Tai Tuivasa and the Vindication of Mark Hunt

To say that the young Australian heavyweight Tai Tuivasa has been influenced by Mark Hunt would be an understatement. Tuivasa’s style draws on The Super Samoan’s style so heavily that you might as well consider him Hunt: Mark II. While Hunt came to MMA late in his life, and his run as a legitimate title threat lasted only a couple of years, he developed a wealth of knowledge in his 2011 run which he seems to be successfully imparting onto Tuivasa. Many fans look to Tuivasa as something like Hunt’s vindication—perhaps Hunt looks at him that way too. For many of PRIDE and K-1’s stalwart fans, Tuivasa represents what Hunt might have done had all the parts come together for him to train with top coaches, full time, for modern UFC heavyweight money a decade earlier.

Tuivasa’s counter grappling tactics are very clearly based on the foundation that allowed Hunt to transform himself into a legitimate top contender from 2011 to 2014. For a start, Tuivasa attempts to end up with at least one underhook any time an opponent closes to clinch or goes after his hips. This was the reason that Hunt adopted a low lead hand in his career resurgence. We often talk about shortening the path of strikes to create the illusion of speed, Hunt’s low lead hand is effectively a shortcut to an underhook that a faster man might get there from a regular guard.

Notice that both Hunt and Tuivasa try to time their right hands/elbows and drop their left low when they punch. If you know anything about boxing or kickboxing, you know that’s not good form. But if you watch what they are able to do with it, it all makes sense. Hunt and Tuivasa hope to hurt their opponent by intercepting them with the counter, but ensure that they end up with the underhook when the opponent follows through.

That elbow is a Hunt creation. It walks a fine line, if the opponent shoots with their head too low, or gets in too deep, there’s a chance it will come down on the back of their head or spine. Hunt used this unintuitive strike to good effect against Ben Rothwell in their blood-and-guts scrap back in 2011. In fact, Hunt has only gotten better with elbows over the years. In his first fight with Bigfoot Silva, Hunt began elbowing because his hand was mangled. Against Alistair Overeem, last year, Hunt landed counter elbows on the way into the clinch and broke out of the clinch with pairs of elbows as well. The body may not be what it once was, but Hunt is still learning.

You might notice another Hunt look in that clip from the Tuivasa-Coulter fight. Hunt and Tuivasa both use a little brute-force judo to lubricate their exits from the clinch. Neither man really wants a takedown but they will go for them in earnest just to make their opponent move and give them space to slither free. Here Hunt gets double underhooks but is still struggling to get away from the crown prince of “wall ‘n’ stall," Cheick Kongo, so Hunt tries to trip him and Kongo stumbles to catch his balance, leaving the arms behind.

Once the clinch has been established Tuivasa’s plan is the same as Hunt’s: he attempts to pummel his hands and elbows to inside position before disengaging in order to strike. Most of the time this relies on influencing his opponent’s head position. The classical method to free the arms from a clinch in boxing is to post the top of the head underneath the opponent’s face in order to force him upright while pulling the arms out. This has always worked well in MMA and fighters like Jon Jones use it to land boxing combinations while infighting along the fence.

Tuivasa and Hunt aren’t subtle in their clinch work, but you can’t argue with results: two hands go underneath the opponent’s chin and push his head skyward. Then the head comes in underneath the opponent’s. Then the elbows are sucked back in and it’s either time to grab some underhooks or start “throwing them bungalows.”

But Tuivasa seems to suffer from a few of Hunt’s hang ups as well. He has exceptionally heavy low kicks, but scarcely uses them. Obviously, in MMA it is trickier to use traditional low kicks than it would be in a kickboxing contest, with the threat of an opponent catching the kick and running through into a takedown. Yet when Tuivasa finally decided to throw a couple against Coulter, Tuivasa lifted his man clean off his feet and followed up with a knee for the knockout.

Tuivasa can also become fixated on the knockout. This results in him running straight at his opponent desperately swinging his fists and loading up one lead right elbow at a time. Cyril Asker was set up to be something of a "gimme" for Tuivasa in front of an Australian crowd, but Tuivasa spent much of the fight swinging wild at a helpless, shelled up Asker along the fence. Tuivasa took a couple of chances to land good body shots but he could have benefited enormously from taking a step back and throwing some high-low-high combinations or low kicking to punish Asker and draw him out of his entirely head-focused guard.

The counter elbow proved to be money once again as it set Asker wobbling and stumbling back onto the cage, but the running elbow follow ups were pretty obvious and probably wouldn’t fly against a higher quality opponent with better instincts under duress. You cannot, after all, run in flailing at Stipe Miocic or Daniel Cormier even if you have dinged them with a decent shot. Obviously, Asker isn’t Miocic or Cormier, and plenty of fighters have risen to the occasion after looking sloppy against lesser competition, but it would be more encouraging if Tuivasa had shown some patience and variety against a man whose number he clearly had even on physical ability alone.

It may be early days but there isn’t much time to waste if you are a UFC heavyweight at the moment. If you win a few fights impressively, you might end up dragged into an early title shot kicking and screaming. Having Tai Tuivasa fight Andrei Arlovski is a pretty transparent piece of matchmaking and no one is in doubt as to what is supposed to happen. Tuivasa should knock out the aging, chinny Belarusian and then we can start talking about his unstoppable power and his results on the legendary UFC punch measuring machine. Arlovski is the second most knocked out athlete in UFC history and hasn’t stopped anyone since 2015, breaking his streak of five losses by wall ‘n’ stalling Junior Albini and then grinding a few takedowns in an abysmal fight with Stefan Struve. The Arlovski who comes to bang seems gone and he is finally going to his grappling, it just isn’t very interesting. At least if Arlovski comes out hoping to grind on Tuivasa we get to see how Tuivasa holds up in his presumed weakest area of the game against a solid all rounder.

If UFC 225 goes off as planned and the hype train rolleth on, we will have a fun knockout to pad the highlight reel and to add to what we know about Tuivasa. And if if Tuivasa loses? It is no big deal. He’s twenty five years old. Mark Hunt didn’t get near the UFC title until the last days of his thirties. If there is one thing Mark Hunt can teach all of us it is that if you can knock people stiff as a heavyweight, you have tremendous value to the company and are only ever two good wins away from a title shot.

Jack wrote the hit biography Notorious: The Life and Fights of Conor McGregor and hosts the Fights Gone By Podcast.