I remember watching this fight live, back in the day:
There came a brief pause in the action and the two men stared at each other. Vitor Belfort had tried his usual bursts and hit nothing but air. The champion, Anderson Silva stood in front of him, leaning forward at the waist. Silva was baiting him again. Everyone knew by now that the champion’s magic was in convincing the sloppy strikers of MMA to charge at him, then picking them off as they overextended. The humiliating defeat Silva had handed to Forrest Griffin two years earlier served as a reminder of just how not to fight the middleweight king.
The fact that Silva was stood there, just on the end of Belfort’s reach and just a step away, meant that he was planning something. Belfort suspected that all Silva wanted in the world right now was for him to lead. If Silva’s opponents would not chase him freely, the champion would start giving them his face, sticking it out on the front of his stance. Vitor Belfort wasn’t going to make the mistake of reaching for Silva’s head and allowing Silva to pull back and whip the rug out from under him—he had worked too hard to round out his game and fight his way back into the UFC as something more than a straight line, 1-2 puncher. No, now was the time to use his own craft and to show a patience that was not usually associated with the Belfort brand. At least, Belfort might have thought all of this if the ball of Silva’s left foot hadn’t smashed into the point of his chin from beneath and buckled his legs. Belfort crumbled straight down where he stood like a falling building.
For Silva, it was a throwaway strike. One he had already used against Dan Henderson and others. The front snap kick came smoothly out of his forward lean, which was intended to draw his opponent into attacking him. The front snap kick to the face is a hard technique to time on a moving opponent. The target area is small, and while the kick can benefit enormously from entering through the blind angle—below the opponent’s field of vision—you have to be close enough to the opponent for it to travel this path.
Because Silva had a reputation as an almost superhuman counter-fighter, opponents were reluctant to reach for him even if he gave them every provocation. The forward lean that you so often saw in Silva’s fights was a simple boxing tactic known as presenting a false distance—where the head is undefended and within striking range, but is also out in front of the fighter’s centre of gravity. Reach for a man who is presenting this false distance and he has all the space to pull back to his upright stance, plus all the distance that he could lean back from his regular position. Belfort was very much in the right in not reaching for Silva, but he ended up lingering on the end of Silva’s kicking range and suffering for it.
The Silva–Belfort front kick was awarded knockout of the year by most online publications, and the UFC listed it at the top of their list of the one hundred best knockouts in UFC history. Over the coming years the front snap kick and the front kick to the face both became common features in mixed martial arts. That was Anderson Silva in a nutshell: he made a lot of moves that never knocked anyone out, and consequently no one noticed, but the moment he scored one of those many, many highlight reel finishes, everyone went wild trying to copy what he had come up with.
Coincidental timing: I’ve been reading a lot of the non-Sherlock fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle — historical fiction, sporting fiction, medical soap operas mostly.
His sporting fixations appear to be fox hunting and boxing, lesser degree cricket. Context-appropriate for him.
He throws in a lot of presumably accurate colour about the business side and popular culture of 19th century rural boxing in England. In one story, The Croxley Master, he gives a surprisingly vivid round by round of a 20-round glove match. Much more gripping for me than I had expected. Not especially technical, perhaps, but holds the attention.