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Joined: Fri Feb 22, 2013 12:02 am
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 Say you're a UFC fighter lurking somewhere beneath the top ranks of your division, but well above the Facebook prelim zone of near total anonymity. Say you're a known fighter, even a popular fighter, and you can feel pretty confident that the UFC brass isn't watching your fights with a Sharpie in hand, ready to draw a big black line through your name the moment you slip up.
Say, in other words, that you're Brian Stann. Say you're coming off a decision loss to Michael Bisping, and you're trying to find a way to move forward with your career without becoming so fixated on wins and losses that it screws up the fighting style fans love you for. How do you do that?
We know the UFC prioritizes two things from its fighters: victorious performances and exciting ones – and not necessarily in that order. Losing is a good way to fall all the way out the bottom of your division, but winning too conservatively can be counterproductive to your long-term career goals. If you're a fighter trying to make your way on a UFC roster that's 100 fighters over capacity, how are you supposed to balance all that in your mind?
According to Stann (12-5 MMA, 6-4 UFC), who will try to bounce back into the win column when he takes on Wanderlei Silva (34-12-1 MMA, 4-7 UFC) in the main event of this weekend's UFC on FUEL TV 8 event in Saitama, Japan, you have to start by telling yourself that you might lose. You have to know it and really believe it, and yet not be afraid of it.
"I always walk in there prepared for that," Stann told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). "I make peace with the fear of defeat."
That might sound simple, but it really isn't. It's actually pretty complicated, and maybe even impossible for the vast majority of the population.
Think about it: You spend a solid eight weeks essentially living in the gym, training so hard and so often that by the end of each day you can't do much more than come home and enjoy the brief sensation of not moving. You do this because you want to win. You do everything because you want to win, because only an idiot walks into a professional cage fight figuring he'll just wing it and see how it goes. Add to that the fact that you make twice as much money with a win. Also add that, at least in most cases, winners move up the ladder while losers fall down. Winners get to grin their way through the post-fight press conference while losers sit around with ice packs on their faces. Winners hoist a beer to celebrate. Losers drown their sorrows.
The point is, it's better to win a fight than to lose it. Losing is something you want to avoid, especially in this business and in this hyper-competitive environment. And yet, as Stann explained, it's the fear of losing that makes bad fighters and bad fights.
"I think that fear holds you back from putting forth your best performance," Stann said. "If you walk out there thinking to yourself, 'I have to win,' you almost fight with that mental emergency brake on. It holds you back, and you fight not to lose instead of going for it."
One of the problems with fighting not to lose is that you might lose anyway. That's part of making peace with the possibility of defeat, Stann said. What you have to come to terms with is the fact that the result doesn't always reflect the process. You can want it and work for it and do everything in your power to earn it, but that doesn't guarantee you'll get it. You have to find a way to be all right with that, as difficult as that is.
"In the fights I've had where I've gone for the win and just got caught or made some mistakes or whatever, I still get frustrated, but I can live with that," Stann said. "I can make those adjustments. In fights that you lose where you defeated yourself before you went out there and didn't put forth your best effort, those are the ones that haunt you. That's why I try to make peace with the fact that, hey, I may lose this fight. But they're paying me to go out there and fight hard. That's the only thing I have to do."
Against Silva, a violent and exciting fight seems like a given. Especially fighting him in his old stomping grounds inside Saitama Super Arena, Stann can feel secure in the knowledge that he's probably not in for a wrestling match. If anything, he said, he has to accept the fact that, even if he wins, he's probably going to have to take some lumps in the process.
"One thing he has, no matter how old he gets, is a right hand that he throws heavy and throws often," Stann said of Silva, who's coming off a decision loss to Rich Franklin at UFC 147. "Even in the fights that he's lost, he's severely hurt his opponents at some point or another."
That doesn't mean Stann is expecting Silva to come out flinging wild haymakers in the bout's opening seconds. Then again, he said, "If he does that, I would certainly feel comfortable doing that with him." What he expects instead is a smart, aggressive fight from a savvy veteran. After losing two of his past three and suffering through a difficult year in 2012 – both personally and professionally – Stann also knows that his immediate future may hinge on the outcome.
When I talked to him this time last year, I remember Stann saying that he didn't want to hang around in the UFC as just another slugger who can be counted on to produce "fun fights." If he's not moving closer to a title shot, he said, he might have to think about doing something else with his life. But now he finds himself in what he describes as a "one-off" in the light heavyweight division – as Stann explained it, "To me, it's a middleweight fight and we just have a gentleman's agreement that we're not going to cut weight" – and against an aging legend who's definitely closer to the end of his career than the beginning.
Doesn't that make this exactly the type of "fun fight" Stann didn't want to hang around just to participate in?
"For me, coming off a loss, I don't know," Stann said. "It's a one-off outside of 185 [pounds], but the bottom line is, does a win over Wanderlei Silva mean something? My biggest focus is I need to go undefeated in 2013. I need to finish Wanderlei Silva and then fight a top 10 opponent next. ... It's a big fight, an important fight for me. I think a good performance here helps me get co-main events and possibly main events in the future."
That is, if he wins. There's always the chance that he won't, and he knows it. The question is, can he know it and accept it without fearing it? It's a lot harder than it seems, especially when so much is riding on where you end up and how you get there.Source: MMAJunkie.com
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