The 2019 Slacky Awards: Technical Turnaround

Of all the Slackies, this is perhaps the award in which I am most invested. I do not have a “Fighter of the Year” award to be doled out to the man with the most high profile wins in a calendar year, or who succeeded in generating the most buzz. The Technical Turnaround is for the aspect of combat sports and martial arts that excites me the most—the fact that you are not a finished product. It is common in combat sports to point to the result of a fight two, five, even ten years ago and act as if that indicates exactly how the same match up would go today. The fighters who have won the Technical Turnaround award did not storm straight up the ranks—they all hit a wall at some point and they took stock of their loss or losses and rebuilt themselves. They stand as a testament to the idea that fighting is not about who you are—set in stone—but what you do and how you adapt. And this year’s field is perhaps the most stacked to date.

While Jack Hermansson ended 2019 on a loss it would be an injustice to ignore the terrific little run he built himself over the year and the developments he made along the way. He was “herky jerky” as a striker to the point that it was his defining characteristic and it was getting hard to describe him as anything else, but Hermansson actually ironed out a nice straight jab and built a decent orthodox boxing game on top of his strange base. His seated kata-gatame / arm triangle stole much of the attention because—hey, who doesn’t love a finishing move—but the all around improvement in Hermansson’s boxing game allowed him to keep a great pace without putting himself at risk in a cracking performance against Ronaldo ‘Jacare’ Souza in April. Sadly, the mental side of the game caught up to Hermansson in his fight with Jared Cannonier in September—pace and feints aren’t a factor if you just aren’t happy to throw real strikes for fear of getting countered.

And of course in losing to Jared Cannonier, Hermansson ran up against another contender for the Technical Turnaround award. Cannonier debuted in the UFC as a heavyweight with a bit of a spare tyre, some great low kicks, but perhaps not the ability to take—or at least avoid—the heavyweight power coming back. After cutting down to light heavyweight he looked tremendous in the striking portion of fights—most notably boxing the ears off Glover Teixeira when Glover was still the number two guy in the world—but if an opponent so much as touched Cannonier’s legs he would be stuck on his back for the duration of the round. When Dominick Reyes blasted him on the feet inside a round in May of last year, it seemed like Cannonier’s potential had been reached.

On the tail end of 2018, the idea of Cannonier moving down to middleweight raised few eyebrows. He was slated to face Alessio di Chiciro at UFC 230 but wound up bouncing into a fight with the top ten ranked Dave Branch, whom he shucked off with each takedown attempted, and whom he knocked out in the second round. Most importantly, a former heavyweight dieting and cutting down to middleweight sounds like a disaster waiting to happen but with the help of the MMA Lab, Cannonier was able to perform the transformation without showing any real shortcomings. It was about as safe as strategically dehydrating yourself for the scale can be.

But that was 2018 and it was just one, six-minute fight. Coming into 2019 there were still a lot of questions about Cannonier’s middleweight experiment and over the course of the year he acquitted himself excellently. In May he outstruck Anderson Silva to a low kick TKO—which many sites and fans somehow treated as though it were Silva’s old injury taking him out of the fight… despite being on the other god-damned leg. Then in September, Cannonier met Hermansson—easily the best rounded fighter he had fought at middleweight, and his takedown defence looked just as flawless. Cannonier timed Hermansson ducking for an obvious takedown attempt and TKOed him in under six minutes.

Ultimately in the year since Cannonier fought Branch we have had very few answers to questions that existed then. Can his takedown defence and wall walking hold up over the rounds? Does his punching power and conditioning hold up over the rounds? We just don’t know. But we do know that he’s fought three of the best middleweights in the world and beaten them easily, where before he was going life-and-death with Ion Cutelaba. The move to middleweight has been a success, the move to the MMA Lab has been a success, and 2020 rings with promise for fans of The Killa Gorilla.

Many readers recommended Kevin Lee for the Technical Turnaround award and this is likely because he looked tremendous in his last fight, when he knocked out Gregor Gillespie with a cross counter into left high kick. Tristar gym is not going to be the answer to every fighter’s issues but Firas Zahabi produces great grapplers with great jabs. Kevin Lee is already a great grappler, with a damn near eighty inch reach at lightweight—if there is one style that he might be tailor made for it is the Tristar style. With all of that being said, he is where Cannonier was last year: he ended the year on an excellent showing but some consistent showings of this new look will solidify him in the running for this award next year.

Volkan Oezdemir got his light heavyweight title shot off a couple of spastic, flailing knockouts inside of a minute and came to billed as some kind of unearthly knockout wizard. He got his fight for the belt against Daniel Cormier and came up short. He then gassed out and was submitted by the unlikely Anthony Smith. At the time we thought Smith was showing us just how bad even the top light heavyweights were, however, the book had not been completely written on Oezdemir yet. In his last three, Oezdemir has been able to lever his skills in every area of the game and seems uninterested in living up to the daft “No Time” moniker anymore.

Against Dominick Reyes he gave light heavyweight’s most promising up-and-comer the fight of his life. Oezdemir lost the split decision but the performance was a thousand miles removed from the rest of his UFC run. Then Oezdemir took apart Ilir Latifi in a beautiful performance built around a thoughtful jab, low-low kicks, intercepting knees, and crisp left hooks.

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Oezdemir saw out the year with a close split decision over the powerful Aleksandar Rakic. The key seems to have been recognizing that yes, Oezdemir can hit hard—he’s a 200 pound man—but that he’s also a significantly better technician than most light heavyweights in all areas.

Back in February, Jimmie Rivera’s coach put words to what many were thinking about Aljamain Sterling as Rivera sat dejected on his stool ahead of the final round. “He sucks with his hands, why are you giving him so much respect?! He’s just throwing stupid shit.” Those who had followed Sterling from the start of his UFC career knew him as a wrestler with some flicky meme kicks, flailing back fists, and no real boxing. Somehow the kicks have stayed, and the boxing has remained fairly rudimentary, but the fights have turned into bell-to-bell beatdowns. A lot of it seems down to Sterling’s work to reset the distance. Jimmie Rivera and Pedro Munhoz both insisted they were going to get inside of his flicky kicks and beat him up, both got kicked in the gut a couple of dozen times, and then suddenly they were on the back foot and Sterling was the one playing the bully.

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Furthermore, he might not be a wicked inside fighter, but his composure on in trading range has noticeably improved. Aljo’s ability to go between level changes and body shots, and to come up with back elbows or high kicks, keeps his opponents playing catch up. Unfortunately, Sterling’s last fight of the year came in June and the division is in a weird spot with Henry Cejudo out of action and Petr Yan and Marlon Moraes taking time to fight old featherweights instead of each other.

The dark horse of this award category is probably Diego Ferreira. Go back and watch his fight with last year’s Technical Turnaround winner, Dustin Poirier. It’s honestly kind of embarrassing as both men run in swinging wildly and then try to run out in the opposite direction after each attack. But just as Poirier went from strength to strength, Ferreira has quietly built himself into a very serviceable striker. Just like Aljo, Ferreira’s change has not necessarily been in any particular technique but in footwork, movement and application of distance and pressure. Though his constant use of the jab, and switching leads to apply it from both stances, allows him to keep up a near constant tirade. It also helps that his wrestling game has seemed to hit its stride this year too, as he walked down Rustam Khabilov, fought off his takedowns, and roughed him up with strikes.

In September, Ferreira took on Mairbek Taisumov—a favourite of pundits and analysts, who had been on leave due to chemical irregularities. Ferreira’s pressure fighting gameplan worked even better against Taisumov who, aside from a few calf kicks early in the bout, looked like a rag in the breeze. Ferreira is another example of that principle ensconced by Beneil Dariush and Fabricio Werdum—if you can get comfortable pushing forward and using the cage as your ally, you can make up for a lot of years of striking training, and make well regarded strikers look bad.

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Ferreira is slated to fight Anthony Pettis next—which is the ultimate buttered cat of a match up, because Pettis cannot win if he is put under pressure, but it also seems that he cannot lose if he has lost his last match.

But the winner of Technical Turnaround has to be Justin Gaethje. I have tried to go at this every way I can to avoid my obvious bias for Gaethje—even by trying to double my bias for Diego Ferreira—but what he has done this year has been remarkable. The way that Gaethje was acquiring stoppages was by applying frantic pressure and forcing errors—it was a reckless game but it was also a reliable way to overwhelm opponents.

He hit a very obvious wall that his grit and natural attributes could not carry him over, as Eddie Alvarez and Dustin Poirier led him around the ring and ground him down in back-to-back fights, and so he went back to the drawing board. Most of us didn’t think he’d even try to adjust. Almost everyone thought he would fail to have the same success by changing up his style—or that we might get a couple of “D-1 Alvarez” style performances out of him and then back to business as usual. The fact that in his last three fights Gaethje has managed to collect three more highlight reel knockouts while barely taking a single blow simply cannot be argued with. He’s managed to get his jab going, he’s landing the low kicks without getting blasted on the return each time, and he’s applying the pressure as and when he needs to. There are still a few too many head butts and open handed swipes and his opponent’s eyes for some to enjoy it, but in the space of a year and a half he has made changes at the fundamental level of his game that most couldn’t manage if they caught them two or three fights into their career.