He’s crazy. With rare exception that is the first thing people say about Diego Sanchez.In fact, he evokes a string of adjectives — batty, bananas, bonkers, cracked, cuckoo, daffy, demented, deranged, loony, loco, mad, mental, unbalanced, unstable, unhinged and just plain nuts.
Even lightweight champ B.J. Penn, whom Sanchez will battle for all the marbles in the main event of Saturday’s UFC 107 in Memphis, has found himself drawn into giving an impromptu psychological assessment of his opponent, telling reporters on Wednesday that he believes Sanchez is more weird than wacko.
Of course, the 27-year-old MMA fighter comes by his nitroglycerin reputation honestly. Just look at him and you can see insanity in his eyes. He marches into the octagon to the strains of Queen’s "We Will Rock You" while literally foaming at the mouth like a rabid pitbull and shouting “Yes!” with every step.
He’s the world’s foremost — and likely only — proponent of the “Yes!” cartwheel, in which he performs a series of cartwheels while shouting that simple Stuart Smalleyesque affirmation. He also routinely takes barefoot walks over hot coals and runs marathons in the New Mexico desert to visit the graves of his ancestors. Indeed, it would appear that Diego “The Nightmare” Sanchez is missing some dots on his dice.
Named for the Spanish conquistador Don Diego de Vargas, Sanchez is possessed, for lack of a better word, by a conquering spirit. He was a state karate champion as a pre-teen and a wrestling star in high school. He took up mixed martial arts out of high school and became the middleweight winner of Season 1 of The Ultimate Fighter when he was just 21.
Once a student of Greg Jackson, the Yoda of MMA who is Georges St-Pierre's head coach, Sanchez now trains in San Diego under brothers Saulo and Xande Ribeiro, who have combined to win 11 world jiu-jitsu titles and six Abu Dhabi Submission Wrestling World Championships. He’s the owner of a 21-2 professional record — his only losses came when he was fighting at welterweight – and possesses a natural propensity for punching, kicking and otherwise mangling the human body, no matter how tenuous his grip on reality.
But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover a method to his madness. Sanchez is a devoted follower of Tony Robbins, the motivational guru and self-described “peak performance coach,” who has taught Sanchez how to “unleash the power within.”
“The psychological aspects of mixed martial arts are so huge, if you’re not right in the mind you’re not going to be right in the cage, and the worst thing a fighter can let enter his mind is doubt,” Sanchez says.
Doubt is the one thing that Sanchez seems not to experience. He simply cannot conceive of losing. In his mind, he is already the UFC lightweight champ, he just has to go into the cage on Saturday and let Penn know that.
In Robbins speak, Sanchez operates in the “Peak Mind State,” in which the impossible becomes possible, including defeating the overwhelmingly favoured Penn.
“It doesn’t matter — lack of sleep, nutrition, training, everything — because there is a power within all of us, a spiritual power,” he says. “There is something special in all of us and you can tap into that at any given time.” Sanchez calls it “the switch,” a mental on/off button that he flips before a fight, unleashing his untapped inner energy. The Chinese call it qi, Obi-Wan Kenobi calls it the force and Tony Robbins calls it the Peak Mind State. Mostly, it’s an inner faith, he says. “I flip the switch and just trust in myself.”
Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/postedsports/archive/2009/12/10/ufc-107-there-is-method-to-diego-sanchez-s-madness.aspx#ixzz0ZHTCMeTL
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Source: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/postedsports/archive/2009/12/10/ufc-107-there-is-method-to-diego-sanchez-s-madness.aspx
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