Mar-24-2009
The mysterious stylings of Professor X—Xavier Foupa-Pokam
|
UFC 109 Official Event T-shirt - Black
|
|
By Chuck Mindenhall
“I have a very violent style,” Professor X says from his compound with the Snake Team.
Professor X is Xavier Foupa-Pokam by light of day, and this accounts for his cult following all over his native France, where mixed martial arts are still mostly sort of illegal but cage worship remains in full effect. Obviously, having a violent style doesn’t help assuage the French government’s concerns.
But then hey, that’s what airplanes were invented for.
The Parisian middleweight has fought in 11 countries in seven years, and will add Canada as a twelfth when he makes his UFC debut on April 18 at UFC 97 against fellow globetrotter Denis Kang. Needless to say, he has left a trail of fire.
Particularly—and testimonially—check out the YouTube video of Foupa-Pokam in his last fight against Kyacey Uscola this past January. The flying knee he plants into Uscola’s ribcage is up there with Kid Yamamoto’s four-second destruction of Kazuyuki Miyata, or James Irvin’s second round patella-pogo on Terry Martin.
Violent, yeah. That’s one way to describe it.
“Fighting for me is a passion, so I’m taking a lot of pleasure in fighting,” says the 26-year-old about signing on with the UFC. “I am aggressive, so people know my style when they come to watch my fights. I’m here to win, and I’m not the kind of fighter who stands in and waits for a decision. In my 20 wins, I have only two wins by decision—every other time it’s knockout, submission, knockout, knockout. I want to have it entertaining for the crowd and everybody.”
Perhaps it should be noted that in Foupa-Pokam’s nine losses—his overall record is 20-9—none of those went the distance either. Violence, as it turns out, is an arbitrary sort of dispensary. So, entertaining this fight should be for the French-Canadian city of Montreal.
In fact, when considering that his opponent Kang (31-11-1, 2 NC)—who is coming off a loss to Alan Belcher at UFC 93 in Ireland—has only awaited the judges score cards seven times out of 45 fights, well, this has detonation written all over it.
Fine by Foupa-Pokam, who is expecting a mixed-bag sort of arsenal from Kang.
“I know him well,” he says. “He’s been a very good fighter. What I expect from him in terms of a game plan . . . I am expecting everything from him, because he can do everything. What is sure is that I know I am going to beat [him], and we’ve built a very good game plan and it will maybe be a hard fight for him. But you know, that’s MMA.”
Foupa-Pokam’s English is coming along—when he says maybe, he means to present a humbler version of most certainly. He trains with Team Quest in Temecula, California with Dan Henderson and company when he’s not training with the Snake Team in Paris with his mentor, the lanky kickboxer Cyrille Diabate. In fact, he and Diabate stood in as Spider mimics when Hendo was training for Anderson Silva last year, and Hendo at the time never got used to his springiness.
“These Frenchmen are very long,” Hendo joked at the time.
And he’s remarkably conditioned, too. He has outstanding cardio, a very light step and a thorax like Tommy Hearns circa 1980. This is a long way for the kid whose mom signed him up for karate when he was 11 to prevent him from running with bad sorts on the streets.
“My mom wanted me and my brother to do a sport, just be good guys and not hang out on the street when we were not in school,” he says. “He did football, and I did karate for seven years in competition. I was always captain of my district, then I was going to the French championship every time.”
Fun, right?
“Yeah, but by the age of 18 I got bored with competitive karate because it was always based on speed and the strategies were always looking the same. I wanted to use more of my legs. I wanted something a bit more creative and I wanted more contact, definitely.”
So he took up kickboxing, and eventually he searched out a Muay Thai gym when he happened upon Diabate’s club in Paris, and since then it’s been the science of eight limbs for the man nicknamed after Charles Xavier, the chief and founder of the X-Men who was renowned for his astonishing mental powers.
“I really liked Muay Thai and then Cyrille was training MMA so he made us try it,” he says. “We liked it so much we became an MMA school.”
Historically speaking, this is likely the time he invented (and began inflicting) his ominous motto: Punishment Time. The French for this is almost elegant—temps de punition—but ask any of the seven victims that he’s beaten consecutively heading into his bout with Kang and that’s probably not a word that comes to mind. Genoux, maybe—“knees.”
For a fighter who is at least cognizant of putting on a good show for the fans, perhaps it’s fitting that his second love is of a more celluloid nature.
“My second passion is audiovisual video,” he says. “Making movies, shooting movies—I really like that a lot. Before being a full time fighter I was also a TV and cinema director’s assistant and camera guy. I’ve actually worked for a lot of US programs. For example, Human Weapon.”
He was an instructor and translator on that show that aired on the History Channel. So, might there be another career for the mysterious Professor X after his days in the Octagon are well behind him?
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
“I would say, why not?” he says. “But right now I don’t know when I’m going to stop so I’m going to fight for the longest time I can, and then I’ll figure it out. I’m feeling stronger than ever, but I think I’m going to improve more and more with time. I don’t have limits, so that’s why I’m here.”
Professor X has arrived alright, and it’s coming up on punishment time.
Want to Leave a Comment?