Viacheslav Datsik: The MMA Mental Hall of Fame
Filed Under (MMA) by admin on 09-01-2009
Tagged Under : MMA, Viacheslav Datsik
Over the years, mixed martial arts has been filled with its share of odd characters. The fact that it spent so much of its existence as a fringe sport, as compared to boxing, meant that it often drew fringe personalities. And by fringe, I mean some of these guys were the fringe of being wrapped up in a straight jacket and put away in Arkham Asylum.
There has been Charles “Krazy Horse” Bennett, with his wild and fearless antics in and out of the ring, the heroic but contradictory fighting free spirit Evan Tanner, who always seemed to be toeing the line between Rocky Balboa and Jeremiah Johnson, the constantly adrenaline-jacked James “Colossus” Thompson, and Dan Quinn, the aging club fighter who consistently claims to have surpassed Einstein’s work in physics by putting calorie-free sweeteners in a blender and pressing “puree.” Don’t even get me started with the cast members of The Ultimate Fighter.
But has there ever been a personality more baffling than Viacheslav Datsik, the man who knocked Andrei Arlovski out cold in his first MMA fight, then posted a career losing record as he fought with an apparent indifference as to whether he won or not, seemingly more interested in testing out bizarre fighting techniques that he looked to be developing on the fly.
The high point of his career came in the first match for both he and his opponent, future UFC heavyweight champion Andrei “The Pitbull” Arlovski. Datsik displayed some promising power and timing with his striking, but future bouts would cast a great deal of doubt on his achievement in this match and it would be filed away by history as a far luckier incident than Matt Serra enjoyed against Georges St. Pierre in their first battle. It is an interesting historical footnote in the following video, however, to witness Arlovski so fiercely beaten, given the dominance he would soon display against his future opponents.
Datsik would follow up this performance with a 3-9-0 record, including six straight losses in his final sanctioned matches, the last of which occurred in 2003. There is no small degree of mystery as to how the train ultimately became derailed. The story has it that he ended up in a Russian jail for armed robbery, with some speculation that there were ties to racist organizations. Regardless, it ultimately became clear that the strange tactics the man would display in the ring were merely an extension of a dysfunctional personality in the real world.
At this point, in the following video, Datsik takes on the referee and we witness a career low for the fighter whose potential was difficult to determine.
The in-the-ring oddities didn’t end there, however. Datsik began to completely neglect his physique and by his later fights, was entering the ring as a significantly overweight competitor. In another interesting performance, which is quite representative of his work, he begins the fight with a maneuver that became something of a signature move, a goofy somersault kick that invariably left him on his back five seconds into his fights. Naturally, his opponents were often too confused to pounce on the positional advantage he had conceded, and he would typically spring up from the canvas to commence a snarling, taunting and completely unorthodox slugfest.
It is painfully obvious that MMA fans were dealing with a confusing parallel to boxing’s Andrew Golota, one of the sweet science’s greatest talents in recent history, but with such glaring deficiencies in his mental game that he never performed anywhere close to his potential in bouts of significance.
Datsik never showed the undeniable athleticism of Golota, and seemed never to apply himself in his training to a level that would allow his technique to even be intelligently critiqued. But it is quite possible that with any measurable degree of mental stability and training focus, he may have been able to capitalize on the physical gifts of which he did, from time to time, give us brief glimpses.
Alas, he’ll be filed away as a criminal statistic, an historical asterisk and an Andrei Arlovski trivia question. But one thing is for sure. He was never boring.