking full mount and the back. While Carlyle got back on top near the end, he ate a series of huge elbows McKee landed from his back. McKee had not only withstood Carlyle's barrage, but won the round. Carlyle was also tired after round 1. He tried for the same magic he did against Moret, fighting in opportunistic spurts, but he had attained the limit of his toughness against an opponent as good as McKee, who utterly dominated Carlyle over the remaining 10 minutes. Almost any other fighter would have been stopped from strikes or submitted, but not Carlyle, who continued trying to win, if in vain, until the final bell. McKee was ready for this, though, tried to slow the fight down and did not overextend himself.

Thus we learned how far ultimate toughness can take a fighter. The answer is a lot further than most realize, although there is a hard upper boundary to it. We also learned something about ultimate talent. Despite all of McKee's ability, he couldn't rely on that alone to win. He had to dip into his own toughness, self-discipline, and fighting smarts to avoid the lure of Carlyle's endless brawling and win the exhausting, thrilling 15-minute battle. The fans, for their part, got one of the best rounds of the year and a very good fight. It's an exciting and instructive battle the likes of which we may not see again for a while.