If you watched carefully Last Saturday evening You may have seen it. He was there in the corner of Ian Machado Garry, whispering in the ear of the Welter weight between the rounds, repressing him for his risky use of bad mid-guard in the last lap, refining the already quite finely adjusted points of the transitional game of the fighter.
Of course, in order to find out who you are looking at and why he always counts so much for mixed martial arts, you would need to at least know the history of this sport.
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Or you could also ask Reinier de RidderWHO BO Nickal fight In the co-printing event of the UFC combat evening event on Saturday at monks, Iowa. Ask him who he admitted as a grappling of submission trying to operate this style for the MMA.
“It's really just a guy, and it's Demian Maia,” Ridder told Uneced earlier this week. “It's the guy. You look at what he did, his creativity – it's him.”
He is not the only fighter to feel this. Years ago, I spoke to Neil Magny just after being submitted by Maia to the 190 UFC. He had entered the fight knowing that Maia was supposed to be a kind of Jiu-Jitsu assistant, but what? He had already fought good grapplers of submission. He won seven consecutive UFC fights and felt quite confident.
“I had an excellent training camp, I felt like my coaches had brought the guys with whom I had to train, all that”, Magny said to me in 2016. “But then I entered and live his pressure, I made, Wow, this guy is at another level.
Demian Maia fought at the UFC for 14 years, contesting the titles in two different divisions. Now, at 47, his work as a coach and mentor shapes a new harvest of combatants. (Jason da Silva-Usa today Sport)
(USA Today Sports / Reuters)
Maia still gets these kinds of other fighters. At 47, he has a few gray spots in his beard, but otherwise looks like the same guy whose MMA career was remembered which lasted almost 20 years, almost everything at the UFC.
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These days, Maia is mainly coach and coach, and his expertise is in high demand. The main event of the UFC Kansas City last SaturdayFor example, was made up of two guys who both wanted his services. (Garry arrived first, so Carlos Prates had to seek elsewhere.)
What they come from in Maia, however, it is not an instruction on the jiu-jitsu or the grappling of submission. You can get a lot of places. The world of MMA is full of black belts, after all.
Maia offers something different. It is the rare guy who knows exactly how to adapt a jiu-jitsu game for the specific requirements of an MMA fight. He knows what works in these cages, with these rules and tours. He also knows what doesn't. And he knows because he understood him himself, the hard time, in many years.
“Many people, they think that grappling in MMA is just no jiu-jitsu,” Maia told Uneced this week. “This is not the case. It is totally different. I made a lot of effort to try to be the best grappling my time and trying to develop and understand a way to use Jiu-Jitsu for MMA.”
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It was, in itself, a process. When Maia arrived at the UFC for the first time in 2007, he raged in the ranks of middle weights as a forest fire. He won his first five fights, all via submission, beating Chael Sonnen and Nate Quarry without ever facing a lot of resistance. He was simply far ahead of everyone with regard to the game on the ground.
But as he went up above in the division, he discovered the limits of his style. He suffered a defeat against Nate Marquardt in 2009. He had a fairly disastrous title shot against Anderson Silva in 2010. He realized that he had to increase his typing game if he had to reach the summit, so he devoted himself to improving his boxing.
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“For a long time, I just trained boxing,” said Maia. “It was a mistake. Many guys always do it. They just train their strikes, then just their game on the ground. But in an MMA fight, they are not separated. In MMA, most things happen in transitions. You have to understand this and work this in your training.”
The fork on the road occurred after his loss of decision in 2012 against Chris Weidman. Against a talented wrestler, Maia chose to stand up and exchange punches for most of the fight. But while his boxing was improved, it was not a real threat in isolation. Weidman easily exceeded it on the feet and continued to fight – and win – the average weight of the UFC the following year. Maia returned to the drawing board with her team, which struck him with a hard love concerning the necessary lessons.
“I remember (after the fight of Weidman), we were talking about what we had to change and all that”, the longtime manager of Maia, Eduardo Alonso, said to me in 2019. “At one point, (Maia) said,” But I felt like I was about to get him out at any time. We all looked at each other and to him, and we had to say: “No, it was never close to performing”. You know, it was the top of him to be an attacker, and he was in this bubble in part for emotional reasons. »»
Demian Maia (right) was a large part of the UFC trip by Ian Machado Garry. (Mike Roach / Zuffa LLC)
(Mike Roach via Getty Images)
What Maia and his team have achieved is that no matter how he improved his striking game, he was never going to be as elite on the feet as on the carpet. His boxing was something that should have existed, but it had to be a way to get an end. Insofar as he spent time hitting his feet with opponents, it had to be done in order to go to the ground, where he would really win fights.
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“I then changed my training and my reflection,” said Maia. “I wouldn't just be boxing; I would make boxes with shots, with withdrawals. I would train with boxers, but I will lift two punches and I would look for where I could take down, where I could shoot down. In MMA, you should know where all the opportunities are, not only for you, but also your opponent, where he could go to bed or knee. You can't do these separate things.
The result was a rebirth at the end of their careers. Maia has changed its entire perspective on sport. He fell in Welter weight. He won seven consecutive fights at some point. He submitted guys like Carlos Condit and Matt Brown. He smothered decorated wrestlers like Ben Askren. One night, he tightened the face of Rick Story so hard that he brought the blood out of his nose on live television.
Each opponent knew exactly what Maia wanted to do, but he continued to do it anyway. He even won a title of UFC title in a second division, although he failed in a loss of decision against Tyron Woodley in 2017.
His last fight occurred in 2021, when he lost a decision against the current Welters Champion of the UFC, Belal Muhammad. After that, Maia has entered a coaching role more. He had always been a professor of Jiu -Jitsu – even former adversaries like Magny came to his seminars to learn the magic he had exercised against them, and Maia taught them with enthusiasm without worrying that they could become future adversaries – and therefore the transition came to him easily.
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But beyond his own instructions in the gymnasium, his career in the cage provided a plan than other fighters based on the grapple like Ridder benefit and always try to imitate.
“Some of these very creative moments of his game, such as when he could not bring down a guy so that he uses the half-garde or half a deep half, he showed different ways of making all of this work,” said Ridder. “I really liked everything he did and I wanted to be like that. He's not the most physical guy, not the strongest guy, but he could dominate people.”
These days, said Maia, hearing this kind of thing from the young generation of combatants helps him as if he has not been forgotten. He may have had to fight against the desert to find a new path to the waterfall, but it was worth seeing the others follow it while paying tribute to the man who paved the way.
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“It makes me very happy when I hear this,” said Maia. “I tried to always learn and grow. … When I started, I would ask a lot of questions to the older guys and they would always help me. I also wanted to do this for other guys.”
These days, the UFC has many fighters who would say it has done so. And he hasn't finished yet.
