Mir comes full circle in quest to stay on top

Frank Mir went through a great deal of experimentation over the past year, trying to figure out exactly who he is in the fighting game.

The journey resulted in Mir coming full circle and trying to be the "old Frank Mir" as he headlines UFC 119 on Saturday night in the promotion’s debut in Indianapolis. Mir will face Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic (28-7-2, one no-contest), a 36-year-old mixed martial arts legend who has also struggled the past few years trying to regain what he once had.

The fight is a test for Mir (13-5), who has held both the UFC heavyweight title and interim title and needs a solid victory to remain relevant in the deep heavyweight division.

Filipovic was on a vacation when called in mid-August to replace an injured Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira. The two are entirely different fighters – Nogueira a ground specialist and Filipovic a converted kickboxer whose lengthy résumé includes 45 amateur boxing matches and 23 professional kickboxing matches.

"Obviously, it was a drastic change as far as opponents, right-handled to left handed," said Mir. "A guy whose a decent boxer to a guy who has, truly knockout power, a ground fighter versus somebody who doesn't want to get to the ground. So, I had to change a lot of things. But the enthusiasm beind the change actually helped motivate me." The fight had a minor scare in recent days. Filipovic was poked in the eye last week in his final days of training, leading to discoloration. He was medically cleared in Croatia, sent X-rays to UFC in Las Vegas immediately, and the company doctors said there was no structural damage that would keep him from fighting. Still, as a precautionary measure, company officials had him undergo a variety of tests on Monday when he arrived in Indianapolis. They found nothing that would threaten the fight.

In the past 14 months, Mir first had to overcome a mentally difficult loss to his biggest rival, Brock Lesnar, in what could be argued was the biggest fight in company history. The results of that July 2009 fight shook the very foundation of everything Mir believed about the sport – which is that superior technique beats strength and size.

As it turned out, all his ground technique as one of the best submission heavyweights in the game couldn’t overcome or even threaten Lesnar’s superior wrestling and power edge when the fight was on the ground.

To combat that, Mir went on a size binge. Seeing Lesnar and Shane Carwin (twin powerhouses who both had to cut to make 265 pounds) as the top guys in the division, he went on a heavy routine of powerlifting training and protein shakes in a quest to get up to their size. He got up to about 270, which brought up the obvious questions of what that kind of a weight gain in a short period of time would do to his cardio and speed.

Those questions weren’t answered in the fight that followed, in which he knocked down and choked out Cheick Kongo in just 1:12 in December.

But adding size from there got even more difficult. When undergoing a physical while shopping for life insurance, Mir found that his cholesterol levels were high; after reading up on the subject, he felt the best way to improve his health was to eliminate all animal fat from his diet. But simultaneously trying to be a 280-pound powerhouse athlete and a vegetarian isn't easy.

"It was horrible," he said. "I would drink so many protein drinks that I was sick of them. Right before I’d go to sleep, I’d have to drink one and it would make me sick, and then I’d look and see I still had half the drink left to go."

Mir's theory was that even if he couldn’t match them in strength or overpower them, he’d be strong enough to negate their strength – and he’d still have his superior technique, both standing and on the ground.

But that didn’t work either, as he was knocked out by Carwin in the first round in Newark, N.J., in a March 27 fight to determine who would get Lesnar next.

While getting knocked out from short range by a barrage of punches in the clinch didn’t necessarily show that trying to be as big as Carwin and Lesnar did him in, he said he had already realized from his training that it wasn’t the answer.

"I was still explosive in going straight forward, but I didn’t have the side-to-side movement and the quickness on the ground," he said. "I couldn’t do in practice what I used to do."

He likened it to being a matador instead of a bull stylistically: He was a matador, but at that size he no longer had the speed and movement to move out of the way of the bull.

So Mir took a 180-degree turn and embarked on a move to light heavyweight. While he gave up on that a few months ago, he said he still thinks he could have made it.

"I went down to 228 pounds without any dehydration," he said.

But when it was time for another fight, he felt he wasn’t within striking distance of 205, so it had to be at heavyweight.

"If I had two more months, I think I could have made it," he said.

The heavyweight division now looks to have a big four of Lesnar, Carwin, Cain Velasquez and Junior Dos Santos, with Mir perhaps being the top of the next tier and needing a few wins to get back in contention. But he does have the advantage of being a recognizable name and probably the division’s second-biggest drawing card. If he were to beat Cro Cop and Lesnar were to lose to Velasquez on Oct. 23, a third Lesnar-Mir match would be a strong possibility – which gets him right back in the big hunt.

Mir said he’s not worried about weight going into this fight, saying that whatever weight he winds up at is fine, figuring right now it’ll be between 245 and 250 pounds. Ironically, that’s right where his best conditioned weight was before he tried to reinvent himself. He’s going in as a 5-to-2 favorite and will likely enter with a 10-to-20-pound weight edge.

The fight has stylistic intrigue. Filipovic is an experienced striker whose quiet charisma made him the biggest foreign star during the heyday of Japanese MMA and a national hero in his native Croatia – to the point he was elected to the nation's parliament.

But while known as the sport’s master of the left high kick, it’s been four years since Filipovic last finished someone with it.

"His strengths are still there," Mir said. "He still punches and kicks as hard as ever."

Filipovic doesn’t show the quickness of his youth. Still, a standing fight would play to Filipovic's strengths. While not thought of as more than a striker, Filipovic has powerful shoulders. In clinches, he usually gets good positioning that makes him difficult to be taken down from a bodylock position.

Mir would figure to have a strong edge on the ground, and he’s worked hard on his wrestling in fight preparation. Fighters with much stronger wrestling credentials have had difficulty getting Filipovic to the ground.

If the fight stays standing, Mir said the key would be to keep himself in boxing range (where he feels he can match Cro Cop) and avoid being farther away, in kickboxing range (where Filipovic can get his low and high kick game going).

And like always, Mir is highly confident in the end result.

"When the cage door shuts, I have every advantage," he said.