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Georges “Rush” St. Pierre fought his way to the top of the Ultimate Fighting Championships. Now he’ll have to fight to stay there.
Chuck Palahniuk’s book, Fight Club, and the subsequent film it inspired, captured the sense of meaninglessness and powerlessness that pervades the lives of many a modern salaryman. The story’s protagonists try to add meaning to their existences by beating each other after work in dimly lit basements. For them, it was something real, a release, something thrilling and dangerous in their otherwise drab, buttoned-down lives. The first rule of fight club, you may recall, was that you weren’t supposed to talk about it. Mixed Martial Arts, the sport to which the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) belongs and in which Georges St. Pierre is a dominant figure, is a similar concept, except the guys taking the beating are earning a living doing it and not only are you allowed to talk about it, it is getting hard to avoid, even in polite company.
Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA, as it’s known, appears to have provided something refreshingly real, undeniably thrilling and completely addictive to average working guys with buried anarchic aspirations. To call Georges St. Pierre and the other men battling it out in the eight-sided ring Ultimate Fighters, despite the term’s appealing, action-figure ring, is hardly an exaggeration. Trained by coaches from half a dozen different styles, they combine muay Thai, ju-jitsu, boxing, wrestling and a handful of other forms of martial arts to create hybrid fighting styles. In the octagon, bones are broken, blood is spilled and the man who emerges at the end of the bout, gloves held high, is undeniably as well-rounded a combatant as you are likely to see in any televised fight, in this sport or any other.
This man, more than any other in recent years, has been 26-year-old Georges St. Pierre, who is more commonly identified by the Anglo-friendly acronym GSP. After rising to the top of the UFC, the largest and most established of North American MMA competitions, winning its welterweight (170 lb) belt, losing it, and winning it again, he has solidly established himself at the forefront of growing public enthusiasm for the sport. This has as much to do with his fighting skill as his charisma and movie-of-the-week-worthy backstory.
A working class kid from a suburb of Montreal, he seemed an unlikely candidate to rise to the top of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, especially to the dismissive inhabitants of his hometown of St-Isidore. Yet there he was, on April 19, headlining UFC’s first-ever Canadian event at Montreal’s Bell Centre, in front of a sold-out crowd of 21,000 fight fans. In the second round, with his TKO of Matt Serra, he reclaimed his championship belt.
“It was such an experience when he won,” says Firas Zahabi, one of St. Pierre’s trainers. “The climax was immediate – we felt a roar in the middle of the arena; the Romans were cheering and celebrating the hometown hero.”
