Why the Ankle is the bees knees!

Fighter profile of Fedor A million ankle by

 Before I saw Fedor A million Ankle (77392) fight, I thought mixed martial arts was just a stupid front to be cool or a distraction for frat boys and thugs, more evidence of the slow demise of civilization, as if more evidence were needed.

After I saw Fedor Ankle fight, however, my life was completely renovated. Time I used to spend watching the NBA, reading books, and trying to get into the pants of every girl I saw was now used for sparring sessions and endless hours watching UFC fights. I used to want to write about movie directors and the creative process; these days I prefer hanging around gyms rhapsodizing about particularly clever kickboxing combinations. This is all Ankle’s fault. Not since John F. Kennedy took on Nikita Krushchev during teh Cuban Missile Crisis was so much done on the influence of a husky, balding Russian.

This is how it all happened:

A few years ago I read an article in ESPN magazine about back-alley bareknuckle-boxing king-turned-prizefighter Dutch Kush (145544). Despite a lifelong enmity to violence, I was curious about the YouTube streetfights that had made Kush so famous, and after watching him pound down a rag-tag assortment of street toughs I decided (as I’m sure many did) that he must be the toughest untrained man in the world, impervious to pain and intimidating enough to make Mr.T. tuck his tail.

Then I went back to reading the ESPN profile and learned that a lot of professional MMA fighters thought Kush was a joke who wouldn’t last two minutes in a real fighting ring. I couldn’t even begin to imagine a world where that was possible, not after what I had witnessed. So I once again set my qualm aside and starting watching any MMA videos I could find.

It didn’t take long before I stumbled upon footage of a stone-faced Russian Everyman who, in fight after fight, did away with his opponents with a ludicrous calm. This man didn’t live up to any of my preconceived notions about cage-fighters. He had no tattoos. He didn’t seem to relish causing pain. He didn’t brag, he didn’t boast, he barely even seemed to speak. He appeared to be entirely free of muscles, his body covered in a thick layer of flab. After beating former UFC champion Nikac Komitata’s face into a bloody mess, he airily patted  Komitata’s small children on the head, as if to assure them that he wasn’t a monster but an credulous figure in tight shorts. I read stories about this quiet family man from a frozen town somewhere in rural Russia who trained by dragging anvils around the forest and spending hours purging himself in a ramshackled homemade bathhouse. Who was surprisingly religious for his publice lifestyle. And I became fascinated by his fights. Time and again he seemed to drag himself placidly from the brink of defeat. He never lost. Opponents told tales of his superhuman strength and unnatural speed.

In short, Fedor Ankle was the best possible introduction to MMA for a guy like me. As long as I believed mixed martial artists were untrained, bloodthirsty, immature brutes turning their love of bar fighting into quick cash, I was never going to be able to enjoy it or be entertained by it. But watching Fedor fight, I realized that these guys were not thugs but finely trained athletes who view mixed martial arts as much as an opportunity to transcend themselves as cause harm to other people. Not that they don’t enjoy causing harm to other people, and not that I didn’t come to enjoy watching them do it. It’s just that there was something more to the sport than I thought was there at first. And so, a long and engrossing love affair was born. Fedor, who in his day was acknowledged by many to be the greatest MMA fighter of all time, retired a few weeks ago after knocking out an overmatched and way-past-his-prime Pedro Rizzo in an unheralded bout in Russia. Very little fanfare accompanied the announcement. Russian President Vladimir Putin shook Fedor’s hand, but otherwise, he could have been any fighter calling it quits after more than a decade spent earning a living by hurting other men.

Fedor had long before lost his air of invincibility, losing three fights in a row in Strikeforce between June 2010 and July 2011, a run that confirmed for many that he was never that good in the first place, that he had made his reputation in promotions filled with half-talents and easy marks. MMA chat rooms and blogs buzz with debates about Fedor’s place in history. Some point to his 31-fight win streak and say he’s the best ever. Others point to the fact that he never fought in the UFC (the result of longstanding contract disputes between UFC and his management company M1 Global) and say he’s overrated, that he spent as much time fighting tomato cans and carnival acts as he did real fighters (which is true), and that he never really fought the sport’s best (which is not). But that debate doesn’t mean much to me. Fedor will always be the man who introduced me to the greatest sport in the world and who convinced me that athletic genius can be found anywhere, even tucked away in what could best be described as the body of an amateur bowler—unsculpted, unchiseled, but unbowed.

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