GSP is the GOAT

Fear.

Fear can be defined as an unpleasant feeling or emotion associated with the threat of injury or death. In fighting, “fear” is a term often used in a negative context. Fighters will call each other “scared” to fight them, even when they are already booked against one another. Fans deem fighters “scared” when they don’t fight who everyone thinks they should fight. During combat, if one fighter is perceived to be disengaging from the other, some will say they are “scared’, or “running”. If a combatant pulls out of a matchup beforehand, that could be viewed as fear, as opposed to an injury or illness. For people involved in organized violence, this probably all sounds completely obtuse, inasmuch as fighters are ceaselessly under threat of injury or death when they are in the cage or ring.

Fearsome.

Georges St. Pierre is one of the most FEARSOME fighters in the history of mixed martial arts. Now, he didn’t have one-punch knockout power or lights-out submissions, so he wasn’t fearsome in the conventional sense. Georges doesn’t look like a “scary” guy, or somebody who would invoke a feeling of panic or fear inside of a person. He certainly doesn’t talk like it. But what I do know is this: Georges had world-class fighting skills, high combat intelligence, excellent work ethic, and a matchless drive to win and be the absolute best at what he does. What made him scary is not that he intimidated guys - it’s that he dominated them so thoroughly and completely that their will was drained from their bodies like milk from a cow’s udders. Not only did St. Pierre beat his opponents pillar to post, but he absorbed their energy like a real-life version of Majin Buu. He only got stronger as his opponents were weakened by his constant pressure and attacks. He has been described as “dominant”, “unstoppable”, and “suffocating”. One fighter even described Georges’s intelligence as “like trying to fight a computer program”. He was a fighting machine at the bleeding edge of human performance and obsession.

Fearless.

Georges St. Pierre carried fear within his mind and heart. The reason we know this is because he is sentient, and is therefore able to feel and think. Georges has even said himself that he feels tremendous fear before his fights, to the point where he doesn’t want to make the walk, and even despises it. Looking back on this feeling in a seminar at Bangtao in 2024, Georges had this to say: “Everybody is happy to go fight on Saturday night, I’m not, I’m scared.” St. Pierre’s struggles with pre-fight nerves have been well-documented, and his approach to this problem was “fake it until I make it”.
 
The way he did this was by studying the James-Lange Theory of Emotion, which posited that human emotion is a response to physical changes in your body - for example, an increased heart rate creates a feeling of fear in a person. Georges broke this theory down into its simplest form: my environment can affect my mind. Easy enough to understand. But this is where St. Pierre separates himself from everyone else. He flips that theory around and says that not only does the environment affect your mind and body, but your mind also affects your environment. Here’s an example, using the man’s own words: “I go in the bathroom, close the door. People think I’m going to the bathroom to piss or whatever, but I don’t. I close the door and I say, I say… I go in front of the mirror and say to myself, ‘I’m the greatest. I’m the strongest.’ ‘I’m beautiful, I’m strong, I’m faster and I’m stronger, and I’m gonna win!’. I open the door and go back a different person”. Before his fights, he would surround himself with just his teammates and coaches, describing it as “preparing for war”. He viewed his fights as individual battles, and his inner circle as fellow soldiers on the frontlines.
 
GSP is GOAT for female fans because he's a fit, handsome man with a French (Canadian) accent and has been proven to go hard 25 minutes without finishing

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masterofthearts said:
The way he did this was by studying the James-Lange Theory of Emotion, which posited that human emotion is a response to physical changes in your body - for example, an increased heart rate creates a feeling of fear in a person. Georges broke this theory down into its simplest form: my environment can affect my mind. Easy enough to understand. But this is where St. Pierre separates himself from everyone else. He flips that theory around and says that not only does the environment affect your mind and body, but your mind also affects your environment. Here’s an example, using the man’s own words: “I go in the bathroom, close the door. People think I’m going to the bathroom to piss or whatever, but I don’t. I close the door and I say, I say… I go in front of the mirror and say to myself, ‘I’m the greatest. I’m the strongest.’ ‘I’m beautiful, I’m strong, I’m faster and I’m stronger, and I’m gonna win!’. I open the door and go back a different person”. Before his fights, he would surround himself with just his teammates and coaches, describing it as “preparing for war”. He viewed his fights as individual battles, and his inner circle as fellow soldiers on the frontlines.
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By this point it’s obvious that Georges is a smart dude who understood that intelligence is just as important as technique and skill in a fight. During his first fight with BJ Penn at UFC 58, a fight he won, he took a lot of damage. After St. Pierre’s win over Jon Fitch at UFC 87, BJ got into the cage to promote a rematch. The fight was set for UFC 94 in January of 2009. In discussions with his coaches during the preparation for the rematch with BJ Penn, Georges said that BJ had speed beyond belief, and that he had trouble dealing with that speed, and struggled to find the target of BJ’s face. At that point, his head coach Firas Zahabi hired a data analyst, who studied fighters and their reaction times. According to him, out of all the fighters he studied, BJ Penn had the fastest reaction time. St. Pierre wanted to make this fight completely different from the first one, a desire to win by pure dominance, leaving no doubts about who was the better fighter. Georges and Firas came up with a strategy of feinting a lot, using a larger variety of weapons, and firing blanks. The idea behind doing this was to overload the nervous system of BJ Penn by making him think and react to what Georges was doing, therefore tiring him out and dragging him into deep waters. Anyone who knows BJ Penn as a fighter and is familiar with his tendencies would tell you this is a smart strategy for beating a prime BJ - as good as any fighter we’ve ever seen at lightweight.

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even though i never liked him during his reign and wanted BJ to smash him to pieces, there's no denying he's one of the greatest fighters of all time and an insane level of athlete that UFC has not seen since. from not being a wrestler at all to beating the most credentialed wrestlers in his weight class of his era AT WRESTLING speaks to that. nobody did some shit like that since then. that's like if JDM rematched Islam and then OUTGRAPPLED HIM TO WIN. and GSP did that to multiple wrestlers.

i don't care what supposed A level athletes joined MMA since then, none of them were nothing at something and then became THE BEST at it like GSP was with grappling.
 
GOATs don't tap to Matt Serra strikes while in their prime

He is a HOFer and probably on the Mt. Rushmore

He is NOT the GOAT
 
USA!USA! said:
GOATs don't tap to Matt Serra strikes while in their prime

He is a HOFer and probably on the Mt. Rushmore

He is NOT the GOAT
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I'd argue his prime didn't begin until he left Renzo's and fought Serra the second time

Completely obliterated him, and then finished Hughes twice.
 
Pancake Sprawl said:
even though i never liked him during his reign and wanted BJ to smash him to pieces, there's no denying he's one of the greatest fighters of all time and an insane level of athlete that UFC has not seen since. from not being a wrestler at all to beating the most credentialed wrestlers in his weight class of his era AT WRESTLING speaks to that. nobody did some shit like that since then. that's like if JDM rematched Islam and then OUTGRAPPLED HIM TO WIN. and GSP did that to multiple wrestlers.

i don't care what supposed A level athletes joined MMA since then, none of them were nothing at something and then became THE BEST at it like GSP was with grappling.
Click to expand...
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masterofthearts said:
I'd argue his prime didn't begin until he left Renzo's and fought Serra the second time

Completely obliterated him, and then finished Hughes twice.
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I see what you're saying, but he was literally the champion.. I think he was at the start of his prime.

It's not a knock on him - Matt Serra wasn't an all-timer but he wasn't some bum either.

But GOATs don't lose to guys like Matt Serra IMO

I really like GSP a lot - not knocking him.
 
masterofthearts said:
By this point it’s obvious that Georges is a smart dude who understood that intelligence is just as important as technique and skill in a fight. During his first fight with BJ Penn at UFC 58, a fight he won, he took a lot of damage. After St. Pierre’s win over Jon Fitch at UFC 87, BJ got into the cage to promote a rematch. The fight was set for UFC 94 in January of 2009. In discussions with his coaches during the preparation for the rematch with BJ Penn, Georges said that BJ had speed beyond belief, and that he had trouble dealing with that speed, and struggled to find the target of BJ’s face. At that point, his head coach Firas Zahabi hired a data analyst, who studied fighters and their reaction times. According to him, out of all the fighters he studied, BJ Penn had the fastest reaction time. St. Pierre wanted to make this fight completely different from the first one, a desire to win by pure dominance, leaving no doubts about who was the better fighter. Georges and Firas came up with a strategy of feinting a lot, using a larger variety of weapons, and firing blanks. The idea behind doing this was to overload the nervous system of BJ Penn by making him think and react to what Georges was doing, therefore tiring him out and dragging him into deep waters. Anyone who knows BJ Penn as a fighter and is familiar with his tendencies would tell you this is a smart strategy for beating a prime BJ - as good as any fighter we’ve ever seen at lightweight.

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Mind Over Matter​

As for St. Pierre, he sought to sharpen his fighting mentality by putting stark focus on something only the special ones do - becoming psychologically bulletproof. As a kid, Georges trained in Kyokushin Karate to deal with school bullies. As a result he became enthralled by the idea of being the strongest kid in school, even holding the chin-up record at his high school, École Pierre-Bédard. This interest carried over into college, where Georges studied kinesiology. He was a black belt in Kyokushin by the age of 12, and modeled himself after Jean-Claude Van Damme. I think we can all agree that getting a black belt at the age of 12 is a little concerning, particularly in the age of McDojos. In St. Pierre’s case, though, we can rest our little heads at night knowing that the black belt he received wasn’t the result of a bribe. In his late teens he started training in wrestling, something he had never done before. I repeat, he had NEVER wrestled a day in his life. Georges worked with Victor Zilberman and Guivi Sissaouri extensively, the latter of which captured multiple world championships in freestyle wrestling, even winning a silver medal at the 1996 Olympics. By the time of St. Pierre’s debut in MMA in 2002, he was regularly outwrestling guys who had been wrestling for years. He even used his wrestling against Justin Bruckmann in his second professional fight to win the UCC Welterweight Championship. This was but a narrow glimpse of the man who would form a legacy that even the widest of lenses couldn’t capture.

Not even close.

By Georges’ third professional fight, he was already being cheered on like a superstar. His opponent, Travis Galbraith, was a perfectly respectable fighter on the Canadian scene, going 5-1 and earning a spot in the UCC. The fight results show a win by TKO via elbows, but those weren’t just any elbows. Georges had Travis in side control and was posting his forearm on Travis’s chin, slamming his head to the canvas. So when his head hit the mat, not only was he taking the force of the elbow on his chin, but he was taking the force of the mat on the back of his head. In order to get Travis to the ground, GSP employed an unconventional tactic - a high crotch double leg is common in MMA, but the way he did it is not. The takedown Georges utilized is called a snag double leg. This technique is a bit different from other doubles in the sense that instead of driving forward with your hips and creating an angle, you’re using your head to drive into your opponent’s chest to push them forward, while also pulling their legs towards you, essentially sweeping their feet out from underneath them. What makes this double leg effective for MMA is its lack of set up - it only requires close proximity, as your knee doesn’t need to drive into the ground like it does with traditional wrestling takedowns. This worked perfectly for GSP, who simply caught Galbraith’s kick and used it to grab both legs. Simplicity at its best. Two fights later against Pete Spratt, the kick catcher strikes again. This time in the form of a snatch single leg, followed by complete domination on the ground. Pete standing up only tightened the choke, and GSP got his Goldenpalace.com finish in less than four minutes.
 
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