Words of inspiration from a fighter

I've never been a big fan of team sports. I'm from North Carolina, so I'm legally obligated to have a favorite college basketball team (Duke) but really I'm a fan of the individual athlete. For one thing, individual sports tend to have fewer rules for me to try to remember.

My favorite sport is easily MMA, which you know if you follow my Twitter feed at all. There's a lot to love about the sport. It's more than just two guys beating each other up. It's a battle of wills and strategy where on any given day, a fat guy can knock out an Adonis with one well-placed overhand right. One fighter can be winning round after round, but he slips up for half a second and suddenly he finds himself tapping out in a triangle choke. There's a lot more intelligence involved in an MMA fight than most people realize.

Dana White, who runs the UFC, has a saying: "Never leave it in the hands of the judges." He means, knock the guy out or submit him. Don't count on points to save you. Don't calculate, beat his ass.

I always think about that when I go to write a script. It's obviously not so cut and dry in writing, but you can always go into writing something with the attitude that you will knock it out of the fucking park. Don't calculate the points, submit that son of a bitch.

And that was fine until this last week's Ultimate Fighter. Coach Chael Sonnen gave an amazing speech about failure that kind of blew me away. One of his fighters who is an amazing talent, expressed doubt about his skills. After giving the kid a pep talk, he sat for a moment alone with the camera and said the following:

"When doubt seeps in, you've got two roads.  You can take either road.  You can go to the left or you can go to the right, and believe me, they’ll tell you failure’s not an option.  That is ridiculous. Failure is always an option.  Failure is the most readily available option at all times.  But it’s a choice.  You can choose to fail, you can choose to succeed.  And if we can plant seeds and let him know 'Move your feet, keep your hands up, stay off the bottom,' that is the road to victory.  Or -  self-doubt and negative talk.  And that is the road to failure.  But failure is always there, and it’s okay to recognize that."

Failure is always an option. There's a moment where you decide whether or not it's the option you're going to take. You can wallow in it, or you can accept it as a possibility and then move on to figure out what you need to do next.

A writer's MMA primer

I've been kind of enjoying Human Target. I fully expected it to suck at first, but it's kind of engaging. I love Chi McBryde, although I'll always be a little sad his character from Pushing Daisies is gone, and I love Jackie Earl Haley because he was by far the best thing about Watchmen. They're more interesting than Mark Valley, but he does okay. It's a fun show.

So last night's episode was an homage to Bloodsport. It was supposed to be some kind of MMA battle except every fight was a stand-up fight. At one point Chi McBryde's character says to Mark Valley's character something to the effect of "How did you get hit? All that Jujitsu you do."

Not once in this episode did anyone do any Jujitsu. There was one Judo move but everything else was stand-up fighting. I'm sure the fight coordinator knew the difference, but it was clear that the writers did not.

Granted, it wasn't taking place in an octagon, but they definitely meant it to be an MMA style tournament.

MMA stands for Mixed Martial Arts. MIXED. It is a very rare fight that doesn't end up on the ground so if you're going to use MMA as your basis for a plot, you need to have some ground fighting. Punches and kicks look cool, but most fights are won by things like rear naked chokes and arm bars. Ground moves.

It's an easy mistake to make if you don't know anything about the sport, so let's do a bit of a primer. I'm far from an expert, but I'm a fan and I've done enough fighting on my own to know the difference between the basic styles. I've read a few fight scenes where the writer used some language they've heard but didn't seem to understand. So let's clear some things up.

Anybody feel free to add your own knowledge.

With MMA you start with two basic fighting styles pretty much every fighter learns: Muy Thai and Jujitsu. Jujitsu, originally from Japan I think, was developed to its current state in Brazil. So if you have a fighter from Brazil, chances are he's a hell of a wrestler. That's what Jujitsu is: wrestling. It has almost nothing to do with kicking or punching. It's all about holds and locks. The goal is to get someone in a position where they have to tap out or risk a broken limb. Usually these moves require strategy and patience and endurance and flexibility.

Muy Thai is kickboxing. Often the best MMA fighters train in Thailand, where the sport was developed. It's kicking and punching, but also knees and elbows. Never underestimate the power of an elbow to do some serious damage.

Fights don't end with the ref counting. They end when one of the fighters taps to say he's done, when the doctor calls it on account of dangerous levels of blood loss, or when somebody gets knocked the fuck out. Blood is okay, but when the blood gets in your eyes or it won't stop, that's when they call the fight. There have been some seriously bloody fights in the octagon. Sometimes it's tough to watch.

There are tons of other fighting styles - Judo concentrates on throws, so when you need to chuck somebody over your shoulder that's what you're using, Savate is a French style that uses primarily legs, Escrima is Filipino stick fighting, Win Chung is the style Bruce Lee emulated because it was designed for women and he was a little guy. Then there's always the other various forms of Kung Fu. Each style has a different set of moves and a different purpose.

One thing you almost never see successfully done in a fight is a kick to the head. Unless you're Chuck Norris, a kick to the head is a horrible idea. First of all, it's slow. It takes a long time for your foot to get all the way to someone's head and chances are they'll see it coming, which is really bad for the kicker because it also leaves you off balance. The higher your foot goes, the less stability you have under you, and the easier it is to knock you down. Some guys try it. I don't know if I've ever seen it done successfully in the ring.

Head butts are generally a bad idea. Very few people know how to pull that off without breaking their own nose or knocking themselves out.

Good fighters block and duck and weave with both legs and hands. They don't just stand there and get hit. In fact, they don't just stand there. They bounce around.

Please consider these things if you write a fight scene but don't know much about fighting.

UPDATE: In the 3/31 episode of Human Target, a guy who's 6'2" and weighs a lot claims to be a black belt in Win Chung. Did they just Google types of Kung Fu and type in the first one that sounded cool? Win Chung is specifically designed for women and is also useful for small men. There are larger men who study it, but it's really designed to take advantage of a smaller frame, unless maybe the fact that he studied the wrong type of Kung Fu for his body is why he was knocked out so fast. My point is, you can't just throw any old type of Kung Fu at a script. They all have completely different purposes. Dammit.

Also after my whole bit about not kicking people in the head, on this season's first episode of Ultimate Fighter the very first bout ended with a beautiful kick to the head. So what do I know?