Fight Recap, With a Special Guest

Chilling with Cyborg was awesome, though I was exhausted and it was early.

So, when I go to events, I make a point of finding out where the fighters are staying, and try and crash there. There’s a reason for that, as it’s really cool to talk to fighters as they walk through the lobby. Well, I have some wicked sleep disorders, and apparently so did the star of the show last night and, in the lobby of the Marriot, I ended up chilling with the first Strikeforce women’s champion Cris “Cyborg” Santos (8-1 MMA) .

Wanting to rewatch the fights from the night before, I pulled up the video to the main event fight (knowing that she was sitting next to me the whole time) and played it on full screen. She then decided to turn away from her computer (where she had been surfing looking for video of the fight) and came over to watch with me.

I should first say that the language barrier was a big issue, but with Cyborg’s intermediate English and my very, very remedial Portuguese, we managed to put together an interesting conversation, and I did get a little insight into planning and prep for the fight. One of the most interesting bits of insight I got was the acknowledgement that Cris did not expect to finish the fight in the first round.

Of course, given the incredible conditioning of Cris Cyborg, it’s hardly a shock that part of the gameplan might have been to push the fight into the later rounds, but the five minute round played a huge roll in her ability to finish Carano. That was one of my points, but one that had been made by a lot of people leading up to the fight.

Most of the video session was just the two of us enjoying how phenomenal the performance was. Cyborg, it seems, is still riding the high of winning a world title. And who can blame her? As the first female champion and now the undisputed queen of that weightclass, she deserves the feeling of being at the top.