You have to love fighting more than you love winning. You will always fight, you won't always win.
That's what I always tell the fighters I teach. Joe Warren might be the perfect example of why I preach that philosophy.
In the opening video piece they always play for Joe Warren he says a line about why he fights:
"I love belts, I love crowds, and I love winning, so this is right up my alley"
Everyone loves those things Joe. How about MRIs? Hospitals? Cage-side physicians asking you seemingly ridiculous questions like "What is your mother's name?" and "Can you tell me what day it is?" Do you like your cornerman telling you the details of a fight you can't remember? Seeing someone's hand raised at your expense...?
That is the flip-side of the sport. It's a reality "The Baddest Man on the Planet" must now live with. People get involved in sports for the thrill of victory, not the agony of defeat. Fighting carries that agony to a uniquely personal level. This is not a team sport, the blame for defeat or victory rest squarely on the shoulders of the combatant. The same can be said for tennis, but Raphael Nadal can lose a dozen matches without a single concussion check. If you lose you have no one to blame but yourself, and the physical and emotional consequences can be devastating, especially in the case of Joe Warren.
Joe is an emotional fighter, thats been obvious from the beginning. He psyches himself up for every fight and makes the fight as intensely personal as possible. His talks about the horrors he is going to inflict on his opponent, and talks, and talks, until he has convinced himself that victory is already assured. The vulnerability of this approach is that it only works as long as you believe it. The toll of that KO is much harder on a fighter who has blown himself up to superhuman proportions. Not every fighter would have taken that loss with tears streaming down their face, but with Joe Warren it was inevitable.
Joe Warren got to become Bellator champion in part because he believed that what happened against Alexis Vila couldn't happen to him. Now that he has been faced with the stark reality that he can be knocked out, moving forward will not be an easy task.
Fighters with a wide range of skills, guys like GSP, Bernard Hopkins, and Ernesto Hoost, can come back from defeats with a relatively simple formula. They can analyze what they did wrong, tweak their training, eliminate the mistakes, and go to their next fight with a different game-plan. Joe Warren does not have a wide range of skills. Sure, he has outstanding wrestling, but his submission game is rudimentary and his boxing is basic at best. As far as the technical aspects go, he has very little to fall back on.
A large part of Joe Warren's success as a fighter lies in his ability to take a beating and keep on coming forward. The big question is "Will Warren have the ability to take that beating now that he knows he can be knocked out?" Warren never fought to protect himself, he never hesitated to push the pace of a fight, even when he was taking hellish punishment. Having felt the devastation of a brutal KO, that "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" style may go out the window.
The simple biological fact is that chins don't get stronger. Warren had taken two wicked beatings in his last featherweight fights before he faced Vila and they certainly might have contributed to his poor performance in his last two fights. Fighters like Alexander Arlovski, Wanderlei Silva, and Roy Jones Jr. can all attest to the fact that once the ability to take a shot goes, it's gone for good.
Joe Warren would have had a tough road under the BEST of circumstances. Even if he had taken the 135 belt (no easy task in and of itself) he still would have had consecutive title defenses against two of the best featherweights in the world: Patricio Pitbull and Pat Curran. Now, however, he has to face Pitbull (a man who sees Joe Warren's face every time he goes to sleep) after suffering the worst loss of his career.
It will take "The Baddest Man on the Planet" to overcome the obstacles Joe Warren has in front of him. He will have to find out if he really has championship heart? Can he still walk through an avalanche of punishment to claim victory?
Does he love fighting, or does he just love winning?
