Bjorn Hansen's Take
HANSEN: Examining Miguel Torres' MMA midlife identity crisis
Mar 19, 2010 - 12:30:51 PM HANSEN: Examining Miguel Torres' MMA midlife identity crisis

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By: Bjorn Hansen, MMATorch Columnist

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