MMATORCH
THE TORCH: THE #1 WORLDWIDE BRAND IN COMBAT ENTERTAINMENT COVERAGE - OVER 250 MILLION VIEWS & LISTENS PER YEAR
REREACHING MORE FANS EVERY WEEK THAN ANY OTHER INDEPENDENT SOURCE • VIA THE WEB, MOBILE, PRINT NEWSLETTER, AND ITUNES
HOME | CONTACT USABOUT USFACEBOOKTWITTERLIVECASTPODCASTFREE IPHONE APPFREE AMAZON APPRSS
JUMP TO A LIST OF ARTICLES ABOUT ANY CATEGORY -




GET OUR FREE PHONE APPS FOR IPHONE, IPAD, ANDROID, AND AMAZON: JUST SEARCH "MMATORCH" IN YOUR PHONE'S APP STORE OR MARKETPLACE


Opinion & Analysis : Bjorn Hansen's Take
HANSEN: Examining Miguel Torres' MMA midlife identity crisis

Email This Article - Click for Printer-Friendly Page
Or Spread the World Below...
__


Mar 19, 2010 - 12:30:51 PM

By: Bjorn Hansen, MMATorch Columnist

Staff10Hansen_130_1.jpg
It's official: Miguel Torres is desperate to change-up his routine yet again, and will come out to Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” and drop his customary Mexican mariachi music.

No, but seriously… Who is Miguel Torres? Who does he see when he looks in the mirror?

If you’ve been following Twitter, you’d know he looks more like a miniature Mexican Frankenstein than one of the top ten pound for pound fighters on the planet.

My younger brother just started following MMA, and more recently the WEC. To catch him up, I storied Torres' dominant reign as bantamweight champion, including the fact that he was riding a seventeen fight winning streak going into WEC 41 last August. My brother had never heard of Miguel Torres and was skeptical of his skeletal physique. "He’s the best in the division," I reassured him, just watch what he’ll do to an undefeated fighter in Brian Bowles. Oops.

Surely that was just an aberration. "He got caught," I said. It happens even to the best of them, right? Miguel Torres was just too wildly reckless for his own good. Patience was the missing ingredient in his repertoire.

"Watch him show Joseph Benavidez whose house it is," I then told my brother before WEC 47. Oops.

Now instead of coming out of the gates like Seattle Slew as he did against Brian Bowles, he waited… Then he waited some more. It felt like Torres was eternally trapped in the “feeling out” process that normally lasts only 60-90 seconds.

All the meanwhile Benavidez was falling into his comfort zone, and by the second round he was loose and ready. He picked up Miguel like a small child and dropped him, then proceeded to drop skull-exposing elbows.

He must've hit Miguel very hard, because while I’m certainly no Brazilian Jiu Jitsu expert, as I understand it, you employ the “monkey roll” to help avoid submissions, and not to serve your neck on a platter with a “please accept this” sign on it.

And after the choke is set in, what was up with the oddly long pause — it seemed like forever —before he started fighting the choke?

By the time he finally started to scramble it was too late, and the free fall from the top of his previous dominion continued.

Miguel has got to feel like he’s been skydiving through an abyss of defeat these past two bouts.

Let’s examine his career under a magnifier to get a better feel for his body of work.

First, to begin his career, he goes off on a twenty fight win streak, of which sixteen came by stoppage. He lost to Ryan Ackerman by decision, and then embarked on a seventeen fight blitz, stopping fifteen of them, including Ryan Ackerman.

For some context, five out of every six of Torres’ thirty-seven victories have come by stoppage. Eighteen of those stoppages came in the first round. He’s had twenty-two submissions, including five to punches.

Miguel Torres wasn’t just dominant; he was a stone-cold killer.

But let’s use a microscope this time and start over, focusing not on sexy statistics, but meaty substance instead.

In MMA, it’s more about the “who” and the “where” than it is the “what” and “how”. And who Miguel Torres has defeated in the WEC is less than extraordinary when examined closely.

Out of the five fighter’s Torres has beaten in the WEC only Takeya Mizugaki is still currently fighting for the organization (and barely because he’s only 1-2). Chase Beebe and Manny Tapia have combined to go 0-7 since their respective losses to Torres in the cage. In fact, the five WEC fighters to lose to Torres (Jeff Bedard, Chase Beeby, Yoshiro Maeda, Manny Tapia, and Takeya Misugaki) have collectively gone 7-12 since fighting the Mulleted Mexican.

So… maybe he’s not a top ten pound for pound fighter after all. I don’t know, maybe he is? What I do know for sure is that he can’t fight in the same manner he did against Benavidez again.

Telling Miguel to be patient is like putting a muzzle on one of Michael Vick’s dogs (ok… still too soon?). He wasn’t methodically cautious against Benavidez. He seemed like he was pretend-acting to be "patient", and doing quite a poor job at it. You can’t put a leash on a fighter and expect him to change his ways overnight.

If Miguel Torres felt confused about how to approach a fight after his loss to Bowles (which at the time seemed like a fluke), now he’s got to be clueless. He’s having a mixed martial arts midlife identity crisis. What is he? An aggressive assassin, or a calculating slayer?

Surely somewhere between his hasty failed bull-rush of Brian Bowles and his inertia-full approach to Joseph Benavidez lays the answer. If he can manage to find that thin median between aggression and patience maybe he can get his train back on its winning tracks.

If not, he’s going to be waking up in the middle of the night in a heated sweat, thinking “I can’t get this goddamn Tom Petty song out of my head!”



Questions, comments? Email me at Bjorn.hansen@fiu.edu

Please Recommend This Article at StumbleUpon...



MORE "Bjorn Hansen's Take" ARTICLES
BJORN: UFC 140 Mega-Review - A Top Five Countdown of What Happened, How It'll Be Remembered, What's Next?
BJORN HANSEN: Fighting for Acceptance - What the UFC 139 Shogun vs. Henderson main event means and where UFC goes now
B. HANSEN: Reliving "Big Nog's" UFC 134 KO of Brendan Schaub - A Classic Moment in UFC History
HANSEN: A Case for Purity in MMA - PEDs Mar Historic Comebacks
HANSEN: Chael Sonnen can't get no satisfaction - constantly coming in second
HANSEN: The Ultimate Company Man - “The Iceman” Chuck Liddell


MMATORCH LIVECAST - EVERY TUESDAY NIGHT

ALERT: Every Tuesday night, listen to the MMATorch Livecast from 9-10:30 p.m. ET or listen now to the most recent shows by clicking here. Listen live this coming Tuesday as Jamie Penick, Rich Hansen, and Matt Pelkey discuss the latest MMA happenings. Online listen at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/mmatorch or call into the show at 646-716-8090 to either just listen or participate.


CLICK TO RETURN TO MAIN LISTING



LIKE US ON FACEBOOK!

MMATORCH and USA TODAY
UFC VIDEO PRESENTATION


FEATURED MMATORCH EXCLUSIVES

GREG JACKSON ADDRESSES UFC 143 CRITICS

Greg_Jackson_80_1.jpg
"There's still a large contingent of people, that they just want to see these guys almost die, or the other guy almost die and come back, and sometimes fights are like that. Certainly they are. But sometimes you get technical masterpieces too, and to hate a beautiful, technical fight - you're not really a fight fan...

*CLICK TO READ ARTICLE

AMADI: WHY DIAZ FIGHTS LIKE HE DOES

Staff10Amadi_70_40.jpg
Diaz has a granite chin, possesses perhaps the best recovery in the sport, his pace and conditioning are second to none and he sets records with the volume of his punches almost every time he steps into the cage. Nick Diaz is simply designed to fight the way he fights, and not many other fighters are...

*CLICK TO READ ARTICLE

KOSCHECK EXPLAINS SPLIT FROM AKA

JoshKoscheck_150_5.jpg
"There was a lot of poison going on around there and I'm really disappointed because we had a good thing going. It was a good thing and I think people's egos got in the way. Well, not people just Javier, his ego got in the way, and too many cameras in the gym and him trying to build himself up and his brand, his AKA brand...

*CLICK TO READ ARTICLE

MMATORCH POLL

SEE PREVIOUS POLL RESULTS


10 HOTTEST MMATORCH ARTICLES
UFC Undisputed 3 Review (Xbox 360): THQ improves upon past iterations to provide best MMA experience to date
UFC 143 ROUNDTABLE: Should the UFC book a Carlos Condit vs. Nick Diaz rematch this summer?
ENNIS: Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down for UFC 143 - Carlos Condit, Fools/Crybabies, Bad Judging/Officiating, and more
AMADI: Why Nick Diaz Fights the Way He Does, and Why Carlos Condit Was Right to Avoid It
PENICK: UFC 143's Nick Diaz vs. Carlos Condit - A Round by Round Breakdown of What Actually Happened
PEREZ: The UFC 143 Highlight Reel - The Top 5 stories out of "Diaz vs. Condit" event in Las Vegas
UFC 143 "DIAZ VS. CONDIT" ROUNDTABLE: MMATorch staff and contributors rate and review Super Bowl weekend event
UFC 143 "DIAZ VS. CONDIT" PREVIEW: Penick's breakdown and fight picks for Super Bowl weekend event
UFC 143 ROUNDTABLE: Nick Diaz or Carlos Condit? Who has the better chance at defeating Georges St-Pierre?
PENICK: Notebook 1/30 - Chicago memories, UFC on Fox 2 BTS thoughts, Jon Jones on Evans-Davis and heavyweight aspirations


ALSO: UFC PPV Reports: Results, analysis, fight ratings of all recent events
LATEST PRO WRESTLING NEWS FROM PWTORCH






HOME | CONTACT USABOUT USFACEBOOKTWITTERLIVECASTPODCASTFREE IPHONE APPFREE AMAZON APPRSS
PART OF THE USA TODAY UFC GROUP | © 2006-2011 TDH Communications Inc. • All rights reserved -- PRIVACY POLICY