UFC middleweight Chris “Action Man” Curtis is an old training partner and friend of the freshly crowned middleweight champ Sean Strickland.
Curtis recently appeared on The MMA Hour to offer some insight as to how exactly Strickland dethroned one of the UFC’s finest strikers with a jab, a cross, and the iCarly guard.
Chris Curtis Explains The Power Of UFC Champ Sean Strickland’s Unorthodox Style
“If you watch Sean spar anybody, it goes very similar to that. I’ve seen him spar a bunch of people. You can get better fighting against Sean, but every time someone has their first rounds with Sean, it goes exactly this way.
Where people are like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ So everybody’s like, ‘Izzy looked off.’ I’ve seen this a thousand times. You can get better at fighting him, but when you initially run into him you are just confused.
Everything he does is, on paper, wrong. It’s not the way you’re supposed to move. He moves weird, he throws weird, he kung fu blocks, he’s really good at shutting down the things you’re supposed to be good at.
You hear at one point Izzy say, ‘I can’t find my jab.’ It’s hard to find your jab against Sean because he creates so much random traffic with his jab or when you start jabbing he’s parrying weird, he’s kung fu blocking.
In most combat sports, especially kickboxing and boxing, everything is predicated off of your jab. Everything sets up with your jab, so when he just takes that away from you, no, it’s not there, you can’t out-jab Sean. He’s going to win that battle. He’s either going to counter you or just make your jab pointless.
Look at Izzy, he’s throwing jabs, he’s getting his arm blocked up high, a few times he’d throw and Sean just bats his arm up and away. …
So all that bulls*** about Izzy looked different, no, you look confused like I looked confused and everyone else looks confused when they spar Sean because it’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ No, that’s bulls***, I’ve seen this happen for seven years and this is what he does.”
Curtis reiterated that he always had faith in his old friend, who entered the Octagon on Saturday night as a major underdog. “Sean is probably the toughest human being that I’ve met when it comes to fighting.
I love fighting, he’s probably the only person I genuinely know who enjoys fighting more than I do. I knew he could win this fight, I didn’t think he would make it look that easy. I don’t think he thought that he would make it look that easy.
We all knew he could win, we were like, ‘Sean’s tough as nails, he’s patient, he’s aggressive, he can do this. He’s got to make it an ugly war and get Izzy to fight a dumb fight.’ No one ever thought that he would out-kickbox Izzy. I’m watching and I’m like, ‘This is not what you trained, oh my God.’”
