Joe Rogan & John Danaher on Georges St-Pierre

Now, when you work as a coach for George, you weren't just working as a jujitsu coach. You were working in almost like a mastermind sort of a position. I mean, I saw some conversations that you had with him where you discussed various things. In fact, one of the things you came to me about was you asked me if I knew anyone who was proficient at the spinning back kick. And that's how I got to working with George. Your coaching with him was not just simply like these are the principles of jujitsu. This is what I want you to work on when the fight goes to the ground. You were working on a lot of different aspects. Like you were a guy that sort of put it together. Now, when you don't have a background in striking and you're looking at all of these various disciplines and trying to formulate a strategy for a guy who's such a supreme athlete like George, how did you formulate that? Did you do it based on the individual, based on their physical strengths and limitations, and sort of formulate what you think would be the best approach? Did you work it out with him in conjunction? When George comes to train with me, there's a bunch of considerations. First of all, George lives in Montreal. I live in New York. So time is always an issue. Well, he does go down there quite a bit. He goes down there quite often. But it's not like a squad. The squad's there like seven days a week, three times a day. George is never like that. So in the time available, we'll work on what we can. So everything's always done with George. And how much time is available and what is the scenario that's coming up? For George, almost always, it was an upcoming mixed martial arts fight. So a lot of people often ask me, say, you know, how come you didn't teach George the MP of leg locks? Why wasn't he leg locking everyone in MMA? Well, that's a good question. First off, leg locking, as you saw from the Gordon Ryan clip, requires if it's not done well, leg locking is one of those things where if it's done well, it's amazing. But if it's done badly, it's the worst looking thing in the world. It's a disaster. So secondly, George's game, because his takedowns are so strong, is almost always done from top position on the ground. It's rare for George to be in bottom position on the ground. And in a fight situation, if you're already on top of someone, and you've got the striking prowess of George St. Pierre, I was happy to coach him more in what we call grapple boxing, the skill of grappling to punching on the ground. It just made more sense for him. He's competent in leg locking, but he's not like Gary Ton and Eddie Cummings or Gordon Ryan. Could he finish most black belts? Yeah, absolutely. But why would you stake a fight where literally millions of dollars have been fought? There's a legacy on the line. Why would you take that risk when you could just stay on top and just punch him out, like you did with, say, John Fitch, for example? So it didn't really make sense to push that hard on George. Your question, though, was, okay, what about these other skills? What about standing position? Well, I'm fascinated not just by jujitsu, but by martial arts in general. And I've always believed all the various sport martial arts in the world have areas where they are particularly strong. For example, people make fun of Taekwondo, you know, the Arodu. No one does Taekwondo on MMA. You'll bet me up on this joke. There are some Taekwondo players out there at Olympic level who can kick with a skill level that most people can't even imagine. I've seen people like Herb Perez kicking demonstrations where you're looking at, this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in my life. And this is a guy who, if he hits you, is going to take your head off. It's impressive to buy. I was there when Herb Perez was in his prime. I watched him KO quite a few people. I watched him KO one of the US national champions with an axe kick. Some of the worst KOs I've ever seen in my life came from Taekwondo. They tend to involve jump spinning kicks, where there's just huge amounts of kinetic energy being developed. You see the same thing in point fighting karate. You see some terrible knockouts in point fighting karate. Sure. People make fun of these sports. Well, on their own is the issue. That's the issue. On their own, they've got problems. But if you can integrate that into a well-developed, complete skill set, they could be incredibly effective. And I always saw tremendous potential for Taekwondo's jump spinning back kick. No one does spinning back kicks better than Taekwondo. That's one of their main things, and they do it incredibly well. The setups are fantastic. The application, the mechanics, everything's super impressive. So I always thought that would be a... George had a good spinning back kick, but I thought that would be a nice addition. You always want to be building new skills into a punter. You don't want to be that predictable guy where everyone knows what you're doing. And I know you came from Taekwondo backgrounds, and so I thought that would be an interesting thing for you to work on with him. Well, it was a funny conversation because that was my specialty. Yes. And so when you brought in... I always wanted to talk to you. I always found you a fascinating guy. So when you came up to me and you said, do you know anyone, it's almost like a trick question. It was a trick question. And I was saying... Do you know anyone besides Joe Reith? At what I said, I was like... I was hesitant. I was like, okay, you're not going to believe this. But I... The truth is, I knew you had a good jump spinning back kick. I was trying to subtly... Did you know? How did you know? Word gets around to you. I thought you were just fucking with me. But I felt like when I was telling you, I was like, man, I don't even want it. I wish I knew someone who did it as well as me. You should have just been like, yeah, I've got the best jump spinning back kick in the fucking world. Really, I did jump spinning back kick quite a bit, but I prefer a regular spinning back kick. I want my foot on the ground because I push off that foot. There's a significant amount of force in that left leg pushing off that back. Interestingly, you're seeing some guys out there now having good success in him. Yes. And he made a spinning back kick. I remember seeing Michael Page hit a beautiful one. He's got everything. That guy can do everything. Very impressive. He's another guy who came from that point fighting background. You see Raymond Daniels and him and a lot of these guys from that background that are developing. Raymond Daniels worked with George for his last two fights. Very, very impressive guy. Phenomenal. Yeah. And again, he had just the point fighting skills. And now he's developing real boxing skills. And you see him in Bellator kickboxing. You see the integration of the two. Phenomenal. Phenomenal. I mean, he could just do things physically that most kickboxers just really don't know what he's doing. Yeah. He'll jump up and do what's called like a touch spinning back kick. Like he'll jump up and touch you with the front leg. I saw that. He hit it in a glory fight, I believe. Yes. And beautiful. Yeah. He's phenomenal. He's phenomenal. But again, when you see that, it's like those things by themselves, you're just going to get taken to the ground and smashed. And most people, unless you land one of those catastrophic spinning back kicks right away, the odds are you need all those other things as well in order to be particularly effective, which is why George was such a unique case. George can get away with that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. But that was a fun moment. It was interesting. It was like, I've always wanted to show somebody this because it's a weird little thing that I know how to do. Going back to your original question, the idea of George and Shootbox, you'll see that George's entire methodology and the standing position is built around the concept of a dilemma. The dilemma is always between his jab and his takedown. People always talk about proactive and reactive takedowns. This guy's a reactive take this guy's a proactive takedown guy. The thing about George is he would use his jab proactively, but he would use his takedowns reactively. Now that's interesting because George would literally provoke people. You're saying this takedown. I just want to point this out past tense. You're saying this like you know something I don't know. No, no, no. Because George just won the middleweight title relinquished the title and then the great speculation is will George fight again? The truth is that no one knows because it comes down to medical problems. George has a problem in his stomach. It's like colitis is that what it is? What is that exactly? I'm not going to cling to you as a medical expert, but it's one of the most frustrating things that George has had to deal with where there are certain parts of the human body that are out of your control and the stomach is one of them. Things happening in your stomach, you can't control it. Things like stress seem to make it worse. The truth is that no one really knows at this point. Wherever there's doubt, my instinct is to think well, do you really want to come back George? You've done all this. What a great way to cap off career too. It was amazing. It was impressive. I've got to tell you when he came back, this is what was really interesting about that fight. George had said I'm better. I'm a better martial artist than I was before. He looked better. He definitely looked like he was a little out of competition. There was moments. After four years he sure should. How many fighters do you know came back after a four year layoff? Very few. But skill wise, he looked phenomenal. His striking looked incredibly smooth. I think you could see it in Bisping's face pretty early on. This guy, this is not a rusty George St. Pierre. It's not a small welterweight who's making his way in the middle. He looked huge. He looked phenomenal. His technique, the way he was landing leg kicks and his sharp jab and then ultimately that left hand that he used to stun Bisping and get him on the ground. He looked sensational. You were there the night George went into his first retirement and you'll recall the whole retirement thing was kind of, the speech was vague. It wasn't fair. It was confusing. In truth he didn't know if he wanted to retire. The whole thing was actually contrived in the Octagon right there in front of you. It would have been a hard fight. The training camp hadn't been the best camp. The fight for Hendrix was, George was unclear if he wanted to fight at all. There were all kinds of controversies involved in the fight and then when the fight was over it was a very close fight. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do. There was language miscommunication. Ultimately he essentially walked away from the game and he walked away for four years. That's a long time to be out of a sport that's as young as MMA which is evolving all the time every year. The sport changes and the belts tend to change hands very, very quickly. When George started talking to me about the idea of, okay, I want to come back. I think I've still got, I want to come back. There's a desire, a passion. My point to him was, first off, are you sure you really want to do this? The last two fight camps were tough. You didn't seem to have the same kind of drive as he used to have. Are you sure you want to do this? Is this like a middle-aged fantasy going through here? He said, no, no, I feel this. I want to come back. My question to him was, if you're going to come back, are you just going to do the same thing? Are you just going to come back to welterweight and do what you always did which is come out and beat the best welterweights and just hold the title? Is it going to be doing the same thing? I thought, if you're going to come back, let's do something significant, something you haven't done before. And so, the way I put it to him was, what are the three most persistent criticisms you always hear about George St. Pierre? Number one, you never fought up a weight class. You never went up. Number two, you fought so tactically sound with such an emphasis on strategy and techniques or what have you that matches could become dull. The average fan was like, well, yeah, he's winning easily, it's dominant, but it doesn't do it for his not excite, it's no drama in the fights. Can't go on. So he had this idea that on the one hand, he was very technically sound, strategically deep, but the fights weren't as exciting as they ought to be. The idea that he'd never gone up a weight category. And the third most persistent criticism, he didn't finish fights. He was a very skilled fighter, he wasn't finishing fights. So my point here was, okay, if you're going to come back, let's do it in a way where you address those three things. George is always concerned about his legacy as a fighter. And if there were three persistent criticisms of George's NPS legacy, it was those three things. You're not finishing fights, you never went up a weight class, and you're too tactical. You're not providing the drama that a fight should. So I said, let's change things. In that four years, previous to that, whenever I was training George, I was training him for a fight. He was going with fights, fighting Nick Diaz, fighting Carlos Condo, whoever. And it was always getting him ready for a fight. You're fighting Matt Hughes in two months, let's get ready. Now you're tired, I'm not going to train you to fight some dude. I'm going to train you in jiu-jitsu. Freddie Roach is going to train you in boxing. In this sense, we had the time now to start working on finishing skills. A significant change occurred where my primary emphasis in training George in that four year layoff was in submissions. How happily that happened at what time? The time the squad was coming out. So I had a group of some of the best submission peoples in the world for George to work with. So his submissions started getting better. Suddenly George St. Pierre, if he got on your back, it's a problem. He's submitting people in the gym. I could run off some names, I won't do it because it's not the thing to do, but I could run off some names of people he submitted in the gym that would shock you. Like well-known jiu-jitsu people. For the first time, our primary emphasis wasn't on grapple boxing, it was submission. Freddie Roach was working on the mechanics of punching. George always had good in-out movement. He always had that karate movement, the ability, he always had a strong jab. But now he's teaching him how to sit on a punch. Suddenly George had a left hook. A guy who can integrate left hand between jab and left hook, that's a dangerous man. Everyone was worried, you know, there's so much overreaction to George's jab that suddenly left hook opportunities were opening up. Now he was sitting on that left hook and people were getting hurt. So now for the first time you've got a guy who's got submissions and he's hitting with genuine power. As he came back, there was a question of who's going to be the opponent. And the next thing I said is, well, you never went up a weight division. You went up to 85. Now was any consideration about going up to 85 because of the fact that Bisping was the champion? No. George was trained with Bisping? No, because that decision was made before Bisping was the champion. Really? How far in advance was the decision made? Because Bisping had defended against Henderson, won against Rockhold. Remember this is a four year project. So during these four years, I couldn't make that decision because another student of mine, Wes Wyman, was the 185 pound champion and Chris and George would never fight each other. But once that was no longer an issue, then was like, hey, this could work. This could be interesting. So during the entire four years, he was talking about eventually coming back? Not the entire four years, but he was training the whole time. And I was pushing him, okay, you're not fighting anymore. Let's do some submission grab play. He stuck with Freddie Roach. He loves working with Freddie Roach. So the training was going in different directions. Who was his Muay Thai coach? Mostly he works with Farassa Habi and Tristana, but that's more integrated. Farassa is a black bottom line, so he often does jiu-jitsu with Farassa. I teach Farassa and Farassa does a good job there. But Farassa ties things together. That's his principal function. And I know he trained with Phil Nurse for a while as well. Then he trained with a lot of guys who came out of Thailand itself from Tiger Muay Thai, Yod. That's a shortening of his actual name. They all have very long names, but Yod was one of his trainers. They trained him prior to Condit and Diaz. Did a fine job. So there's never been a shortage of coaches in his life, but there are certain things that seem to gel with them more than others. Interestingly, during that four year period, George had a strong rebirth into karate and worked with a lot of specialized karate people, including Raymond Daniels and others. They came mostly from the European point fighting karate circuit. He was working with them a lot. And so, somewhere, they're across a certain period of time where you're dealing with a different athlete. Now, this is a guy who's had four years off and the training had gone in different directions. His finishing skills in both fisticuffs and grand playing had gotten considerably better. He was toying with the idea of going up to 85 and experimenting with diet, etc., to get his body weight up. That's never an easy thing to do. And tactically, he was working more on the idea of being an exciting fighter through movement and pushing harder for the finish. And I thought those were three very, very healthy directions to go in. And this would, as it were, if he did come back, this would offer a genuine opportunity to address the three most persistent criticisms of his career. Initially, there was a lot of persistence from the UFC. I don't think they were fond of the idea at all. They wanted him to go to 170 and do what he had done. And but George pushed hard for the fighter 85. And ultimately, it happened in a rather strange way. Tyrone Woodley had a fight at 170, which wasn't the most crowd pleasing fight. And George St. Pierre was supposed to fight Tyrone Woodley. And then the US says, you know what, five businessmen and so on. So we chose the Madison Square Garden. That's one of the great fight capitals of the world, and that's how it happened. So there was consideration in fighting 170? Yes. And so this was the UFC's idea. But what about your plan for? I thought, first of all, I'm not the matchmaker. I'm not the main policymaker. I don't want to say that I was the guy that suggested those ideas. And George seemed to like the idea. He said, if I'm going to come back, if I'm going to take the risk of a four year layoff and come back, it's a big risk. I mean, Muhammad Ali came back after three years and had two warm up fights and still lost his title fight. Yeah, but Muhammad Ali really wasn't working out. That was when the Vietnam War thing had happened. He was mostly doing tours of college campuses. He wasn't really working out. George was working out the whole time and improving. You could see the difference in Muhammad Ali's body when he came back. But still, there's many other examples. Sugar Ray Leonard came back after layoffs. He had one successful and one very unsuccessful comeback, and he was working hard the whole time. So coming back is a tricky thing. On many levels, too, not just physical, but also psychological. So now this colitis thing has thrown a monkey wrench into the ears. Yeah, actually, it threw a monkey wrench during the camp. Really? Yeah, I could tell you some stories about that. That camp was as good as the four years was. The camp itself, I can say it now because it's over, was a disaster. It was probably the worst camp I've ever been involved in. I was coaching, of course, the squad for ADCC. So ADCC, I believe, was around six weeks before George's fight. So I was in Finland and communicating with George, and he's like feeling good. Let's get the moment I get back. I'm just going to want to plane from Finland to Montreal and start the camp. George sent me out. I've got stomach issues. And I was like, what do you mean, stomach issues? What does that even mean? Now, about two weeks into the camp, the issues got so bad that George literally could not. Now, this is a six-week fight camp. It's a very short camp. Back in the day, we used to do eight to 12 weeks. But George thought a shorter camp would be better. As he was getting older, he wanted a shorter camp. First two weeks were OK, but I was in the aftermath of the Finland expedition. And when I first went up, George said, I've got to cancel. I can't train. And I fights four weeks away. And George took two weeks off. It was a critical moment on a Friday evening where I said to Ferasa Harbie. This is the second time I've had to say this to Ferasa Harbie. The other was the Carlos Condit camp. I said, George isn't training by Monday. We're going to pull the plug. There's no other way. And we were talking about a four-year layoff. And this camp is dead in the water. So four weeks out, he takes two weeks off. I believe it might have been five. I'll check the dates later. But close somewhere in the neighborhood. We're talking very close. It was a critical two-week period. And during that two weeks, what is he able to do? Essentially nothing. Nothing? Yeah. Just no training. Light drilling, some movement. And it occurred at the worst possible time. It wasn't at the start of the camp. It was in the middle of the camp. The first two weeks were lost because we had two weeks of inactivity. Then there's two weeks left. And I remember the first time I went up, I bought Jake Shields, Gary Toner, and Gordon Ryan with me. We came up. And we went through some drills on the ground. And I was happy. George looked OK on the ground. He did fine against the squad, guys. And we worked on some specialized grappling stuff. And then the next day, he went to do a shoot box workout. Now, I could sit here all day and tell you adventures of George St. Pierre doing shoot box training with people. I've seen him spot everybody. I'm not going to mention names. But I've seen George St. Pierre take down effortlessly some of the biggest names in mixed martial arts, in weight divisions far above his own. So many times per round, you just lose count. I'm afraid to even tell you the stories because people wouldn't believe me. I'm used to seeing George St. Pierre shoot boxing, bang, bang, bang, down. I've seen that since the start of his career. I watched George St. Pierre do a shoot box workout where he couldn't score a takedown. This is a fight two weeks away. I'm just looking and going, holy heck, what is this? He's getting hit. He's getting frustrated. He's getting tired. And I said to Faraz, this is a crisis. This is one of the biggest UFCs of the year. It's Madison Square Garden. He's the headline. The UFC had to pull some big things to get this fight to happen. They originally didn't want it. If we pull out now, it's going to look like a disaster. It's going to let George let the UFC down. And to his everlasting credit, George said, I'll be back on Monday and I'll be better. We went up and he dug in deep. What can I tell you? He's a trooper. He trained every day those last two weeks. And as each day went by, there was significant improvement. And I remember it was a distinct moment about five days before the end of the camp. I saw him do a shoot box workout and he looked like the old George. And I was like, OK. I believe in this kid again. You can do it. Jamie, will you please Google colitis? I don't know enough about what that is. I believe you should Google ulcerative colitis. Yeah, I don't know. So it's something to do with stomach ulcers? I'm not going to claim to be an expert. But yeah, I can tell you what the symptoms were. It was extreme stomach pain and inability to eat. It screwed up his entire diet. And when did it start? It started early in the camp and got progressively worse. So before the camp, there was no issues. Not that he mentioned. Ulcerative colitis is usually only in innermost lining of the large intestine, colon, and rectum. Forms range from mild to severe. Having ulcerative colitis puts a patient at increased risk of developing colon cancer. Symptoms including rectal bleeding, bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and pain. That sounds like a party. Yeah, if you read the, can you bring it back? Read the first four. Treatment can help, but this condition cannot be cured, requires a medical diagnosis, lab tests, or imaging always required. Chronic can last for years or be lifelong. It's incredibly frustrating for him to deal with. And so his treatments include medications and surgery. Yeah. So it's a problem. Surgery. But it appeared to back off a little bit in the last two weeks he came back. This is the kind of person George St. Pierre is. The morning of the fight, Saturday morning, we're in New York City in the hotel room. For us, the Harvey, Freddie Roach, and myself are at the breakfast table. George comes down for breakfast. He's weighed in. He looks at his breakfast. Originally the plan, because it was a fight at 185, was to have George come in at a higher body weight. But he ended up weighing 191 pounds, which is exactly the same as he used to fight at welter weight, the same body weight. So that was kind of a disappointment. And he quietly excused himself and went to the bathroom. Everyone else went away to do their things. And I sat there and I realized he's in the bathroom for an hour. He came out, I was like, George, you okay? And he looked at me and he said, I'm fine. But I knew he wasn't. And then he went out, fought. And then afterwards he told me, dude, I was in so much pain. And he was afraid to tell me, because he would worry that if I cornered him and I thought he was compromised, I wouldn't corner him the way I normally would, that I would doubt him. So he kept it all inside, didn't say a word. And he's a good kid. You can't help but admire a kid like that. Wow. Well, that's what makes him a champion. It's one of the things. It's in less than perfect conditions. He could still rise to the occasion. Less than perfect. It was very far from perfect. Now, you said that during the Johnny Hendricks fight, during the camp for that fight, when he decided to impromptu retire inside the Arked Gun, that there was talk during the camp that he didn't want to fight. What was that about? Really, it centered around two things. One, I can not discuss, because it involves a personal life, George St. Pierre. There were some things going on in his personal life that deeply affected him. And he was deeply unhappy with some circumstances in his personal life. And it's not appropriate for me to talk about those. And the second was the whole idea that it had become an obsession with George at that time, which was the use of anabolic steroids in mixed martial arts. And he was deeply unhappy with what he perceived as the prevalence of the use of anabolic steroids in mixed martial arts as a whole, and among his opponents in particular. And he wanted a testing program to be brought in for that fight. There was talk about it, but nothing came of it. And it became like this psychological obsession during the camp. And between those two issues, there was a lot of unhappiness. He came in, he did his training. He's a professional athlete. It's not like he missed workouts or anything crazy. There wasn't going out at night or anything foolish. But there was a degree of unhappiness where I'm looking and thinking, how much longer can this go on? Now, there was some talk about the Tyron-Woodley fight. And then Tyron had this bad performance. But if George did get healthy and was confident enough in his health that he could get through an actual training camp, would he be interested in considering a fight with Tyron-Woodley? Absolutely. I think Tyron-Woodley is a great champion. I know he gets a lot of stick, a lot of flack. That kid is talented. Very talented. Very, very good. He doesn't think George wants to fight him. He was on the podcast the other day. I think people say that for reasons so that they can motivate someone to fight them. Sure. There's a political aspect to it. I think that both athletes have a deep respect for each other. Yeah. Yeah.