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Mirko Filipovic

Mirko Filipovic was a cop in Croatia. Because of this, he was nicknamed Cro Cop.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (Pride: Final Conflict Absolute vs Wanderlei / UFC 70 vs Gonzaga / Rizin 2016 WGP vs Aliakbari / K-1 World Grand Prix Final 1999 vs Hoost). Likes to kick a lot.





Okay, okay. Settle in, it's time to talk Cro Cop.

Mirko Filipovic's career is an insane combination of inspirational levels of strength, systemic fortune working in his favor, and total, unabashed lunacy. He was a childhood student of taekwondo, karate and boxing, but his actual decision to fight didn't come until he saw the Van Damme film Bloodsport. He left sports behind to join the Croatian army, but through them wound up training with the national kickboxing team. He quickly won national boxing and kickboxing championships, made it to K-1, and in the space of a few years he was the sport's biggest prospect. He stormed the 1999 Grand Prix and lost a hard-fought battle to Ernesto Hoost in the finals--the same man who'd bounce him from the first round next year. Cro Cop would fail to qualify for the 2001 GP, but that was in large part because he was training for his debut in the sport that would make him a star.

Cro Cop's tenure in Pride was absurd in several senses of the term. He tore through a who's-who of top heavyweights: Fujita, Herring, Vovchanchyn, Coleman, Barnett, Waterman, Yoshida and Alexander Emelianenko all got kicked to death within one round, most by the high kick that became his trademark. Cro Cop would challenge for the Pride title twice--both times putting champons Minotauro Nogueira and Fedor Emelianenko in sizable trouble before getting outclassed by their better-rounded abilities--and was the winner of Pride's 2006 Open-Weight Grand Prix. His accomplishments were legion.

But it'd be dishonest to characterize his entire tenure that way. Cro Cop was one of Pride's biggest financial draws, and his matchmaking often showed it: For every tough match he had a gimme fight against Shungo Oyama, Hiromitsu Kanehara, Yoshihisa Yamamoto or--most famously--Dos Caras, Jr., the luchador who fought in a mask. (Fun fact: Later to be WWE champion Alberto del Rio.) After Cro Cop got bounced from the 2004 GP by Kevin Randleman, they had a rematch where Randleman gave up suspiciously easily. When the aforementioned OWGP started, Cro Cop could have been matched with any of a half-dozen top heavyweights in the tournament; instead, he got pro-wrestler and natural middleweight Ikuhisa Minowa. The first fight of his Pride career wasn't even a fight: It was a special rules exhibition against Nobuhiko Takada that saw Takada repeatedly butt-scooting on the ground so as to avoid striking. His legend was partially manufactured, but his talent was real, and it's why the entire world was excited when he moved to the UFC in 2007.

And...it didn't really work out. He'd have two stints in the UFC, and picked up a couple mid-tier victories in the process, but by and large he just got knocked out a bunch--Gabriel Gonzaga, Junior dos Santos, Frank Mir, Brendan Schaub and Roy Nelson all stopped him on the feet. He entered the UFC at 21-4-2, and he left it--including a brief three-fight stint in DREAM that saw Alistair Overeem knee one of his testicles into his abdomen (no, really)--at 27-10-2-1. Mirko's fighting home was Japan. Call it different competition, call it a better environment, call it more lax drug testing--there were many factors, but it was where he shone. He returned one last time for a retirement run in the Pride-inspired Rizin Fighting Federation's inaugural 2016 World Grand Prix, and his path through the tournament was a perfect tribute to Pride: A Korean heavyweight rookie, a career light-heavyweight, a 6'6" sumo wrestler and an Iranian giant who'd been banned from his home sport of wrestling for doing too many steroids. It was absurd, and every Pride fan loved it.

It's that love that matters more than anything, really. Cro Cop is so deeply loved by the world of fighting that despite K-1 going bankrupt and ceasing primary operations in 2010 a number of financiers put together a Grand Prix tournament in 2012 with considerably less than top-flight competition that was so blatantly crafted for Cro Cop to win it that despite every WGP in history being held in Japan, this one--the last one--happened in Zagreb, Croatia. His career is a weird mixture of insanely impressive achievements and unfair fortune, but all that fortune came because people just loved him so damn much.

Pat Barry fought Cro Cop in the UFC, knocked him down three times and each time refused to go in for the kill because he was his hero and he didn't want to hurt him. That's Cro Cop in a nutshell. No one embodied Pride better than him, warts and all.