Making sense of Dricus Du Plessis

Dricus Du Plessis does not look like a man ready to win the title at UFC 297. He also did not look like the man to KO former UFC champion Robert Whittaker--but he did. So is he actually good, or what?

Art by Chris Rini

Dricus Du Plessis is not a good fighter. 

He may yet, however, turn out to be a great fighter. 

Let me explain. 

Throughout the history of combat sports, there have been many legends who didn’t play by the established rules of fighting technique. Roy Jones Jr was an improvisational dynamo, a fleet-footed dancer with wrecking-ball power. Muhammad Ali was a smirking trickster who dropped his hands and limbo-ed his way around his clumsy, heavyweight opposition. Azumah Nelson was a ball of nervous energy whose twitchy swings belied a calm intelligence that made him one of boxing’s most ferocious finishers. 

Dricus Du Plessis looks worse than all of these men. He is awkward. He is tense. He gets about four minutes into a fight before he turns bright red and starts gasping like a landed fish. Of the three boxers mentioned, he bears the closest resemblance to Azumah Nelson, but even that distant comparison does a massive disservice to Nelson’s technical skill and tactical genius. Du Plessis is not graceful like Nelson. He is not subtle. He moves like Keith Jardine piloting a pink, Yoel Romero-shaped mech. Azumah Nelson knew well the rules he was breaking, as did Jones and Ali. Dricus Du Plessis, on the other hand, does not even own a copy of the rulebook, having presumably eaten the one he was given. 

So why the hell does Du Plessis keep beating everyone? Why is he fighting Sean Strickland for the UFC middleweight title this weekend at UFC 297? And why does it seem perfectly likely that he’ll win? How on earth is this confusion of muscle and sinew and heavily-gelled hair so good at MMA, while at the same time being so very obviously bad at it? 

I don’t know that there is a definitive answer. But if it’s out there then, dammit, we’re going to try our best to find it. And if we can’t, we may as well take our cues from Dricus Du Plessis and make it up as we go along. 

Leveling the Field 

Context is key to understanding Dricus Du Plessis. He is not, after all, the only fighter who makes mistakes; he simply wears his mistakes on his sleeve, as well as on his pants leg, in his shoes, and right on the brim of his funny little bowler hat (I assume that’s what they wear in South Africa). 

This is fighting, however. More specifically, this is MMA fighting. Even more specifically than that, it is middleweight MMA fighting. Chaos abounds, and with chaos comes inaccuracy and error. No man has time to cover all of his bases in this game, and no man in this division is good enough to make a serious attempt anyway. It’s just that most of the other middleweights don’t screw up as dramatically or as willfully as Dricus, and so they don’t have to hear about it all the time from dorks like me. 

But Dricus sees their screw-ups. Dricus knows. 

One of the commonest MMA sins is lazy defensive footwork. Everyone knows that you shouldn’t avoid an attack by backing straight up, that angles are the key to efficient evasion–but taking an angle requires all sorts of careful, precise footwork that, most of the time, hardly seems worth the effort. Therefore most MMA fighters take shortcuts.

Nowhere is that more true than at middleweight, the land of narrowly-defined specialists like current champion Sean Strickland. Show me a UFC middleweight, and I’ll show you a fighter who routinely retreats in straight lines. 

Show Dricus Du Plessis a fighter who retreats in straight lines, and steam starts coming out of his ears. Take this outrageous bullrush from his fight with former champ Robert Whittaker, for example.

Watch the GIF

1. Robert Whittaker advances on Du Plessis. 

2. A front kick to the Afrikaner’s midsection.

3. Du Plessis scoops the kick aside, catching Whittaker’s heel in the process.

4. Whittaker is spun into a side-on stance, from which he can do little to avoid the low kick Du Plessis fires back at him. 

5. Whittaker backpedals to reset–but looks up to find Dricus literally running at him.

6. A lunging right hook cracks Whittaker on the mouth. 

7. And Du Plessis continues lumbering forward, following with an awkward left hook…

8. …and another right for good measure.