Horsepower: An Honest Appraisal of Alistair Overeem’s K-1 Run
I have a lot of respect for Alistair Overeem, even if I am a bit uninspired by his tangible list of accomplishments. On the surface, Overeem appears to be one of the most decorated heavyweights in MMA history, and by some metrics, he is. However, not all of these accolades are equal.
Overeem’s Strikeforce belt was won against Paul Buentello of all people (and only defended against the decidedly average Brett Rogers), and the inaugural DREAM championship debatably means even less. For all of his listed trophies, the only one that really sticks out as carrying any real weight is his K-1 championship.
How much is that one worth, then? There is an argument to be made that Overeem beat a total of four all-time greats in the sport of kickboxing (Aerts twice, Spong, Saki, and Hari), and to be clear, his short stint in K-1 was time well spent. Conversely, Alistair’s actual methods to victory in many of these fights were informed by grotesque physicality (aided in its entirety by the infamous ‘horse meat’ diet) and pure brutish strength in the clinch. I don’t mean to diminish the Demolition Man’s accomplishments too much, but there is a significant amount of context that must be provided when analyzing his path through K-1.
Without further adieu, here is the significant context.
Massive Gloves, Massive Problems
If there is one major issue that springs to mind regarding Overeem’s kickboxing stint, it was his complete and utter reliance on a shell guard without any sort of depth behind the defense. He wasn’t particularly comfortable catching-&-pitching counters off of a tactile high guard, nor was he an especially comfortable hand-fighter on defense. Reem was completely reliant on the enormous K-1 gloves to shield from any damage and to insulate him from any kind of uncomfortable exchange.
Ben Edwards lands a looping left hook in this exchange, and Overeem entirely resorts to his shell until his opponent is finished throwing. Reem attempts to convert a right hand to the body into a clinch entry, but Edwards immediately frames him off.
Aerts throws a jab up high and lands the 2 to Reem’s body, but hangs in range just a moment longer before fading off the rear hand. Overeem attempts to counter with a left hook and spins himself stupid.
The amazing thing about Overeem’s high guard is how rarely it actually worked. Kickboxing can facilitate a more two-dimensional form of defense where simply blocking can bear the brunt of the workload, but even then, there are always methods around a simple high guard. Great defensive operators in kickboxing always have more than one tool available to them, and Overeem’s struggles in K-1 are an object lesson in how crucial those tools can be.
Spong counters Overeem’s step-knee with a leaping left hook, and Overeem freezes like a deer in the headlights. Spong quadruples up on the left hook, even attempting a Dutch hand trap on Overeem’s right glove. No kind of head movement or exiting angles will be found here from Reem.
Whenever Overeem was in survival mode, he was effectively a blank canvas for his opponents to try out whatever the hell they wanted. Spong plays with rhythm off his right-handed lever, comfortably working the legs, body, and head in engagements. Meanwhile, Alistair does nothing much.
I mean...
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a high-guard in kickboxing, but to use one implies that your defensive/counterpunching system will simultaneously be in play. You can counter with low kicks when you feel an opponent touching your guard, since you know they will be in range. Catch-&-pitch counters are also commonplace. The problem for Overeem was that his offense was entirely removed from his defense, and he completely fell apart in layered exchanges. Too much of the time, he was thinking about landing one-off strikes and getting out of dodge, but the moment opponents began to take advantage of his gaping defensive holes, he immediately became more desperate to lock them down.
This wasn’t helped by Overeem’s lack of fundamentally sound pressuring footwork. Alistair was very linear with his pressure, generally doing his best to simply collapse the distance between him and his opponent as far as possible. He wasn’t particularly good at cutting the ring, typically relying purely on the threat of the clinch to force his opposition to move backwards.
Saki levers off his left hook, and constantly pivots off his lead leg. Notice how Saki is almost always stepping laterally, backstepping, or pivoting. He also does a nice job of turning Alistair into a low kick, as Alistair shifts. Meanwhile, Overeem is left simply following Saki around in circle, as the most adept ring general glides around him.
This confluence of issues meant that for many stretches, Overeem wasn’t entirely sure how (or, more accurately, when) to initiate the clinch, because removing his high guard would leave him defenseless and his footwork wasn’t doing enough of the heavy lifting to ensure when exactly his opponents were trapped. At certain points in his K-1 run, Alistair looked somewhat amateurish.
Overeem was incredibly uncomfortable tracking Saki down, and even when he had Gokhan on the ropes, Saki’s speed and diversity of attack threw him off. As such, he spent quite a bit of time just trailing the better kickboxer, trying to nudge his way into the clinch without providing too large an opening for Saki to capitalize on.
So, since Overeem was a defensive void inside and had difficulty cutting the ring off against lateral movers, then he needed to fall back hard on his clinch entries to start working. To his credit, one of Alistair’s better tactics was the cheat hook, an orthodox lead left hook thrown as a shift into southpaw. Overeem used this punch effectively, because he would often smother behind the shift and immediately turn his left hook into a frame or a collar tie. It remains a woefully underutilized clinch entry in modern MMA.
In a closed-stance orthodox engagement, Overeem catches a body kick with his left hand, drags it across the plane of his body, and throws a ‘cheat hook’ to enter the clinch. He pins Poturak’s left arm to his body with his right, crossfaces with his left, and drags Poturak into a knee. Then, as his opponent is reeling, Alistair transitions to the double collar-tie and smashes Poturak unconscious.
Standing orthodox, Overeem takes a long step with his left leg, and throws a tight shovel hook. His right leg takes another long step to the inside angle of Hari’s orthodox stance, thus shifting to southpaw and allowing Overeem to grab hold of the clinch.
Jack Slack once argued that Overeem’s entire striking arsenal largely boiled down to the cheat hook and the cross-counter, and I’m not about to dispute that. However, once Overeem got his hands on guys, the real breadth of his game began to shine.
Tank & Spank
It feels odd calling Alistair Overeem a tank, considering how hilariously fragile his chin has always been, but sheer overwhelming physicality was effectively Megareem’s main concession in kickboxing. Alistair’s playbook was basically threefold:
Cheat hook to smother opponents into the clinch.
Smash them on the inside.
Overeem shifts to the outside angle on Spong as he reaches out with his left hand for a collar tie. With his right arm, Alistair looks to pin Spong’s left arm at his side, and shifts again, stepping further into the clinch. Then, Overeem grabs another collar tie, takes a short lateral hop-step to transfer his right to his left leg, and nails Spong with a right knee up the middle. Alistair’s double collar tie was so potent and threatening in K-1 that the rules had to be changed, but this is the essence of the Demolition Man.
I have already covered how much of Overeem’s approach was built entirely around marching straight into the clinch to work, but there is a silver lining to be found here. Perhaps this entire article is simply damning with faint praise, but Overeem’s clinch game is genuinely exceptional, particularly in kickboxing. Admittedly, Alistair hugely outsized everybody in his division, but his combination of strength and leverage allowed for some pretty neat inside attacks.
Overeem converts his high guard by posting his left hand on the inside track of Spong’s shoulder, dragging his opponent’s arm down to his side, trapping it. On the opposing side, Alistair repeats the tactic, but turns his right hand into a collar tie. Now, Overeem has full control of Spong’s posture whilst limiting his ability to frame. I especially like how Overeem yanks down on his right collar tie to break Spong’s posture, pulling Tyrone into a knee.
Occasionally, Alistair would throw in same-side attacks off clinch breaks, catching opponents unaware.
A lot of Overeem’s success in the clinch was related to his physicality, but any time a fighter can create subtle openings with yanks and frames, I am immediately more impressed with their inside game. In general, Overeem did a nice job of switching collar ties and posting to throw his opponent’s positioning off before pulling them into a violent postural break, usually punctuated by a knee.
It wasn’t just Overeem’s clinch that improved when he tied up with opponents. In K-1, Alistair was a very tactile fighter, gaining a better sense of distance with his jab when he was able to maneuver between the clinch and infighting. The more he pressured opponents, the more tired his opponents became, and a variety of tactics opened up by Reem simply staying on them.
On the inside, Overeem plays with collar ties and a shifting right hook to draw Spong out of his guard. I like Reem pulling down on Spong’s head off the left collar tie straight into a right uppercut. In close-quarters engagements, Reem works in subtle shifts, playing off jabs from both stances.
As a result, optically, a lot of Overeem’s K-1 run was very strange. He would spend a lot of time walking down more skilled opponents, who had varying degrees of success framing off. He would push and prod to find an entry into the clinch, and then do his damnedest to absolutely hulk his opponents into oblivion. What continues to amaze me is how Alistair executed this strategy against much better fighters than himself, and it generally only two one or two bad exchanges for his opponents to physically or mentally whither.
Conclusion
So, what is the takeaway for Overeem’s acclaimed K-1 run?
Alistair Overeem is the ultimate size bully.
At very few moments against the elites in kickboxing did Alistair look like the better fighter. Tyron Spong hurt Overeem several times, but exhausted himself trying to keep the behemoth off him. Gokhan Saki absolutely worked Overeem for every second until one blocked body kick completely dislocated his shoulder, and the fight was waved off. (In Saki’s previous fight with Daniel Ghiţă, his shoulder was already dislocated from earlier that evening, but it was still a lone kick that completely ended his contest with Overeem.) Some people might be tempted to call Badr Hari the signature win of this series, but Overeem still wound up 1-1 with the Moroccan. Wins are wins, but Reem’s methods were so beastily that it can be difficult to name any singular moment as being particularly crafty.
There are elements to like from Overeem here, but in retrospect, some of the shine has eroded from this illustrious run. A lot of my criticism around Overeem’s defense were centered around his overreliance on a high guard with large gloves, and this suspicion was borne out in his return to MMA. Next thing he knew, equally decorated strikers such as Bigfoot Silva and Travis Browne were ripping through his shell guard like a knife through butter.
Shortly after concluding his run in kickboxing, Overeem arguably lost to a flop-happy Fabricio Werdum in Strikeforce, so let’s just say that whatever skill gap exists between these two sports is irrelevant at heavyweight.