“Speechless,” said Randy Couture. “Unbelievable,” agreed Joe Rogan.
And it truly was.
20 significant strikes (13 to the head, three to the body and four to the legs), two knockdowns and one guard pass led to the most significant three minutes and twenty-five seconds of Matt Serra’s career.
In mixed martial arts, upsets are commonplace due to the combination of ill-informed oddsmakers and the fact that anything can happen on any given night, in any given fight.
But this was much more than any ol’ underdog upsetting the odds.
History was made on April 7, 2007 in Houston, Texas when the brightest prospect to rise through the UFC ranks to that date had the blinding blaze of new-found invincibility quenched by the mulish mentality of a man who was set up for a loss.
It’s a quirk of fate that, only this week, it was announced that the winner of The Ultimate Fighter 24 would be handed an immediate title shot against the reigning flyweight champion, whoever that may be, at the finale in December.
The last time that the reality show adopted this format was nine years ago, when the UFC decided to try something new with their hugely successful TUF brand.
For the fourth season of The Ultimate Fighter, rather than have unheralded youngsters compete under the tutelage of UFC veterans for the chance of a six-figure contract, the promotion opted to try ‘The Comeback.’
The premise was that 16 former UFC fighters (eight middleweights and eight welterweights) would fight over the course of several weeks with the prize at the end of the road being a shot at the titleholder of their respective divisions.
In the welterweight bracket you had the likes of Jeremy Jackson and Rich Clementi, both of whom had a UFC record of 0-1. You also had more experienced fighters like Shonie Carter (3-2 UFC) and Chris Lytle (2-4 UFC).
Then you had Matt Serra.
Serra was far and away the most experienced welterweight on TUF 4 in terms of UFC fights under his belt.
‘The Terror’ had gone 4-4 in the Octagon, with notable wins over Ivan Menjivar and Yves Edwards, and had gone the distance with legends like BJ Penn and Karo Parisyan in defeat.
So it came as no surprise when the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt adopted something of a leadership role on his team, Team Mojo.
Fighters would come to him for advice throughout the competition which Serra won by dominating Pete Spratt before he avenged his first UFC loss by taking a unanimous decision over Shonie Carter. In the finale, Serra was on the favourable end of a split decision in a clash with Chris Lytle that was far from a classic but, hey, he got the job done… just.
But it was that simple. From relative obscurity, we had a new mandatory title challenger on our hands in the form of a foul-mouthed, fuck-a-minute New Yorker who spoke considerably less about his love of martial arts than he did of his fondness for pasta.
His opponent?
None other than Georges St-Pierre, the Herculean Hughes-vanquisher who had just comprehensively beaten the then-greatest welterweight of all time with a head-kick finish in the main event of UFC 65.
GSP didn’t exactly become the greatest of all time overnight but he had proven himself as the next generation of excellence at 170 lbs.
His redemptive victory over Hughes pushed him to 13-1; with victories over BJ Penn, ‘Mayhem’ Miller and Karo Parisyan coming since signing with the UFC in 2004.
The Hughes win demonstrated not only a courage to take on an opponent who had previously bested him but it also indicated a remarkable improvement in technique, as well as a maturity only gleaned through adversity.
Georges ‘Rush’ St-Pierre was an athletic specimen not seen in the UFC before he burst on the scene. The Montreal welterweight quite literally had no holes in his game which only added to his incontestable eminence in the division.
The future was, at stages, 1/11 to send the past packing.
But then came a black hole, an explosion of spacetime from which light, and Georges St-Pierre, could not escape.
Right hand after right hand landed nine years ago today. St-Pierre’s best attempts at keeping distance, throwing kicks from his lead leg and efforts to punish Serra with jabs were all nullified by the bullish brawn of fortitude.
“It helps motivate me for sure and the fact that I’m such a huge underdog, hey man that’s no sweat to me,” Serra told MMAWeekly prior to the fight. “If anything, that’s worse for him. Every round that I’m in there with him, people are thinking I shouldn’t be in there with him. He should have took me out two rounds ago or one round ago.”
It didn’t take more than one round for ‘The Terror’ to get the job done, though.
Midway through the first of five five-minute rounds, Serra rocked GSP with a right hand to the jaw, another met the temple. St-Pierre dropped to his knees. The Canadian made his way back to wobbly feet only to receive another flush pair of rights. Desperation set in and he dived on a single leg but the flexibility cultivated through years of rolling in a gi paid off and Serra handily escaped.
The next right hand dropped St-Pierre.
Serra smelled blood in the water and he dived like a sharkish, hungry Italian-American who knew that Bolognese sauce, denied of him for weeks of cutting weight, was just around the corner.
A tornado of ground-and-pound allowed Serra to scythe past St-Pierre’s guard and land comfortably in mount where a pendulum of bombs forced the champion to begin furiously tapping his own wrist to call a stop to the action.
‘Big’ John McCarthy jumped in and so we had it, the greatest upset in MMA history.
You might not agree with that very popular theory and favour more recent upsets, like those of Renan Barao and Ronda Rousey at the hands of TJ Dillashaw and left shin of Holly Holm respectively.
But for me GSP vs. Serra, in 2007, will always be number one and here’s why.
With Renan Barao, there was always the sense that he was being over-hyped, oversold and under-matched when UFC bantamweight champion before being dethroned by Dillashaw in 2014.
With Ronda Rousey, there was at least an element of doubt in her striking game prior to the fight. Everyone knew that Holm would be superior to ‘Rowdy’ in a boxing match but we all just presumed that the then-undefeated Rousey would be able to quickly close the distance and take Holm down.
Rousey was favourite and everybody expected her to win but she did not have this element of perfect well-roundedness that Georges St-Pierre epitomised.
GSP was supposed to be superior to Serra absolutely everywhere – on the feet, on the mat, in the clinch – everywhere.
But there was no accounting for a few devastating right hands and a lack of preparation on April 7.
“I should have put more into this and now mentally I got broken,” GSP has since told Fox Sports. “As I’m walking to the Octagon, if you see that fight, I’m walking and I’m like ‘(expletive) I’m really not ready for this’. Now I’m doing the opposite of what I should do to boost myself and walk like it’s impossible to fail. Now I’m walking like (expletive) I’m going to a funeral or something.”
Even with the puncher’s chance that’s afforded to most fighters prior to the opening bell, Serra wasn’t given much hope of that lucky shot.
He was supposed to be taken apart on the feet, taken down at will (if necessary) and ground out on the mat with the smothering top game of St-Pierre.
But he came good. He dug deep, ignored the critics, oddsmakers and naysayers to pull out the performance of a lifetime nine years ago today.
Yo boxing. You can keep your Buster Douglas. We’re more than happy with our Matt ‘The Terror’ Serra.
