Why You Should Be a Fan of Retired Fighters
At the highest levels, modern day MMA is outstanding. Fighters are well-rounded, showcasing polished striking and grappling skills, plus the ability to transition and flow from one form to another. Coaches and trainers have massive amounts of data available to develop game plans and training regimens. Advances in nutrition and recovery mean fighters are nearing the upper limits of athletic performance. At their absolute peak, current day MMA is the pinnacle of athletic competition, unmatched by anything else.
Yet, from time to time, it just feels good to dig into the crates for an old classic. Sure, things may be a little sloppier (Though not always), and yes, there is a heavy dose of nostalgia adding a deep red hue to my glasses, helping to hide other deficiencies. But it’s not just about a single Comfort Fight. I truly enjoy grabbing a long-retired fighter, rotating them in my mind, and becoming a fan of someone who last laced up the gloves in 2003. That’s why I’m here to plead with you to follow suit, find a retired fighter to become a fan of now, long after they’re relevant.
A Brief History of Watching Old Fights
Part of it is my nature. I get into something and I want to learn about its history. I can’t just listen to the current offerings of a new music genre, I want to find who started it all. So, I look back into the murky days of 1990s MMA and become a fan of Dan Severn. Granted, Severn isn’t officially retired yet; I think he’s got a 5-on-1 rumble at the Millville Rec Center this weekend, but the majority of his prime punching years were past him by the time I started watching him. But god damn if he didn’t suplex some people back then.
Part of it stems from how I got into MMA. When I first started watching, I wasn’t buying many, if any, UFC PPVs, and the thought of figuring out how to watch live PRIDE events was akin to space travel. So, I became more than comfortable with reading after-action reports and watching choppy, low-res GIFs of finishes while waiting for even choppier, lower-res video to come available. So, years after he’s hung up the gloves to become a dancing robot man, someone shares a clip of Genki Sudo, dressed as Buckethead, blasting off a backpack aircannon and I think “oh hellyeah, I found a weirdo to obsess over!” Then I pull up his actual fights and discover a strange dancing man with fluid striking and crazy cool grappling. And yes, amazing walkouts.
Part of it was the very nature of how MMA was presented to me initially. When I first started watching, it was just UFC, in 2004. I barely knew about women’s boxing, do you think I was aware of women’s MMA for the first five or six years? Absolutely not, they let a guy punch another dude in the nards for nine minutes in the second year of UFC! By the time I figured I might as well devote far too much of my time, life, energy, and brain power to MMA, I had missed the career of Hisae Watanabe (Until she unretired to fight a small child and then stuck around to lose a few times in her mid-40s). I missed out entirely on the live run of a Japanese Quarkweight (That’s smaller than an atom, right?), wearing a leopard-print loincloth and just fucking flatlining other women. Skull-crunching hooks and haymakers, leaving ladies dangling in the ropes, and I missed catching it live because I didn’t know women were allowed to do such things, and also, I on earth did you watch 2002 Smackgirl? Nevertheless, Hisae rules!
Is this all just a coarse appeal to nostalgia? Well, sure, that’s most of my writing. Is this also just a chance for me to continue to Remember Some Guys? Absolutely, I could Remember Guys for another couple thousand words.But it’s also practical advice. There’s no greater time to get really into a fighter than after they’ve already hung up the gloves. Ideally, after about five years, because the modern MMA retirement has a lifespan of about thirty seconds, so you really want to make sure they’ve completely stopped. No point in getting invested in someone’s old career just for them to hop into the Bare Knuckle circle or Karate Combat pit and ruin it all by losing to Sam god damn Alvey. Yuck.
Why Are Retired Fighters so Great?
Retired fighters are great because there’s no new surprises. With someone active, you always run the risk of them dumpstering their skills and advantages in a given fight to try something simply mind-numbingly stupid. Nothing is more frustrating than getting invested in a fighter because of their unique set of skills, only for the wrestler who’s entire head is a cauliflower callus to shoot none takedowns and wing the worst haymakers you’ve seen for fifteen minutes. If your chosen retired fighter did have one of those performances, guess what? Just skip it! That’s another great thing, skipping fights. If you have a current fighter you’re a fan of, there’s a sense of obligation to watch everything. You don’t know what’s going to turn out important, you don’t know what’s going to be a standout performance. With the massive benefit of hindsight, you can curate a playlist of the choice moments. Don’t want to think about how your chosen retired fighter should have been retired about two years and four brutal knockout losses earlier? Pretend they didn’t happen and you can fully ignore them on your rewatch.
Another big advantage of getting really into a retired fighter is instant catharsis. With any fighter, past, present, or future, the probability of them doing something horrendous always hangs above them, a “going on a vehicular rampage in a lifted truck that says Rampage and your nickname also is Rampage” level of dark cloud that can open up and rain down disappointment and regret. In the case of the retired fighter, you can pull up any moment, usually from the past their prime portion of the career to see them retroactively beaten for the truly awful thing they said or did in the present. A brief scenario:
“BJ Penn sure was neat as a fighter. Outstanding BJJ, incredible flexibility, phenomenal anti-wrestling, good power in his hands for a Lightweight. Oh no, he thinks his family has been murdered and replaced with Life Model Decoys for the purpose of stealing his money. Well, at least I can watch Georges St-Pierre dominate him. Oh no, Georges St-Pierre is hanging out with horrible person and Nazi enthusiast Adin Ross. Well, at least I can watch Matt Serra TKO him. And thankfully, Serra is an Italian American guy from Long Island, so he’s incapable of holding controversial opinions. Whew! Good thing that cycle stopped where it did!”
But Which Retired Fighter Do I Pick?
Okay, I’ve somehow convinced you to dive into the deep pool of retired fighters. That’s great! Now, you have to decide which fighter to pick. It can be daunting, there are a lot of options, but luckily, there are a few methods to help make that selection a little bit easier.
A quick way is to look up a list of champions from years gone by and just pick one of those. Make it fun and pick from a specific year. If you’re the typical reader of Fight Island, how about the year you graduated high school or college, or maybe some other major life event? If you aren’t a decrepit dust-mummy such as myself, you can use the year you were born, but just know that I will hate you and wish to never hear you speak to me.
You could also take a current fighter you are a fan of and find out who got them into fighting. If that person is still active, dig deeper and pick the fighter that inspired them (If you get to Bruce Lee, you’ve gone too far back). Sometimes you get a fun scenario where your current favorite fighter got into MMA because of their retired coach, and so you can watch the coach’s old career progress and see what they took and discarded from fighting and how they used it to mold the current person. To me, that’s pretty neat!
If you’ve got a friend who’s been watching MMA for a lot longer than you, possibly got you interested in the sport, then ask them for a personal favorite from any Japanese MMA organization. It’s okay, they always have at least one, if not one for each of PRIDE, Shooto, Pancrase, K-1 Hero*s, and World Victory Road Presents: Sengoku Raiden Championship. Get ready to watch plenty of Alexander Otsuka!
Okay, you’ve got a retired fighter all picked out and a selection of fights to watch. Go, become a new fan of an old fighter today!
Wow, Hisae Watanabe is a name I haven't heard in a long, long time. Thanks for keeping the memory of late 2000s and early 2010s Japanese women's MMA alive. It was certainly an interesting time and definitely one I think back on fondly. When I was still covering Japanese MMA, my favorites (outside of my friend and personal GOAT, Megumi Fujii) were folks like Mei Yamaguchi, Ayaka Hamasaki, and Korean kickboxer turned MMA fighter, Seo Hee Ham. Like Watanabe, Ham has some fun firefights in the ring I'd encourage folks to check out.
Also, hi, I'm that guy who's watched MMA for forever (though, less so these days), and so yes, I have recommendations for each Japanese promotion from that heady period of JMMA. I don't want to wall-of-text anyone, so I will endeavor to keep it short at one: seek out the Shooto posterboy, Rumina Sato.
Shooto itself is a storied Japanese MMA institution that's seen better days, and even in those "better days," I'd argue it never got the respect it deserved for being such an important MMA pioneer. Their greatest innovation was a rigorously structured amateur system that developed talent into professional fighters (many of whom became Japan's lower weight champions at a time that the UFC was less interested in those weight classes or didn't host at all), and there was perhaps no greater representative of that system than Sato.
Sato was one of the last of the catch-influenced Shootors to make it into modern MMA, and it shows. Dude lost almost as often as he won, but his fights were usually always wild, wooly affairs with him abandoning positioning and tactical advantage in favor of just diving for (or flying into) submissions. Not only was Sato dynamic and fighting his heart out, he often inspired his opponents to do just the same.
The culmination for me was in his bout against former Shooto lightweight champion Akitoshi Tamura (who purveyors of early YouTube fights might know as the conspicuously round-headed Japanese dude who traveled to Mynamar to participate in a Lethwei bout). I won't spoil it, but maybe watch a handful of Sato's fights leading up his Shooto Tradition 1 bout with Tamura. I guarantee you, it'll be an entertaining afternoon of violence.
(Also, please: write more about fighters from that time! I'll definitely read it!)