Steve Erceg: oxygen deprived in Mexico City

A year ago, Steve Erceg was 3-0 in the UFC with a title shot on his horizon. He's 0-3 since and, far from improving, he may actually be getting worse. I think I know why.

If any fool ever tells you that the UFC knows how to build a star, take a moment before spitting in their face to remind them of what this organization did to Steve Erceg.

A year ago, Erceg was a promising prospect just entering his prime, with a very respectable 12-1 record. I say respectable, not incredible: of three UFC opponents, Erceg’s best win was either Matt Schnell (6-7, 1 NC in the UFC; now retired) or Alessandro Costa (2-2 in the UFC). Nevertheless, after only three UFC bouts, the promotion gave Erceg a shot against the flyweight champion, Alexandre Pantoja—not because he was ready, but because the brass needed a title fight at the top of UFC 301, and no one else was available.

As it happened, Erceg exceeded expectations He took Pantoja a full, hard-fought five rounds and indeed may well have won the fight if not for an ill-advised takedown attempt in the fifth round. It was exactly the kind of mistake you would expect from a fighter with more talent than experience—and a clear indication that, with just a little more seasoning, Erceg would truly be ready for prime time.

But the UFC is not a place where fighters are given time to develop. If you ask for more seasoning, Sean Shelby and Mick Maynard will loosen the cap on the salt shaker and snicker into their sleeves while you ruin your dinner. And if you think that gets you out of the bill, think again. Trial by fire is the UFC matchmakers’ modus operandi: throw ‘em all into the blaze, and let only the strong survive. Truth be told, this ruthless method has yielded a few incredible talents over the years—fighters like Max Holloway, Dustin Poirier, and Charles Oliveira. But it has sidelined many more, and reduced more than a few to ash: Dominick Reyes, Lando Vannata, Sage Northcutt, Paige Van Zant, Cody Garbrandt—the list goes on.

After Pantoja, Erceg was matched with Kai Kara-France, a top contender who knocked him out in the first round. A brutally disheartening result for a young man who had just three months before glimpsed the top of the mountain. After that came last weekend’s main event: Erceg vs Brandon Moreno, a two-time former champ and one of the most experienced fighters on the entire roster. In case you missed it (now seems as good a time as any for a spoiler warning), Erceg lost that one too.

And so, in the space of a year, the UFC (with help, it has to be said, from Erceg’s own management) has turned Steve Erceg from a promising talent on a three-fight hot streak, to a failed title challenger on the wrong end of a three-fight skid.

In this piece, we’re going to look into some of the problems Erceg faced against Moreno, many of them the same problems with which he has been struggling his entire career.

But that’s the issue. When your chief concern is the choice to sink or swim, you really don’t have time to think about fine-tuning your stroke.

Old Habits

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that defense is the last thing a fighter learns to do well. Good defensive movement is not natural: it requires the wholesale rewiring of one’s instinctive responses to a given threat. And even with the best schooling, most fighters still require a great deal of experience to put the technique into practice, to reach that point where they no longer even have to think about stringing three or four defensive moves together only to then go back on the attack.

Steve Erceg’s striking defense is undoubtedly the weakest part of his game. This came through even in his promising pre-title-shot performances. Alessandro Costa got beat up for a round before figuring out that he could simply cover up and wait for Erceg to punch himself into range before uncorking a few powerful counters; Erceg had to resort to his wrestling to win that fight. And Matt Schnell may have lost 90% of his fight with Erceg before getting slept in the second round, but he spent the other 10% stunning Erceg with nasty right hands.

Heading into this fight, I was quite certain that Erceg’s bad defensive habits would give Moreno all the opportunities he needed to win. Early in the first round, however, I received a little hope from color commentator Laura Sanko. She recalled something Erceg had said before the fight, saying: “He talked about the struggle that he had in the Kai Kara-France fight. It’s something that plagued him earlier in his career as well, and he feels like he has addressed it with some very specific footwork. We’re not gonna see him take a step back and look for the check hook, because that’s an area where he felt like he was vulnerable.”

Just to be clear, here’s a short montage of Erceg’s defensive reactions in that Kai Kara-France fight, ending with the one that finally got him knocked out.

See how Erceg does everything he can to put as much space as possible between his chin and the incoming right hand—which is, of course, an inherently flawed idea. You don’t avoid a train by running along the tracks, after all, and you can’t kill the bull unless you move just enough not to get skewered yourself. Ultimately, Kara-France finds the adjustment: a quick shift after the right hand, and Erceg never sees the follow-up left hook coming.

There was an obvious problem here, and Erceg and his team were right to address it heading into the Moreno fight. Not ten seconds after Sanko mentioned this specific course-correction, however, this happened.

Moreno throws a straight right hand, and Erceg does exactly what he did against Kara-France, right down to the flaccid counter left hook. It looks like he’s trying to throw a check hook (that is, a counter hook combined with a pivot), but the mechanism is malfunctioning at every level. Instead of pivoting on his lead foot to create an angle, he remains right on Moreno’s line of attack, swinging his feet into a sort of surfboard position. Far from creating an angle, this gives one away; Erceg almost ends up showing Moreno his back. On top of that, he lays back while moving both feet at the same time, even bringing them together at one point.

A recipe for disaster, and it didn’t take long for disaster to strike.