In two short fights Jiri Procházka cemented his claim for the next challenge at Jan Blachowicz’s UFC light heavyweight title. On Saturday night, Procházka starched Dominick Reyes outright with a sickening back elbow that left the two time title challenger flat on his face. Ahead of the fight Reyes had quipped that “this [the UFC] isn’t Rizin,” that naturally drew some ire from MMA fans. Yet Reyes was right: Jiri Procházka’s opposition in his last two fights has been far removed from the motley crew of has-beens and never-wases that the Japanese promotion was able to scrape together to compete against Procházka for their light heavyweight belt.

Procházka was always a man with potential, marked out by his power, creativity and gas tank, but the question was how that would hold up against the world’s elite. But as Procházka has now transposed his tricks to this higher level of competition, it seems a good time to revisit the quirks he has shown throughout his career.  

The most effective part of Procházka’s game is his boxing. While he had a background in Muay Thai before making the move into MMA, Procházka’s kicking game serves a relatively limited role. Part of that is likely due to the fact that he simply didn’t have the wrestling chops, particularly early in his MMA career. From Cyril Gane to Rambaa Somdet, mixed martial arts is full of examples of strikers who were known for one thing in pure striking competition, and learned to lean more heavily on punching and counter-punching once they transitioned to MMA. Obviously throwing a lot of kicks is an invitation to have your leg caught, but more than that—punching offers the longest reaching weapon a striker can use while maintaining their footing and mobility as much as possible.

Jiri quickly adopted a low hands stance which serves several purposes. It places him closer to underhooks and downblocks on level changes. This is pretty common for quality strikers transitioning to MMA—sacrifice some safety against the attacks you are very familiar with to obstruct the ones your reactions aren’t quite as honed for. But the stance also disguises his long jabs, upjabs and right hand leads, and most importantly serves as an invitation. No one Procházka fights seems overly concerned with hitting him in the body or kicking his legs, because his head is out on a platter and they all, at some point, get tunnel vision.

Procházka himself waxes lyrical about the effect that Miyamoto Musashi’s Go Rin no Sho or Book of Five Rings has had on his life and his style. In the 2000s and early 2010s, Musashi was at peak saturation and any corporate presentation would have at least one Musashi or Sun Tzu quote in any presentation they delivered. Musashi also has the unfortunate honour of being lumped in with the idea of bushido or the “Way of the Warrior”. While many old texts make reference to budo and bushido as an idea or a system of etiquette, these ideas were romanticized to the nth degree and co-opted in the 1940s by the war-time government to convince young men to jump into planes with only enough fuel for a one-way trip. Even now the idea of bushido is invoked when a fighter’s coach doesn’t stop him from going out for another round of beating in a fight he is clearly losing.

But being overquoted is not a fault of the author. Furthermore, among a library of tomes penned by samurai in Japan’s lengthy period of peace, Musashi’s stands out as written by a man who experienced battle. Even then, Musashi’s value is not as a commander or strategist on the grand scale. Musashi’s significance to the martial artist or fighter comes in the fact that he was a duellist. One of the most successful to ever live. He sought out serious competition and fought one-on-one matches where the stakes were life and death. As melodramatic as that looks on paper, that is the only reason anyone knows Miyamoto Musashi’s name and the only reason that anyone has read any of his words is that he lived long enough to set them down.