Advanced Striking 2.0 - Anderson Silva

This is the opening portion of a chapter of Advanced Striking 2.0 which the Patreon bois can read in full here.

There came a brief pause in the action and the two men stared at each other. Vitor Belfort had tried his usual bursts and hit nothing but air. The champion, Anderson Silva stood in front of him, leaning forward at the waist. Silva was baiting him again. Everyone knew by now that the champion’s magic was in convincing the sloppy strikers of MMA to charge at him, then picking them off as they overextended. The humiliating defeat Silva had handed to Forrest Griffin two years earlier served as a reminder of just how not to fight the middleweight king.

The fact that Silva was stood there, just on the end of Belfort’s reach and just a step away, meant that he was planning something. Belfort suspected that all Silva wanted in the world right now was for him to lead. If Silva’s opponents would not chase him freely, the champion would start giving them his face, sticking it out on the front of his stance. Vitor Belfort wasn’t going to make the mistake of reaching for Silva’s head and allowing Silva to pull back and whip the rug out from under him—he had worked too hard to round out his game and fight his way back into the UFC as something more than a straight line, 1-2 puncher. No, now was the time to use his own craft and to show a patience that was not usually associated with the Belfort brand. At least, Belfort might have thought all of this if the ball of Silva’s left foot hadn’t smashed into the point of his chin from beneath and buckled his legs. Belfort crumbled straight down where he stood like a falling building.

Fig. 1

For Silva, it was a throwaway strike. One he had already used against Dan Henderson and others. The front snap kick came smoothly out of his forward lean, which was intended to draw his opponent into attacking him. The front snap kick to the face is a hard technique to time on a moving opponent. The target area is small, and while the kick can benefit enormously from entering through the blind angle—below the opponent’s field of vision—you have to be close enough to the opponent for it to travel this path.

Because Silva had a reputation as an almost superhuman counter-fighter, opponents were reluctant to reach for him even if he gave them every provocation. The forward lean that you so often saw in Silva’s fights was a simple boxing tactic known as presenting a false distance—where the head is undefended and within striking range, but is also out in front of the fighter’s centre of gravity. Reach for a man who is presenting this false distance and he has all the space to pull back to his upright stance, plus all the distance that he could lean back from his regular position. Belfort was very much in the right in not reaching for Silva, but he ended up lingering on the end of Silva’s kicking range and suffering for it.

The Silva – Belfort front kick was awarded knockout of the year by most online publications, and the UFC listed it at the top of their list of the one hundred best knockouts in UFC history. Over the coming years the front snap kick and the front kick to the face both became common features in mixed martial arts. That was Anderson Silva in a nutshell: he made a lot of moves that never knocked anyone out, and consequently no one noticed, but the moment he scored one of those many, many highlight reel finishes, everyone went wild trying to copy what he had come up with.

A Second Royce Gracie

A legacy in combat sports is generally written with raw statistics: titles won, titles defended, number of main events. In a contest of legacies in that regard, Anderson Silva can hold his own against almost anyone. Silva held the UFC middleweight title from 2006 to 2013, defended his crown ten times, and headlined cards for the UFC well into his forties. Yet Anderson Silva’s legacy is greater than a simple round up of his accomplishments because he changed the face of mixed martial arts as we know it. Just as Royce Gracie had introduced the world to ground fighting by winning the earliest UFC tournaments on the mat, Silva was a fighter out of time—a striker who showed up just how sloppy the standard of boxing and kickboxing was even at the highest levels of MMA. But all of Silva’s success and his incredible impact on the culture of combat sports could only come on the end of a decade of hard, thankless work and underwhelming results.

Through the late nineties and early 2000s, the Chute Boxe academy in Curitiba, Brazil fostered a small army of brawlers. Through rugged aggression and solid Jiu Jitsu, some of the team members began to have enormous success in the last days of “No Holds Barred” and into the years that PRIDE FC ran the MMA game. Today many observers believe that Chute Boxe’s methods belong in the past with its successes. In a sport full of meatheads who sparred too hard, too often, Chute Boxe became legendary as the most meatheaded place in the sport. If the stories are to be believed you could have walked into Chute Boxe on any given day in 2005 and seen Wanderlei Silva and Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua—the number one and two 205 pounders in PRIDE FC—trying to knock each other out without an audience or purse. It was in the gym wars of Chute Boxe—against established greats like Wanderlei Silva and ‘Pele’ Landi-Jons that Anderson Silva cut his teeth. While Silva never excelled in the Chute Boxe style as others did, he had good success under their charge. In August 2001, Silva faced the Shooto middleweight champion, Hayato Sakurai—a pound for pound great and undefeated in his twenty fight career—and the Brazilian handed Sakurai his first professional loss.

Chute Boxe was not a great fit for Silva’s talents though. The camp valued all out aggression and this could be seen in all of its other famous charges: Wanderlei Silva, Mauricio Rua, Murilo Rua, Evangelista Santos, Jose ‘Pele’ Landi Jons. Chute Boxe fighters went forward, swung hard, and when the opponent dropped for their hips, the Chute Boxe representative would sprawl and dig underhooks. It was a primitive and labour intensive attitude to wrestling and Silva was doing his best impression of it in the Shooto and PRIDE rings.

Silva has always been a long and lanky fighter for his weight, and this was especially true when he was skinny enough to compete at 170 pounds, but it was often made even more obvious by the way in which he fought. That is not to say that he used his reach well or made the opponent play the part of the shorter man. Silva—concerned about takedowns at all times—stood with his feet wide, his legs deeply bent, and his fists in front of his chest. He looked like a bow-legged Mike Tyson and he moved poorly from this squatted, heavy base, but everything about that stance was to compensate for his disadvantage on the level change, and to put him into position to sprawl and dig underhooks. Striking out of this position was wooden and he was seldom able to flow together more than one strike without having to abandon the stance and lose the defensive benefits for which he adopted it.

Study in a Goofy-Ass Stance by Jaques Slaque

The victory over Hayato Sakurai in 2001 was more than enough to be considered a world class fighter, and in June 2002 Silva was signed by PRIDE FC, the Japanese mega promotion which had quickly become the global powerhouse in mixed martial arts. Silva made a good start against Alex Stiebling, slicing the American’s brow open with a high kick which forced a doctor’s stoppage inside two minutes. A tedious grappling match with the unremarkable pro wrestler Alexander Otsuka followed. Up to this point Silva had been undeniably skilled, but had failed to catch fire in the way that his teammate, Wanderlei Silva had. What Anderson needed was a highlight reel moment, the kind that could be replayed and cut into tribute videos on Youtube. Silva finally found a little of the kind of split second magic that would come to define his later career when he fought Carlos Newton in his third PRIDE fight.

Advanced Striking 2.0 - Anderson Silva continues here for the Patreon bois. The previous chapter, Badr Hari can be read here.