For many kickboxing fans, Andy Ristie became public enemy number one when he starched the untouchable Giorgio Petrosyan at Glory 12. Petrosyan was considered the greatest defensive technician in kickboxing and GLORY had doubled down on hyping “The Doctor” as “The Mayweather of Kickboxing” in the lead up to their lightweight grand prix. A broken hand was given as the excuse for Petrosyan’s loss, but broken hands tend to slow down a fighter’s offence rather than dull his defensive reflexes. Petrosyan probably feels as though his hand cost him that match, or that he got caught cold in a wild exchange—that could happen to anybody. It’s just that it tended to happen to Ristie’s opponents and not to him.
The Ristie story is a bizarre one and cannot be recounted with absolute certainty because much of it is fleshed out by rumour and hearsay. Needless to say, he did not last. While Giorgio Petrosyan is headlining cards and winning tournaments (with a little help from the promoter) in 2020, Andy Ristie has vanished. A fighter who could at this point have been in all time great conversation is largely just an interesting footnote.
Anyone could watch one of Ristie’s fights and realize he was something unique. His style was a constant march of offence and while he was knocking out everyone he met his feet were seldom set for more than an instant. Often he seemed to be stumbling in and out of exchanges, never completely on balance, and yet the bodies were hitting the mat in front of him. There was a lot to like about Ristie’s game, but if you had to boil it down to the core the difference between Ristie and everyone else came down to constant use of what this writer would call an “advanced fundamental”: generating concussive punching power off one leg.
The problem with kicking or kneeing is that you are on one leg as you do so. The reason that punching techniques are the foundation for most of those who take up kickboxing or MMA is that you can move your feet while you’re doing it and if you get hit or pushed or the opponent steps in unexpectedly while you’re doing it, your feet are going to be there to catch you. When you start kicking you are making the momentary judgement that now you have time to lock yourself in place, on one foot, just for a moment. You can muddle your way through with punches, but a lot more can go wrong if you start kicking with no sense of timing or anticipation.
If you have watched any of Lucien Carbin’s pad work you will know that he loves knees. In his seminar footage and his two great instructionals available at the Warrior Collective, Carbin expands on this several times insisting that the knee is like a “giant knuckle”, an “atom bomb”, and that it puts fighters down for “minutes, not ten counts.” This is particularly noticeable in kickboxing, where bouts are often fought under rules that prohibit extended clinch work and holding for multiple knees. From Tyrone Spong to Imro Main, Carbin’s charges knee early and often, and especially love standing high knees to the face and palming the lead hook into a collar tie as they do it.
Ristie was already a big believer in the knee when he left the Colosseum gym and started training with Lucien Carbin. But when he got to Carbin Fight Factory, Ristie’s stance switching became constant. By Glory 12, the night that Ristie made history, the Surinamese Dutchman was switching stances on every exchange.
While revisiting Ristie’s career I was reminded of a segment in the great (in an incredibly corny way) TV show Mind, Body and Kick Ass Moves. This was a documentary on the Beeb in which Kung Fu brummy, Chris Crudelli would fawn over the chi tricks and mysticism of martial artists around the world—though some of the legitimate feats shown were certainly remarkable. In one episode Crudelli meets Ernesto Presas, a Filipino who practices Kombatan—an art where the footwork is constant but carries the man through the movements. Presas performs hand trapping and stick fighting drills with a blindfold on and insists that if you know the footwork you can become unhittable.
While that is obviously largely woo-woo nonsense, there is something of the idea in Ristie’s style. He is always throwing himself forward with knees or push kicks, and then stumbling back out before returning in again. There is seldom a moment where he is stood still in a set stance. But stepping back and forth in front of an opponent and sacrificing the structure and familiarity of a single stance is often a recipe for disaster: one of the things that made Ristie such a nightmare was his ability to constantly be generating knockout power in his blows, even when on one leg or seemingly stumbling. Rather than examine Ristie as a whole, let us examine some of the ways a fighter can generate power off one leg.
Same Side Shoulder Drive
The first way of generating power out of a kick is to straight punch off the same side by throwing the shoulder forward. Rather than rotating the body to generate force for the blow, the upper body is driven towards the opponent. It is the kind of “leading with the face” rear handed hitting that boxing coaches hate, but when paired with a kick or knee it leads to rapid two-beat striking off the same side. When using a round kick as the first part of this double strike, the round kick is often thrown with the hip held back, and the hand is cocked rather than held out or thrown back as in classical kicking form. The kick serves only as a partial blow, tapping the opponent’s forearm before the straight shoots down inside of it.
Not the best connection but Satake being on the end of Hug’s reach really shows how much Hug is throwing his upper body forward.
Major exponents of this technique include the Machida brothers and Andy Hug. Lyoto Machida dropped Rashad Evans with it in their fight, and Andy Hug was able to score powerful left straights on much more experienced boxers like Ray Sefo in this way. Hug was an absurdly hard kicker but you will notice when he wanted to score the left straight he would often just slap the opponent’s forearm with his kick, or even feint it and throw the shoulder forward—a short, clipped off superman punch. Ristie used this technique throughout his marches but more often than not he instead tended to rely on the next technique.
Swinging the Arm Wide
A second way to score power blows off one leg is to swing the hand wide around and turn the shoulders as on a standing left hook. In the previous technique the kicking side arm is coiled to drive a piston straight, but in this one the hand is thrown back—as many fighters like to do on a powerful kick or knee anyway.
This is a Carbin staple—right knee into right hook, left knee into left hook. Ristie used this in just about every fight he had in Glory and it proved a nightmare.
A knee up the middle cannot help but bring the opponent’s hands in to their centre line. Against orthodox opponents, the left knee to the body, immediately followed by a left hook as the knee was returning, kept Ristie’s constant stream of offence going. More often than not these connections weren’t enormous but Ristie would be able to knock his opponent off balance and follow with another knee or another punch and continue his violent train of thought.
A fighter can also use this technique to angle off to their kicking side as the foot goes down.
While for Ristie the hook was just a follow up to the knee to stay on offense at all times, fighters have also been able to this knee as a set up for the right hook. Against orthodox fighters the right hook to the head—without dropping the left shoulder and swinging it overhand—is a rare punch to see land on its own. It is more an inside combination weapon, a placeholder in a rapid flurry that will probably hit glove or shoulder. Paired with the right knee it connects at a much better percentage. Errol Zimmerman—not a Carbin fighter—is known for his use of the right hook (often more of a horiztonal swing), and the right knee to right hook is one of his best (if not only) set ups. In the examples below the same set up works in a number of different ways.
The first actually strikes his opponent’s jaw from below, raising his head into the hook—the knee takes on the role of an uppercut with a single giant knuckle as Carbin described. In the second Zimmerman’s knee comes in on an angle and onto the wrist of his opponent (something Carbin also advocates as a way to break the opponent’s arm), and pins it as the hook comes over. The third is the most common outcome: Zimmerman’s right knee brings Ben Edwards’ hands in and his right hook swings around behind Edwards’ left glove. And in the fourth clip Zimmerman’s knee and right hand keep Jerome Le Banner occupied just long enough to clatter him with a follow up left hook.
This technique was such a staple for Ristie that it can be seen in almost every attack in every one of his fights after he begins working with Carbin.
Step Back into Hook
A third way of power punching out of the kick is to return the leg to the mat behind you, and rotate the body into a hook with what is now the lead hand. Think right low kick into left hook or left low kick into right hook. Where the knee / kick to same side swing, or Hug style kick to upper body drive is are offensive weapons to overload the opponent’s defences, this technique is something of a counter. That is the reason you will see it most often performed off the low kick: you can score a long range kick for decent damage (or at least enough to suitably annoy the opponent) and also have a good amount of distance to get back to your sprinters stance and execute the hook off. A classic stance switching combination—a favourite of Tyrone Spong—is to perform a step up low kick with the lead leg, place it down behind you and thereby change stances, and then clatter the opponent with the lead hook as they step in.
Notice that the opponent stepping in allows the right hook to connect. Clips like this make you begrudge boxing for taking him from us.
You might have noticed that because this technique is powered by returning both feet to the mat, it can actually be thrown after either the straight or wide-arm swing in the above two techniques. And that’s where it all came together for Ristie—a knee or kick was always followed a split-second later with a punch from the same side, then a power punch off the lead hand as he stepped the foot back behind him.
Against Robin van Roosmalen—a sawn off fighter whose hands were constantly in the double forearms guard, nailed to both sides of his head—Ristie spent the short fight throwing knees up the middle, slapping swings off the same arm, and stepping back into the uppercut. It was one such uppercut that finished Van Roosmalen along the ropes in the second round.
Some of Ristie’s strangest connections and knockdowns came as he threw a hard, committed front kick—glancing off or missing his target altogether—and weeble-wobbled back onto his stance with a lead hook to side swipe the opponent as they thought they had him dead to rights for the counter.
Fall In
The last of the useful ways to build punching power off kicks is also the ugliest and involves abandoning your defense. It is to use the kick as a shift and fall in on the opponent. The way that Ristie tended to do it was with a full bodied Pat Smith style front kick, better suited to Vic Mackeying in doors in The Shield than fighting a scientific kickboxing match.
It concerns me that in pointing out all the success Ristie had precisely because of how chaotic his constant shifting and switching style was, I might be underplaying the need for defensive competence. Ristie was not at all bad at getting away from punches. One way he did this was to leverage guard across his opponent’s body—hiding behind whichever shoulder was forward and either cross-stepping out the side door, ducking into a clinch, or pushing his man out to range again in the manner of Dr. Petrosyan himself.
Another Ristie mainstay was to simply shift back the way he came, taking a full step back into the opposite stance. He also did a good job of dropping his lead hand and hiding behind his shoulder as he did so. It isn’t wrong: in fact the retreating shift is the original shift for which all the others got their name, but it was certainly helped by his height and length over other lightweights.
However, falling in with the kick is one of the worst ways to keep yourself safe. Oddly enough this was Chinzo Machida’s go-to in his short MMA career: throwing the front kick to the opponent’s open side and stepping in with a jab which would often knock his man down. The hips and shoulders weren’t turning well and it didn’t look like it should have a lot of pop on it, but turning the hips and shoulders is a way to put the bodyweight into motion behind the punch while considering the importance to staying on stance and conserving your defensive position.
Falling in off a kick is putting your weight into a blow without any of those defensive considerations. In Champ Thomas’ terrific How to Become an Ass-Whipping Boxer, the author prescribes this as an exercise to learning to score a stiff jab: place your jab on a wall, arm and stance extended as if you had just driven into it, and then lift your lead leg and put all of your weight onto your fist. When you front kick and fall in with the lead hand, this is exactly what you are doing.
This brings us to what became the defining moment of Andy Ristie’s career. Against Giorgio Petrosyan, Ristie had pause for thought. His aggression had been growing in every previous performance and yet against Petrosyan he hung back. Two awkward rounds passed—Ristie failed to commit and put the hurt on Petrosyan, but Petrosyan was also struggling to find his timing and his counters against this gangly, unpredictable opponent.
As he came out for the third round, with no way of knowing how the scorecards were looking, Ristie immediately lunged at Petrosyan. Three separate one legged dives into straight punching attacks. Ristie was almost falling over the top of Petrosyan as The Doctor ducked into clinches. Lunging into a third 1-2 Ristie cracked Petrosyan with a right hand. The uppercut that followed it and laid Petrosyan out for count stole the attention, but it was the right straight that changed the fight.
Ristie has come to be associated with the Lucien Carbin style because Carbin has always run his fighters through weird switch hitting drills on the pads and Ristie seemed to be the only one to live out these drills in the ring. It is true that a lot of the good that happened to Ristie came after he began training with Carbin, but that window of time with Carbin was relatively short.
Rumours in kickboxing circles have it that Ristie was a troublemaker in the gym who kept getting into disputes with one of Carbin’s other trainers. Whatever the case, Ristie and Carbin parted ways and Ristie shopped his talents around. The story goes that Ristie basically took control of his own camp—and his absolutely woeful conditioning in later bouts is consistent with just about every other fighter who has done this.
After putting a beating on Davit Kiria, Ristie gassed in the third and was finally knocked out in the fifth, and during that fight his self-assembled corner could be seen shouting instructions over each other with no real effect. Ristie finally decided on Roberto Flamingo as his cornerman and coach, but that ended in disaster when the pair were caught tampering with the gloves before Ristie’s rematch with Robin van Roosmalen. The referee and commission found that Ristie’s thumb had been cut separate from his glove on both hands: something that has about zero chance of happening by accident. There was some awkward shuffling around to get new gloves as if it were all a misunderstanding and the fight went ahead, but Ristie never came back to Glory and sat out until 2019, when he lost a decision in Kunlun, again by merit of his gas tank.
The moral of this story isn’t not to be like Ristie at his worst, or to try and emulate him at his best, but more one of the value of confidence and aggression. Whenever you move your hands you give the opponent a chance to counter, but conversely the less you worry about counters and being out of position, the more you can open up and overwhelm opponents. It is another of those nonsensical paradoxes that rules this very generously named “sweet science.”