Vaseline and plaster

What's under that glove Antonio?

When I think of boxing and mixed martial arts, images of quick counter hooks and beautiful submissions come to mind. But there has been a recent trend the last two weeks in my favorite two sports and I am not too fond of it. 

Instead of counter hooks and submission attempts, I am now left thinking about vaseline and plaster. 

Yes...you read correctly. Unfortunately, the actions Antonio Margarito and Georges St. Pierre have led me to write a whole blog on two substances I never thought I would have to write about.

Margarito had a tremendous fight with Shane Mosley on Jan. 24 (though he was pretty much a punching bag for most of the match), but that fight could have been badly tarnished if Mosley's trainer, Nazim Richardson, did not have the eyes of a hawk. 

Richardson saw Margarito's hand wraps were bigger than normal, so he asked for them to be unwrapped. Once the wraps came off, pieces of hardened plaster fell out. Margarito went into battle without the aid of his plaster-assisted hand wraps and Mosley made him pay. 

Mosley had no problem picking apart the former welterweight champion through nine rounds, and it was because of his speed. It is ironic that Mosley beat Margarito by getting off his punches faster. Imagine how much worse it would have been if the plaster was in Margarito's hand wraps. His punches would have been slower and Mosley probably would have had an even easier time. 

However, the situation is pretty serious and smuggling weapons inside of gloves is a sure way to open up possibilities for serious injury to an opponent. Boxing is dangerous enough, we don't need stunts like Margarito's to make it more violent. 

The California State Athletic Commission rightfully suspended Margarito last Wednesday. I would like to see the Tornado back in action one day, but only after he is ready to fight with nothing but the power of his own punch. 

If Margarito's suspension was not bad enough, the most hyped match in UFC history had some post-fight controversy of its own. Rumors began flying around that Georges St. Pierre had Vaseline applied to his back in between rounds of his demolition of BJ Penn Saturday night. 

This is a little more comical than Margarito's attempt to cheat, but Vaseline on the back of a fighter in a mixed martial arts fight can be a huge advantage. A world-class jujitsu player like Penn would not be able to control his opponent on the ground if he is slippin' and slidin' all over the place.

While there were legitimate concerns in the hours after the fight, the situation has been examined further and even Penn has come out and said that while GSP may have had a minimal amount of grease on his back, it was not enough to affect the fight. 

It turns out, GSP's corner man was putting vaseline on right above the eyebrows, which is perfectly legal, and then did some weird energy channeling exercise that required him to touch GSP's back. There was a minimal amount of grease left on his hand when he touched GSP's back. 

Normally, this would sound like an insane excuse, but since GSP is fighting out of Greg Jackson's camp, I can believe it. Most of those fighters are very superstitious and believe in those spiritual exercises that channel natural energy. Apparently, rubbing GSP's back and right above his nipple simultaneously aligned the energy within his body. 

I don't know if that works, but like I said, I believe that was actually the case. So it is nice to know GSP didn't cheat, but Margarito tried, and that is very unfortunate. 

Hopefully this trend of controversies in main event fights is just a little fad and will not continue throughout the rest of 2009. This weekend's big fight is between Vic Darchinyan and Jorge Arce. Hopefully these two tremendous boxers will leave their plaster, vaseline, sledgehammers and any other sort of foreign object at home. 

2009 is still young, so let's clean up the little mess that has happened and get back to some quality competition.