The Price of Being Nice?

Pat Barry’s crowd-pleasing fighting style and down-to-earth personality have quickly made him a fan favorite. Of course, Barry has made no effort to hide that he himself began as just a fan, and one of his favorite fighters is none other than Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic. As we saw in the fight between the two on Saturday, mutual admiration and a dominating opening round for Barry soon gave way to a momentum shift and at least a one-night return to the old winning ways for Cro Cop. The question is: did being too nice cost Pat Barry, and just how nice can one afford to be in such a violent sport?

Common acts of sportsmanship in MMA are often seen as puzzling to new fans, who often come into the experience expecting the fighters to hate one another. Most of us long-time fans can remember a time when we found it very strange that two men who had just beaten the crap out of one another could easily embrace and exchange pleasantries afterward. These days, fans readily accept that fighters will touch gloves before the fight, before each round, after any foul, and even sometimes after a good exchange. This is aside from other common expressions of respect and even affection that are commonly seen nowadays. Suffice to say that the Barry-Cro Cop fight was not the first time we have seen fighters stop fighting in the middle of a round to “hug it out” real quick.

Still, this instance was different, because in this case, it seems as if being too nice actually cost one of the competitors his chance to win. Throughout the lead-up to the fight, Barry was more than happy to tell anyone and everyone how much he looked up to Cro Cop, and how he had been one of his favorite fighters since when he was not a fighter, but just a fan. Barry even shared his list of five fighters he would never want to face from back in the day. The list comically included a character from the “Street Fighter” series of video games- the Muay Thai kickboxer Sagat. It also included Cro Cop himself.

Anyone who interpreted this as a sign of true fear was set straight right away on Saturday night, as Barry didn’t take long at all to establish a punishing attack consisting mostly of snapping leg kicks and right hands, two of which floored Cro Cop in the first round. Barry was surely scared before the fight- he is one of few fighters who refreshingly admits that anxiety does get the better of him until the fight actually starts- but he fought hard and showed no signs of apprehension in the fight itself.

That is, except for when he had Cro Cop hurt. Both times that he hurt Cro Cop and put him on the mat with punches, he opted not to follow up on the damage that he had inflicted. Instead, he chose to let his hero up, so that the two could continue to fight as if this was a K-1 matchup, not a mixed martial arts fight. By the end of the first round, few were questioning Barry’s strategy. After all, the leg kicks seemed to be piling up rather nicely, Cro Cop’s left cheek had started to swell noticeably (prompting many armchair physicians to diagnose a “broken jaw” for Cro Cop then and there), and the former Pride star looked like he would be in for a beating.

Then, something changed. Cro Cop came out for the second round and started throwing his feared high kicks, along with the left straight that KO’ed about as many opponents as his cranium-crushing kicks did in the Pride days. Barry seemed…different. He started giving Cro Cop the time and space that the veteran needed to calmly set about establishing his offense, which has always consisted mostly of one or two shots at a time, along with a healthy portion of stalking. It also became clear in the second and third rounds that Cro Cop would not extend the same courtesy that Barry had given him when he allowed him to stand up repeatedly in the opening stanza. Cro Cop approached this not as a K-1 kickboxing bout, but an MMA fight, as he dominated the ground portions of the bout, right up to the final rear naked choke, where he didn’t even need to get his hooks in to finish Barry.

Now, since the fight there has been a lot of talk about Barry getting injured during the bout. It should be noted that Dana White announced that Barry broke his right hand and his right foot in the fight (pictures of his right foot, swollen to nearly twice its normal size, can be found online). Surely, these injuries affected Barry’s strategy as much, if not more than any amount of compassion he may have felt for his opponent.

What about the first round, though. Barry didn’t really take his foot off the gas until after the break between rounds one and two, but it was the first that gave Barry his most obvious chances to win the fight. Why didn’t he follow up when Cro Cop was down twice early on? Was he worried that Cro Cop was not as harmed as he looked, and that pouncing could backfire (like it did with Chuck Liddell in the main event)? Or did he somehow think that more knockdowns would surely come, so he didn’t need to finish the fight just yet? Hopefully, he wasn’t thinking that he would rather face his former hero in a fair-and-square kickboxing match than take advantage of a knockdown by pounding out his dazed and weakened foe. Clearly, Cro Cop came ready to fight, not to have fun. Barry must have the same outlook.

I’m not offended in any way by two fighters stopping to embrace or high-five in the midst of a battle. Far be it from me to tell professional fighters how to frame their minds for what they do. However, when the pleasantries carry over into the actual action of the fight, there is a problem. Dana White may have said it best when he said, “Mirko Cro Cop is not your friend.”

Not until after the fight, anyway.

E-Mail Jon Hartley

Tags: Mirko Cro Cop, Pat Barry, UFC, UFC 115