BLOOMINGTON, Minn. – They left the fighter hotel that day in a determined march and returned hours later like a funeral procession. This was the time of sad moping, those muted hours after a particularly painful loss when nobody knows what to say but everyone feels compelled to give it a shot.
And with this one, a unanimous decision loss to Chris Weidman in January 2012 on the UFC’s first full fight card on the Fox network, there were plenty of things you could say. At least he didn’t get knocked out. At least he didn’t embarrass himself. At least they were having this post-fight meeting in a hotel room rather than a hospital room.
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Still, for Demain Maia, as for his whole team, this one hurt. More than that, this one seemed to cry out for change. His manager, Eduardo Alonso, knew it just from the way he fought. It was as if, after training his boxing skills so much, Maia had somehow forgotten that what he was really supposed to be was a jiu-jitsu guy. It was like he wanted to stand there and trade punches with Weidman rather than using it as a way to get him to the mat.
Which, Alonso realized once they all sat down in the hotel room and started getting into the post-mortem phase of the loss, was pretty much exactly what had happened.
“I remember we were talking about what we needed to change and all that,” Alonso said. “At one point, (Maia) said, ‘But I felt like I was right on the verge of knocking him out at any minute.’ We all looked at each other and at him and we had to say, ‘No, that was never close to happening.’ You know, that was the peak of him wanting to be a striker, and he was in that bubble partly for emotional reasons.”
Maia had already been through a lot by this point. He was a decorated grappling champion before he ever entered the UFC. When he did sign, he proceeded to reel off five straight submission victories, including first-round finishes of guys such as Chael Sonnen and Nate Quarry. In an age when no one was winning fights with jiu-jitsu alone anymore, Maia still managed to do it. His opponents all knew what he was going to do, and he did it to them anyway.
“I grew up in martial arts,” Maia explained. “It’s been my life since I was 12 years old. So for me, jiu-jitsu was the basis of everything in my life.”
In the UFC, his legend grew. He even got a title shot, only to end up as one more person whom Anderson Silva seemed like he’d rather taunt than fight. That loss helped convince him that what he really needed was better striking. Maybe it convinced him too well. By the time he got around to that Weidman fight, he’d tricked himself into thinking that he was a boxer.
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That’s what that hotel room meeting in Chicago was about. It wasn’t the last meeting on the topic, either. There was a tug-of-war going on for the fighting soul of Demian Maia. Important decisions needed to be made.
“We had several meetings,” Alonso said. “We decided to move down a weight class and form a new team and start it over fresh and get back to focusing on the grappling. I really pushed for that, and there were some tense moments. He eventually agreed and trusted us. He trusted me to put me in a position as his coach and not just his manager. We made a lot of changes, and it was only possible because he had all the ingredients necessary. His intelligence, his humility – that’s what you need if you’re going to change. That’s why he’s been constantly evolving in this sport for so long. It’s the way he looks at life itself, the way he thinks. You probably find more people like him in philosophy classes than in a gym.”
The Maia who emerged from that Weidman fight was different. He reinvented himself as a welterweight. He got back to scaring people with his jiu-jitsu. Most importantly, he figured out how to train for the kind of fight he wanted, how to break down all the little pieces and put it together again as a cohesive whole that would work even against the people who thought they knew how to stop it.
A 2012 loss to Chris Weidman forced Demian Maia to start a new chapter of his lengthy UFC story. (Nick Laham / Zuffa)
“It’s a lot of work, and it’s having the right mindset,” Maia said. “I have a team that understands how to get the best out of me, how to direct me. The most important thing was figuring out the right ways of training the situations we need. If my coaches tell me I need to do this thing to be more efficient, then we start to think about exercises and drills we can do to help me do it when I’m tired and not able to think about it in the fight. Everything I do now is to use my jiu-jitsu. Even when I train boxing, my boxing coach knows what I want from it. It’s easy to say, but it’s hard to do. You need to have the right people around you who understand that, who know how to make it work for you.”
Maia (26-9) has found that now, he said, but he’s also 41 and nearing the end of his current UFC contract. A first-round submission of Lyman Good in February snapped a three-fight losing skid – the longest such skid of his career – and for Saturday’s event in Minneapolis, the UFC has matched him up against up-and-coming welterweight Anthony Rocco Martin (16-4), a man 12 years Maia’s junior.
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It’s impossible for Maia to be unaware of his age and how it shapes perceptions of him. When you’re 25 or 30, and you lose a couple of fights, he explained, people think you’re going through a rough patch in your career. If you lose those same fights when you’re 40, they think you’re finished.
“People don’t care who you lose (to),” Maia said. “And of course, I’ve been losing to champions.”
It’s true. Maia’s string of losses were all against fighters who either held the UFC title at the time, or went on to win it or some interim version of it immediately thereafter. It’s also true that most people don’t give you a pass on defeat just because it came against the best fighters in the division. In this sport, we often make pass-fail distinctions on entire careers using only the shiny gold belts as our guide.
Maia doesn’t have one of those in the UFC. In all likelihood, he won’t get one before his time is up, whenever that may be. If he were to call it quits after Saturday’s ESPN-televised bout, a lot of people in this sport would remember him mostly as a really nice guy who was really good at jiu-jitsu. Even his opponents will tell you that they love Maia as a person. Who wouldn’t? He’s nice to everybody, and not that fake nice, either. It’s not just politeness. It’s part of an actual personal belief system.
“That’s something that’s very important for me, to be a good person,” Maia said. “It’s something all my masters and professors really embedded in me, the mindset of being a kind person, of using martial arts as a tool for self-improvement. It’s something stronger than me. It’s like my conscience. You know, when I won seven straight (fights), people told me, ‘You should talk some bullsh*t, you should trash talk to get the title shot.’ But I couldn’t do it because it wouldn’t be true to me. I can’t do something that isn’t true to me just to get something else. I never think that the ends justifies the means. I don’t think it’s wrong if it’s your personality. If trash-talking is your way, I don’t judge. But that’s not me, and I couldn’t do something that’s not me.”
Still, those around him can’t help but wish that people would appreciate the guy a bit more. The hardcores and the jiu-jitsu nerds? They know who Maia is and what he’s done. But they’re also a small slice of the overall viewing audience. When it’s all over, will the MMA world give Maia the credit he’s due?
“I question that too,” Alonso said. “I wonder, when he retires, will they bring him to the (UFC) Hall of Fame? I don’t know. I think other fighters and coaches, they know. They understand what he’s done. The grappling world, they appreciate him. But the general public, maybe not. I don’t think the marketing in this sport is geared to explain to people these aspects of MMA. The average viewer, the guy who gets a beer and watches only the big shows, he doesn’t understand these details. Even in Brazil there are things that go unnoticed. Like, he is the Brazilian with the most wins in the UFC ever. That’s not easy to do. That’s not a small thing.”
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It is, however, easy for it to go unnoticed. Ask most fight fans which Brazilian fighter has the most UFC wins and they’d probably guess Anderson Silva, maybe Junior Dos Santos or Raphael dos Anjos. They might not even consider Maia, who, with a win on Saturday, will pass Georges St-Pierre and Michael Bisping on the all-time UFC wins list. The only fighter ahead of him on that list then would be Donald Cerrone.
But most fans probably look at Maia and only see the one-dimensional fighter, the guy who never got to the top, the nice guy who was very good for a very long time without ever rising to the level of what they would consider great. And if that’s how it ends for him, maybe Maia wouldn’t mind that too much.
“I would be happy,” he said. “That’s fine. But I want to do at least a couple more fights, at least finish this contract. And winning would make me happy. Really, what I want is to keep spreading jiu-jitsu, and I know victory can help me do that. I think I still have more I can give.”
On Saturday he’ll be out there in the cage, giving it again. And Martin, just like everyone else in the building, will know more or less exactly what’s coming. The question is whether or not he can stop it. If the answer turns out to be no, at least he’ll have plenty of company.
(Top photo: Jason Silva / USA TODAY Sports)
