The Anatomy of Going Low

This was published in the July 2011 issue of Golf Canada and the 2011 RBC Canadian Open official souvenir program.

At its core golf is a game that revolves around numbers and they can be expressed in an almost infinite number of ways – by reaching a par five in two strokes, making a quintuple bogey eight on a par three or the fact that a 300-yard drive counts the same on a scorecard as a one-inch putt. So when Paul Goydos stood over a birdie attempt on the 18th green at the TPC at Deere Run during the first round of the John Deere Classic last July, a small margin – 87-inches – was the final barrier between a remarkably low round and a slice of the PGA Tour record book.

If he missed it, he would have cleaned up his par and posted an 11-under round of 60. A tremendous result, to be sure, but it would have been the ninth such score on the PGA Tour in the last 10 years – and by the time the year was out, one of 13 in that span. If he made the putt though, he would become just the fourth player in the history of the PGA Tour to record a round of 59 – the once mythical score that is easily attainable in a video game, but is often beyond the realistic comprehension of even the most brilliant golfers.

In that moment Goydos was telling himself “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” and what he had been doing was flourishing. During the round he successfully hit 13 of 14 fairways, 16 of 18 greens in regulation and when he lined up the left-to-right breaking putt from seven feet away, he had already accumulated just over 180-feet of made putts on the day. (For context, 100-feet of made putts in a round is considered exemplary.) The pressure was immense, perhaps more than he – a two-time winner on the PGA Tour – had ever felt during his professional career.

But with a chance to permanently etch his name in the record book, Goydos didn’t deviate from his routine. He treated the moment like it was an anonymous birdie putt at any point, in any round. And when the ball sprung from the face of his putter, Goydos knew he had made it before it actually trundled towards the centre of the hole and found the bottom of the cup.

“That just happened to be a day where my rhythm was perfect and I didn’t get in my own way,” says Goydos. “I was seeing things perfectly clearly – I could have told you that that putt was a left-edge putt 100 yards from the green. I actually had probably had that putt before. Another factor is that [on] both 17 and 18, one of my fellow competitors was on a similar line so I got to see another ball roll [first]. All the good things that can happen were happening that day. The key was just taking advantage of it.”

Just how well do you have to be playing and how precise do you need to be to accomplish a score like that? When speaking to reporters about his final stroke of the round, Goydos summed up how dialed-in his game was quite simply. “The putt would have gone in a thimble,” he said.

***

While it doesn’t speak to the integrity or sportsmanship that both sit at the heart of the game, the cold, hard math of tournament golf dictates who wins and who loses. From the first hole to the 72nd, the objective for most players is to play a golf version of the limbo – how low can you go? In every tournament there are factors that a player has no control over – course conditions, weather, who your playing partners are, etc. – but they do have the ability to manage how they mentally and physically approach a round. For Jason Bohn – a two-time winner on the PGA Tour who also recorded the lowest ever score on a North American-based professional golf tour with a 58 on the Canadian Tour in 2001 – shooting a low number comes down to one very basic tenant.

“It’s aggressiveness, absolutely,” he says. “What I think happens to some guys or in some situations when they get really deep under par, it’s almost the flip side of others that shoot low numbers. They get four, five, six-under par and they almost get a contentment.”

He continues saying that too often players get out to a good start and would rather throttle back to keep from ruining a good round rather than keep pressing forward to get as low as possible. The ones who eventually do get to those really low numbers have often done so by continuing to fire their approach shots at flag sticks and attacking par-five greens on their second shots.

“They’re able to do that and still hit the high quality golf shot that [is required] to shoot low scores,” says Bohn.

“If a player shoots 67 [or] 68, they were probably playing well enough to shoot something deep if they had holed a couple long ones,” adds Canadian Graham DeLaet, who fired a 10-under par 62 at the PGA Tour’s Reno Tahoe Open last August. “Mentally, however, it is not always that easy. A player knows when he or she is playing well, and the goal on those days is to keep making birdies and stay aggressive. If a player gets four or five-under early, it is easy to try to cruise in, which usually results in a couple bogeys and turns a potentially great round into a very average one.”

Goydos agrees that staying assertive is a crucial element but he approaches it from the macro perspective of a 72-hole marathon rather than the micro perspective of an 18-hole sprint.

“I only shot four-under [on] my first nine holes and then shot eight-under on the back,” he says. “As the round kept going and [I was] getting lower and lower, you’re not supposed to think about it. My thought process when I was nine-under after 14 holes was…that nine-under is going to finish 50th in the tournament, if that, it might be even lower. There’s no reason to stop being aggressive on hole 16 of the tournament. You’re going to need to get somewhere around 20-under par – and as it turns out [Steve] Stricker shot [26-under par to win]. So staying aggressive was a function of trying to win the tournament, not a function of trying to protect that particular round.”

As far as individual accomplishments within golf, recording a double-digit below par round is tremendous but breaking 60 is without equal. Open it up to other sports however and there is an apt comparison to a pitcher in baseball throwing a perfect game, in terms of frequency and historical context. There are some differences, of course, most notably that baseball is a team game and a pitcher does not bear the full brunt of responsibility for the outcome.

“Whenever [someone] pitched a perfect game, they probably had some good defensive plays being made [for them] but it’s a similar concept in the sense that the pitcher has the best stuff maybe that he’s ever had,” says Goydos, pointing out that both require a degree of good fortune.

“Behind him any ball that might have been hit hard was hit at somebody; borderline pitches were called strikes instead of balls – a lot of good things have to happen that turn maybe a two or three or four hitter into a perfect game [and] the same thing happens in golf,” he says.

***

If not for the sheer magnitude of the moment, the first sub-60 round in PGA Tour history may very well have been over shadowed by another rare golf accomplishment – the hole in one. During the pro-am prior to the start of the 1977 Danny Thomas Memphis Classic (now the FedEx St. Jude Classic) President Gerald Ford – just six months removed from office – recorded an ace. Two days later Al Geiberger – who won 11 times on the PGA Tour, including a major with a victory at the 1966 PGA Championship at Firestone Country Club – become the first to record a round of 59 on the PGA Tour. After that landmark round it was 14 years before Chip Beck duplicated it at the 1991 Las Vegas Invitational and another eight years until David Duval accomplished it at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in 1999. In total, the span between when Geiberger first accomplished the feat and when Goydos became the fourth to do so was 33 years.

But just 24 days after Goydos’ round of 59, Stuart Appleby joined the club in thrilling fashion by rallying from seven shots back at the start of the final round to win the Greenbrier Classic. Bohn thinks that advancements in the physical and mental training process of golfers are a major reason for why something that can only be called a statistical anomaly would be possible.

“There’s so much more that goes into that now than did 50 years ago. It’s a combination of both,” he says. “It’s a freak incident that two guys broke 60 within a month, but I don’t think it’s a freak incident that more guys will continue to break 60.”

What it really amounts to is a process of evolution rather than a revolution and while golf technology has improved massively in recent years, Goydos points to a piece of equipment used to maintain every golf course rather than one used by every golfer as a critical component in making a low-scoring round more attainable.

“People talk about advancements in golf, I would say one of the biggest advancements in golf is the lawn mower and the condition of the greens,” he says. “To shoot that type of score, you’ve got to make a lot of putts which means you’ve got to have perfect greens for the most part and…I had greens that I would imagine guys in the 60s would just drool over.”

If you look at the top 100 players on the PGA Tour last year, they played a little over 84 rounds for the season on average. Even with so many opportunities, the sub-60 round remains a mirage for most. And perhaps the fact that players just want to compete and never know when they’ll have a chance to make history is what is so alluring about it.

“I wasn’t trying to shoot 59,” says Goydos, “[I was] trying to put myself in position to win the golf tournament.”

Golf's Global Stage

This was published in the June 2011 issue of Golf Canada.

The history of golf is rooted in the soil on the eastern shores of a small university town in Scotland. The future, well, that could cover a much more expansive terrain.Golf is becoming more global than ever, as the game marches towards its debut in the 2016 Summer Olympics in 2016 in Brazil.

Between the PGA Tour, European Tour and LPGA Tour, there were tournaments played on six different continents – with Antarctica the lone holdout – in 2010, and 18 different countries were featured in the winner’s circle.

Ty Votaw, the Executive Director of the International Golf Federation’s Olympic Golf Committee, and a big reason why golf is now part of the Olympics, says the Games will be a launching point for even more global expansion.

“Clearly the benefit that golf will have in being part of the Olympic Games between now and 2016 is that it will allow governments of countries around the world – where golf is just developing – and national Olympic committees of those countries to provide greater attention, greater resources, and greater manpower behind the development of golf in their countries,” says Votaw, also the Executive Vice President of Communications and International Affairs for the PGA Tour and former commissioner of the LPGA Tour.

“The only way that happens generally is if the sport is an Olympic sport and golf had gone lacking in those areas of attention – resources, manpower, and dollars – because it had not been an Olympic sport since 1904.”

For many years the United States had a monopoly on the game, at least, if major championships are the currency by which golf wealth is measured. From 1960 until 2000, American-born players won 233 of the 302 (77 percent) major championships that were contested on the men’s and women’s tours. In the decade since, they’ve won 32 of 80 (40 percent).

Steven Schlossman is an American history professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the co-author of Chasing Greatness, a book that details the 1973 U.S. Open where Johnny Miller famously fired a final round 63 to win the title.

For the book, he did extensive research about Oakmont Country Club and five of the U.S. Open Championships (three men’s and two women’s) that have been played there. He says that while the winning numbers are certainly relevant statistically, he also points to the international participation rates in those tournaments – an American national championship, mind you – as a further illustration of the continuing evolution of the game.

On the men’s side, the number of players born outside of the U.S. that made the cut increased from six percent in 1973, to 20 per cent in 1994 and finally to 48 percent in 2007.

It should also be noted that players from three different continents (Miller in 1973, Ernie Els in 1994 and Angel Cabrera in 2007) won those tournaments.

On the women’s side, the increase is similar but much more pronounced, increasing from 14 percent in 1992 to 62 percent in 2010. While only a small sample size, this shift does underscore the fortuitous timing of the ongoing global golf advancement, with the 2016 games just five years away.

“Every tournament, if you look at first, second, third and you see what countries are represented and who [would get] a medal if those were the Olympic Games, gives us a lot of interesting momentum heading to the Olympic Games as we experience that between now and 2016,” says Votaw.

As much as it’s important for the growth of golf, the opportunity to tee it up in the Olympics will become equally important for the players themselves.

“It’s huge for golf to be in the Olympics,” says PGA player Ian Poulter. “It would be an honour and privilege to represent my country and win the gold medal.”

Votaw takes it one step further, and says that for golfers to be able to have close contact with some of the greatest athletes in the world can only be a good experience.

“You’d have to compare it to tennis where Roger Federer stayed in the Olympic village and was just another great athlete,” he says. “He wasn’t Roger Federer – who was the no.1 player at the time in the tennis world. He was just another great athlete in an Olympic village filled with a bunch of great athletes.

“That mix, that exposure and that interaction between elite athletes from around the world, and seeing golfers as their equals as Olympic athletes, is going to be a wonderful experience for our players, both men and women.”

Of course, there are still some issues that need to be ironed out between now and then. Votaw says that while the game is on a trail to global prosperity, there are still areas in the world that need to mature in the short term, in order to have a truly global Olympic competition.

“[If] you look at the top 500 in the world rankings on the men’s side, I think only 14 players come from countries in South America, and eight of those come from Argentina,” he says. “So there’s some work to do to develop golfers in South America, such that there can be some representation from that part of the world at the Olympic Games in 2016.”

Votaw adds that it’s a similar scenario for women’s golf, but the more dominant South American country is Brazil, rather than Argentina.

Still, there is a foundation there with players like Camilo Villegas, Jhonattan Vegas and Angel Cabrera.

Even if the future of South American golf is looking bright, there is an area on the opposite side of the planet that most agree is the next frontier of the game – Asia.

“In the long-term I think we will see more and more Asian- born players coming to compete on the PGA Tour, much like we see on today’s LPGA Tour,” says Tom Abbott, an analyst for the Golf Channel. “The South Korean influence on the LPGA has been strong but because of mandatory military service, the men haven’t had the same opportunities. In places like India and China, the situation is different, so I would expect to see an impact from those two countries.”

One of the greatest things about the game of golf is that it doesn’t discriminate and it doesn’t know any other languages. The rules of the game are the same no matter what your native tongue is, whether you’re a touring professional or a weekend hacker.

So when gold medals are hung around the necks of the Olympic champions it will be a momentous occasion.

“There’s no greater accomplishment for a sportsman,” says Votaw. “There may be major championships in men’s and women’s golf, there are major championships in tennis for men and women – but you only get one chance every four years to win a gold medal.”

Go Long: Inside the World of Competitive Long Drive Golf

This was published in the July 2010 issue of Golf Canada.

From the back tee box, the par four opening hole at the Muskoka Bay Club plays to a stout, albeit downhill, 441 yards. With the glowing sun making the already shimmering landscape even more alluring, Brett Cleverdon tees his ball up and doesn’t for a moment second guess himself. “Let’s just go ahead and see if we can put it on the green,” he says assertively. He rears back, turning his body behind his shoulders, sets the club just past parallel to the ground at the top and begins to uncoil, waiting until the last possible moment to ferociously unleash the club head.

His swing is a harmonic convergence of power and precision and it launches the ball spiraling majestically into orbit before crash-landing in the green-side bunker. If there were any thoughts that his confident tone on the tee was mere bravado, they were quickly erased by the tiny grains of sand that splashed upon the ball’s arrival. You see, Cleverdon is a professional long driver, which may have a very different meaning for many different people. But to most, it means he can hit a golf ball far … really far.

The first things you notice are the three distinct sounds you hear when a long driver punishes a golf ball. First, there’s the whizzing of the club as it makes its final descent, cutting a swath through the airspace surrounding the ball. When it reaches its intended target, the combination of titanium meeting dimpled thermoplastic creates a shrill yelp as the ball jumps from the club face and for the all-too-brief moment that it’s still in your presence, it makes a sizzling sound, similar to the one made when you sear a piece of meat on a hot grill. With swing speeds regularly in the 150 mile per hour range (the average speed of a PGA Tour player is roughly 115 miles per hour) in the grip of a highly skilled professional hitter the driver becomes a certifiable WMD – weapon of massive distance.

While the concept of hitting a golf ball as far as possible isn’t a recent innovation, long driving as a competitive sport is relatively young. The origins date back to 1975 when Golf Digest started the National Long Drive Championship, which it ran until 1993. The next year two former participants – Art Sellinger (a two-time champion) and Randy Souza – formed the Long Drivers of America and began their own competition, the World Long Drive Championship. Now held every October inMesquite, Nevada, the championship is considered to be the crown jewel for any long driver.

The format for competition is simple. Participants have two minutes and 45 seconds to hit six balls onto a grid that can extend up to 460 yards long and is anywhere between 40 and 60 yards wide. Their longest ball that doesn’t stray out of bounds will represent them on the leader board. Depending on the size and scope of the event, the field will be put into different groups and paired down round-by-round until a champion is crowned, with each new round requiring a new distance to be set.

If having six cracks at the same shot seems like a lot, Cleverdon cautions that it’s much more difficult than it sounds, especially when the pressure is on and your first few shots haven’t found their mark. “You have to think of every ball as your sixth one,” he says.

He points to fellow Canadian Jason Zuback – a five-time world champion – as someone who not only thrived in the format, but also excelled at being able to bring his best stuff from the range onto the competitive tee. And while Zuback is now the most decorated long driver in history, his path to the top of the mountain was more fateful than calculated. While playing in the qualifying round for the Alberta Open in 1996, a fellow golfer marveled at Zuback’s length off the tee. He told him about a local qualifier for the World Championship and encouraged him to attend, citing the fact that Zuback’s was the longest ball he’d ever seen. Zuback took him up on the challenge and never looked back.

“I don’t think I really set out to be a long driver,” Zuback admits. “I’d always enjoyed hitting it far and I always hit far throughout the years. I started off and had a lot of success early on. My first time I made it to the world championship, I won the whole thing and then repeated that three more times for four in a row.”
His streak was snapped in 2000 when he finished in second place, after Swede Viktor Johansson edged him out by a single yard. He remained a strong contender every year thereafter though until he reclaimed his spot as the king of the long drivers in 2006. While it may be easy to look at the start of Zuback’s career – four wins and a runner-up in his first five appearances – as a reason to keep at it, he says that even though those memories of victory are nice, the appeal for him now comes from the pursuit.

“Once you get hooked, it’s very difficult to get away from it. You’re always trying to better yourself and [better] your competition as well,” he says. “You’ve got an element of competing against yourself and then in the grand stage of competing against everyone else.”

Any sport that craves mainstream acceptance can expect a few bumps in the road, but long drive has had to slay more than their share of misconceptions along the way, most notably that the players use illegal equipment and steroids. It should be noted however that all competitors are drug tested and all of their equipment – from clubs right down to tees (in competition, all participants use the same ball) – must meet USGA regulations. There’s also the stigma that despite their massive length long drivers aren’t real golfers, but Cleverdon says that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“The golf swings are extremely good. The vast majority of the guys that are good at the sport, their swings would fit in on [a professional] tour,” he says. “The only difference is everything moves faster. There’s more shoulder turn, there’s much faster hip drive, there’s much faster club head speed, so everything is just sped up, but you can’t hit a ball over 400 yards and straight without having a very technically good golf swing.”

While it may seem irrelevant what the perception of the participants is, those attitudes can trickle down and affect the sport’s bottom line, especially when it comes to acquiring new sponsors. And with a lack of overall capital invested, there are very few players who are able to dedicate the time necessary to look at the sport as a full-time job – Cleverdon says that long drive is “a hobby for 99 per cent of the guys.”

“Back five years ago we had probably 15 people that had reasonable endorsement deals; that actually made a reasonably good living at long drive. Now we have one,” Zuback says, pausing to allow the number to sink in.

Like their touring golf brethren, long drivers have to grind it out and it takes a toll on the body. Cleverdon estimates that he hits around 10,000 balls with a driver every year. By the end of the golfing season, he is spent physically and mentally.

“When you’re swinging a golf club at 150 miles an hour, it’s the same stress on your body as a 30-mile per hour head-on car collision or a 300-pound bench press. It’s the same force exerted on your body,” he says. “So when you do that from spring until October, you’re done.”

If the sport is to take some forward leaps, it seems likely that it will lean heavily on Canadian Sadlowski – the two-time reigning world champion – to do so. If you met the 22-year old on the street, based purely on physical size, you wouldn’t necessarily think he was the preeminent name in power golf.

“Finally we have somebody of normal size who can hit a golf ball farther than anybody on planet earth,” says Sellinger. “That gives a lot more respectability and acceptability in the product in that we’ve got a person who’s under six [feet tall] and under a 175 pounds that can win a world championship.”

Between Sadlowski and Zuback, seven of the last 14 world championship titles have belonged to Canadians. (Another Canadian, Jeff Gavin, finished sixth at the World Championship last year and has the fastest ball speed ever measured on the Titleist Launch Monitor at 221.8 miles per hour.) And while you may think there’s something in the water in Alberta – where both Zuback and Sadlowski are from – that provides the magic elixir for hitting a golf ball far, the connection may be water related, but it’s of the frozen variety.

“Hockey helps a lot. A lot of the Canadians that are high-level long drivers are right-handed golfers and play hockey left-handed,” says Cleverdon, referencing himself, Zuback and Sadlowski among that group.
“What that does is, it strengthens the opposite side of your body all winter, so that when you come out and golf in the summer time you’re able to use both sides of your body very effectively.”

Meanwhile, Cleverdon hopes Canadians will continue to be a key factor in growing the sport. For over a year, he’s been planning to bring a premier long drive event to Canadian soil, targeting September and Summerside, PEI as the location for the Midland Transport International Long Drive Championship.

“I love the sport of long drive more than anything else,” Cleverdon says. “We can do things that [only] 0.2 per cent of the golf population in the world can do, if that even. Every time I hit a ball, if I hit it well, there’s no better feeling in the world.”

Canada's New Favourite Son: Georges St-Pierre

This was published in the June 2008 issue of Chill.

Two days before the first ever Ultimate Fighting Championship event on Canadian soil, the country’s most famous mixed martial artist wasn’t thinking about his final preparations. He wasn’t thinking about the crowd in Montreal’s Bell Centre or Matt Serra, his opponent and the man that dethroned him as the UFC welterweight champion a year earlier.

No, 48 hours before the biggest fight of his life, Georges St-Pierre was thinking about how he could do more to help kids, while his charitable organization, the GSP Foundation, put the plan in action, hosting a pre-fight party to raise funds for various children’s charities.

“For me, growing up I had problems and what I want to do is to help kids," St-Pierre says of his reasons for starting the foundation. “I want to raise money to give it to different foundations, different organizations, to help kids, and for me it’s a way to give back to society."

That’s not to say he wasn’t focused on victory, but rather a testament to the kind of character he has. At a time when sports fans are fed a daily dose of cynicism because of athletes with checkered pasts, questionable morals and poor decision making skills, St-Pierre’s sincerity and generosity is refreshing and epitomizes what the 21st century athlete is supposed to be. As a result, he is quickly becoming one of Canada’s favourite sons. And while it would be one thing if he possessed all these admirable traits and didn’t have the skills to back it up, St-Pierre is a top-shelf talent.

“He’s a prototype of what you have to be in this day and age as the fight game has matured," says Marc Ratner, the UFC’s vice president of government and regulatory affairs and one of the most influential voices in the sport. “He can do it all, whether it’s on the ground, with the jiu-jitsu, with the grappling, or with the striking. I consider him to be what the fighters will look like from now."

At just 27 years of age and with two world title reigns already to his credit, the Montreal resident is just scratching the surface of his vast potential and is on the verge of becoming a bona fide super star. Despite all that he’s accomplished thus far, it’s the April 2007 loss to Serra that will continue to define his career. As one of the biggest upsets the sport has ever seen, it was a watershed moment for the UFC - the Rocky-esque upset that garnered widespread media attention at a time when the company was craving mainstream acceptance. More importantly though, it provided St-Pierre with a catalyst for change.

“What it taught me, this life lesson, is that it’s very hard to be champion and it’s very easy to go down," he says. “I made the mistake once and I will never do it again. I don’t say that I will never lose again, nobody can do such things, nobody is invincible. But every time I will come into a fight, I will be 100 percent, mentally and physically."

In three bouts since the defeat, just the second of his career, St-Pierre has certainly looked like he was operating at full capacity, winning all three in convincing fashion and looking more dominant than ever before in doing so. His most recent victory at UFC 83 this past April allowed him to avenge that loss, reclaim his world title and to top it all off, a record number of fans from his hometown were there to witness it. The 21,390 in the building that night set a North American attendance record for MMA and it was the fastest sell-out in UFC history.

But sheer numbers don’t come close to telling the story. From the moment the gates opened, about five hours before the main event, the support from the fans was obvious. Every time St-Pierre was shown on a video monitor, the entire building, as if on cue, would erupt.

“It was crazy. It was a good, positive vibe," he says of the crowd. “It was amazing. I couldn’t express how I was feeling when I won the fight."

The crowd was still in a frenzy when the two competitors shared an embrace after the bout, then watched Serra pick St-Pierre up, and carry him around the octagon. There were some harsh words exchanged leading up to the fight, so the show of respect was an appropriate end to their feud.

Ratner, who as the former executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission has a lengthy history with all combat sports, says displays of admiration between competitors like that is common place in MMA and it’s certainly not a surprise to see it after a St-Pierre fight.
“Georges personifies what’s right about the sport," he says.

All told, from his climb up the championship ladder to headlining a major event in his hometown, it’s been quite the journey for St-Pierre. Especially when you consider that his initial foray into martial arts was as a way to escape schoolyard bullies.

“Well, I started doing karate when I was a kid," he says. “At the time a lot of older kids were picking on me at school, I had a lot problems going on and karate was the only place where I was free."

Following the passing of his karate teacher, St-Pierre began training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and from there began to look toward MMA. He made his professional debut in the Quebec based Universal Combat Challenge (Now TKO Championship Fighting) in 2002. But while there were few roadblocks along the way, St-Pierre says that his family, all strong supporters now, were hesitant at first.

“In the beginning they were afraid," he says, “but eventually they saw that I was very talented and I really liked what I was doing."

It didn’t take long for people without family ties to recognize St-Pierre’s gifts either, and he now has some of the best training partners in the world. He works closely with legendary MMA trainer Greg Jackson and his stable of fighters, but a key to his development was realizing that fights are often won in the weeks and months leading up to the bout, and that diversification is paramount. He works with a Muay Thai kickboxing coach, wrestles with the Canadian national team, trains in Brazilian jiu-jitsu with black belts (St-Pierre has a brown belt) and has regular sparring sessions with professional boxers, including world champion Joachim Alcine.

It takes a disciplined lifestyle to be sure, and after a whirlwind year that saw him lose and then regain his title, St-Pierre seems more dedicated than ever. Having made it back to the top of the mountain, the challenge now becomes staying there and securing his place in history along the way.

“I’m very happy with what I’ve accomplished so far, but my belly is not full yet," he says. “I want to be known as the best fighter who ever competed in the sport, pound-for-pound, at the end of my career. That’s what I want to be and I still have a lot to do to reach that goal."

In the meantime, he’ll have to settle for being one of the most recognizable figures in an emerging sport and making an entire country proud.