Twitter Mailbag: James Krause calls it quits, Max Holloway needs some good advice, + more
But first, a little segment I like to call: No One Asked Me, But...
By far the worst daily habit that I can’t quite break myself of is the one where I wake up and immediately reach for my phone. If you were to ask me in the moment, I might claim I was checking the time or ensuring that I didn’t have any urgent messages I needed to respond to, but that’s a damn lie and I know it. The time is more or less always the same (between two kids and one puppy, no way I ever manage to sleep past 6:20 a.m.), and the messages are always of the non-urgent variety.
But once the phone is in my hand, it’s already too late. Next thing I know I’m looking at Twitter, which inevitably means that before my feet have even touched the floor I have encountered something that makes me: a) extremely mad, b) merely annoyed, or c) newly despairing of the human experiment on this planet.
Why would I do this to myself every day? Why do I need to learn what fresh hell we’ve stumbled into politically, or what marker of impending catastrophe we’ve chosen to collectively ignore, all before I’m even fully awake? It’s so dumb and I know it and I can’t stop doing it.
But today was a relatively good day. Today was a b day, which means the first negative social media-induced emotion I felt was not rage or despair, but merely mild annoyance. And you know who caused it? Belal freaking Muhammad, of all people, who I actually really like. And it’s because I saw this story, which quotes Muhammad doing one of those Instagram videos where he records while he’s driving (why, fighters?!? why are you always driving?!?!) and talking about Amanda Nunes’ win over Julianna Peña.
“Amanda, I feel like, is getting too cocky,” Muhammad said. “She’s getting too arrogant saying, ‘I could have finished her in the first round if I wanted to, but I wanted to go five rounds so I could show her who’s better,’ blah, blah, blah. Get out of here with that. You couldn’t finish her. I think Amanda started taking her down in the third, fourth and fifth round because she didn’t want to get caught again on the feet. She knows that Julianna punches hard, her eye was very swollen, she was on crutches leaving. So, she was definitely in a fight. It wasn’t a dominating fight like a lot of people are making it out to be.”
This right here? Back in the old days of MMA messageboards, this is what they would have labeled some straight up Peña nuthuggery. My dude, it was a dominating fight for Nunes. How can you tell? Because she won every round (one judge had it 50-43, which is judge-speak for daaaaaaaamn), and the nicest thing you can say about Peña is that she was tough enough to take that ass-kicking for all five rounds.
Which is not nothing, mind you. Peña is insanely tough. But Nunes just went out there and reminded us of what we already knew, which is that she is the greatest fighter in the history of women’s MMA. There’s not even any real argument about that. She holds UFC titles in two divisions. She’s dominated the 135-pound class since winning the belt in 2016 (that’s six fucking years ago!!). The only interruption to that was a loss to Peña, who couldn’t win a single round in the rematch and left looking like a ceiling fan had fallen on her head.
You know when you actually do get to be a little arrogant? Know when you’ve earned that right? When you’ve proven that you’re the best, consistently and over many years. That’s Nunes. So yes, she gets to talk that shit again now. And everyone else has to let her.
Now onto the mailbaggery.
I think as time goes by it will become more apparent that James Krause’s biggest contributions to MMA will be as a coach. Back when we were doing our fighter survey at The Athletic, I was surprised at how many people mentioned Krause as either the best coach in MMA or the one they’d most like to go work with some day.
But I also don’t want people to totally forget that Krause was a bad, bad man in his time. I was there for his first fight with the UFC, when he submitted Sam Stout in a fun fight that got him two bonuses – Submission of the Night and Fight of the Night – which added up to $100,000 combined. I’ll also never forget doing a phone interview with him one day some years later (he was clearly dribbling a basketball in his driveway as we talked; some sounds are unmistakable) where he talked about how he’d taken that money and started buying up property that he eventually turned into a thriving Airbnb business. I don’t think I have to tell you that this is not the norm for pro fighters.
Krause is a smart guy who I think saw the fight game for what it was early on. He had reasonable goals for himself, but also didn’t kid himself about the nature of this business. Hearing him talk about retiring now off a win in the UFC, and feeling good about that decision (also maybe like he doesn’t have much choice, given his health), gives me some hope that it will stick. I think he has a lot more to give this sport, just from the other side of the chainlink fence.
My big bold suggestion for Max Holloway is that he should become a fun fight and/or a rampaging catchweight guy. In other words, he should stop thinking about rankings altogether, and instead think only about what would be some fun stylistic match-ups that people might want to see. Because honestly? I don’t see how there are many better options.
As long as Alexander Volkanovski is featherweight champ (which could be a long, loooong time), he’s not going to get another shot there. Lightweight has seemed difficult for him too, and there’s already a ton of good fighters there waiting for their shot. To hang around at 145 pounds and play the same game he’s been playing is to essentially embrace the role of a gatekeeper. Problem is, he might beat a lot of those would-be contenders, which would only make it harder for the UFC to find new contenders to fight the champion.
Instead, he should be looking for one-off fights that maybe don’t prove anything but are still fun as hell. Pick an exciting guy between 135 and 155 pounds, call him out, work up some interest. Forget about where it gets you in the division, because that’s over with (for now). In the meantime, you can still make some money and remain a capital-g Guy for when things change at the top.
It still feels like pure fantasy matchmaking to talk about the next fight for Conor McGregor, who broke his damn leg in his last fight and ever since seems like he’s mostly about that yacht life. But if I had to choose, I’d rather see Michael Chandler fight Dustin Poirier, while we save Justin Gaethje for the Irish fella. McGregor might also think that sounds like a more winnable fight, since Gaethje doesn’t exactly make himself all that difficult to hit. You just want to be sure your legs are feeling durable before you step in a cage with him.
I actually have had beers with both Bas Rutten and Josh Barnett. Both were memorable, but only one of them told insane stories about brawls in European discotheques followed by police strip searches that he felt were the result of something other than caution on the part of the authorities.
But these days my list would go: Jan Blachowicz (he’d bring some of that good Polish beer), Robert Whittaker (just a delightful man who’d be pleasant to talk to), and Molly McCann (we’re both going to jail by the time it’s over).
Some of that could be the natural result of only having so many fighters to choose from and then throwing them all in the same regular season format, where eventually you’re going to see some mismatches just by virtue of how the system works. Or, another possibility, maybe PFL shouldn’t rely so heavily on one prominent manager who used to act as the matchmaker for the very same fighters he also represents and who still seems like he somehow manages to pay himself an awful lot of PFL’s money each year. You know, one or the other.
True, the big man with the hammer on his chest does headline a lot of UFC Fight Night cards. But lately he loses as many of those as he wins. According to my math, he’s 2-2 in his last four Fight Night main events. Thing is, winning or losing doesn’t seem to affect his status for the UFC as a Fight Night headliner guy. Even in defeat he remains just well-known enough to be at the top of the next low-octane Fight Night card. Maybe there’s something to be said for that level of job security.
From the perspective of the wrestling programs, seems like it would mostly be valuable as a recruitment tool. I’m sure there are lots of high school wrestlers who got into the sport primarily because of their interest in MMA. If you can’t afford expensive jiu-jitsu classes, or if your parents won’t let you get hit in the face at the local boxing or kickboxing gym, school wrestling programs probably feel like the best option. If you’re a college program that can point to a bunch of alumni in the UFC, seems like that would really be worth highlighting as you pursue the next generation of athletes.
If someone wanted to pay me to attend and write about it, sure. But just for my own education? Nah. Seems like there are enough MMA journalists going that route that I can get the gist by following their coverage. Also they probably wouldn’t let me bring my dog, and he’d be so lonely here without me.
Bless you for teeing me up to talk about and link to my own writing. I’m going to make the most of this opportunity by telling everyone (not for the last time) that I wrote a short story about professional wrestling for a really fun shared universe project called “The Territories,” and you should buy it not just for my story but also for all the others, which are rad. Mine is set in the Memphis wrestling territory that my grandfather used to watch, and it’s about a heel manager struggling to contain a wrestler who is a true physical specimen but completely devoid of craft or humility. Seriously, check it out.
As for the stuff you could read for free right away, I always liked this one about a Pros vs. Joes kind of fight between the heavyweight champ and a Butte miner back in 1902. Thankfully it isn’t paywalled by The Athletic, like most of my stuff there. Also this one about a 15-year-old kid fighting in MMA was an honorable mention for Best American Sports Writing one year. One I still think about sometimes is this one, about a guy who’d done prison time for killing a man in a fight and then tried to become a pro fighter after he got out. Something about that one has stuck with me. I still sometimes, out of nowhere, remember something a local reverend told his congregation after the initial incident.
“What makes two young men that angry? I don’t know. What I do know is that two families have been so tragically disrupted and for what? God rained down mercy and we’ve returned blood.”