If anything, Jiří Procházka came along a little late. I don’t mean that he arrived to the UFC’s light heavyweight scene at the wrong time, although you could certainly make that case since he overlapped with Alex Pereira’s reign. I mean he showed up in this world a few centuries late. Had he been around in Miyamoto Musashi’s time, circa the mid-1600s, here’s guessing he’d have been right at home running around Hostěradice with a sword and obi sashes.
You know, like a samurai … in the heart of Czechoslovakia.
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Everyone knows that Procházka, who fights Carlos Ulberg for the light heavyweight title on Saturday at UFC 327, sees himself as a kind of modern-day samurai. It’s a fancy thing to claim. It’s like the woman at the local brewhouse referring to herself as an “alewife,” or a good smack-talker who insists on being called an “elocutionist.” At any rate, his notion adds more to the imagination than those fighters who come from, say, boring wrestling backgrounds.
No offense to Khamzat Chimaev, but between sharing a mystical bond with Confucian warriors and that of sharing a bond with Hasbulla, I’m going with the former every time.
Besides, having a samurai around in the UFC makes things a hell of a lot more fun. It’s like having an exorcist on premises, a throwback to simpler times. And one of the great things about Procházka is that he hasn’t a lick of self-preservation. He headhunts without fear, which I like to think is an extension of the Bushido code. The fact that he is trying to become a two-time champion without playing defense, going against the more modern approaches in areas of “strategy,” is a feat all by itself. It’s a mindset that’s refreshing.
Because we’ve seen our share of boring MMA this year.
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The thing is, I’m not convinced he’s not a samurai, even if he can’t legally ride up on horseback brandishing a sword. We’ve seen him sport the chonmage, for instance, the samurai man bun that sits atop the head like a bundle of sage. And he does have a fetish for swords. I remember him engaging in some serious swordplay before his battle-to-the-death with Glover Teixeira. In fact, Procházka rolled up to Adin Ross’s live stream recently with a rather lengthy katana like a regular kensei, which is (of course) the Japanese word for “sword saint.”
And speaking of sword saints, in his “Book of Five Rings,” written by Musashi, there was a great deal of philosophical language that spoke directly to the warrior class of the day. To check in on Procházka’s legitimacy as a samurai, I tested his standing against the “Nine Rules for the Warrior Mindset,” just to verify his credentials.
Look at this guy — everything about him screams samurai!
(Jeff Bottari via Getty Images)
1. DO NOT THINK DISHONESTLY
This simply means, have integrity. The fact that Procházka adheres to the customs of the samurai suggests a man of strong, perhaps unyielding moral principal. When asked about the lurking presences of Alex Pereira (who might want to move back down to 205 pounds after his foray as a heavyweight) and Khamzat Chimaev (who might want to move up after his middleweight title defense against Sean Strickland at UFC 328), Procházka said it’s a fool’s game to contemplate the sidelines while being locked in the here and now.
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“Just Saturday night,” he told MMA Fighting. “After that fight, we can speak about the next options. But right now, the title fight is here. All what I’ve worked on is right now, right here. This is the week. There is no other things. No other opponents. F*** the others. There is just me and my art and hat I want to show, that is all.”
That seems to be thinking honestly enough.
2. THE WAY IS IN TRAINING
I take this one to mean that you master technique through training. I can say confidently that Procházka has been working on a plan for Ulberg, and that plan is to think less in blitzing earlier, something he has been reluctant to do in previous fights.
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“Start faster,” he told the reporters in Miami when asked about it. “That means, to me, to handle all these keys — how to unlock these primal aggressions inside myself to go there to the fight to the second round, to start the first round like the second round. This is something what we, the team, are focused on — to not start slowly, [taking] too long watching the opponent. I don’t like that. As soon as I can start in the fight, then I can deliver a win.”
He is training his instincts, see…
3. BECOME ACQUAINTED WITH EVERY ART
It started with kickboxing and Thai boxing, disciplines that spoke to Procházka from a young age. I doubt he’s ever donned a singlet with true sincerity, but he’s at least “acquainted” with wrestling. Same goes for jiu-jitsu. Remember, he got Glover Teixeira by rear-naked choke, and way back in the day he scored a triangle choke on Strahinja Denić out in Brno.
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He is “acquainted” with the tenants of kinetic chess, but he said it best when he proclaimed, “I don’t play jiu-jitsu, just ground and pound.”
Fair enough.
4. KNOW THE WAYS OF ALL PROFESSIONS
This means, basically, understand different jobs and ways of life. I’d read somewhere that before he was making his living as a professional fighter, Jiri worked laying asphalt on highways and that he dabbled in factory life, working electronic assembly lines. Not very samurai-like, I know, but then again that’s why he got out.
Compared to those things, fighting is cushy gig.
He also tried his hand as a street fighter in Czechoslovakia, and again, though the cred was high, the pay was poor to nonexistent.
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5. DISTINGUISH BETWEEN GAIN AND LOSS IN WORLDLY MATTERS
Oh yes, the discerning eye. A decade ago Procházka lost to “King Mo” Muhammad Lawal in Saitama, Japan. Then in the UFC, he beat Teixeira in Singapore. I’d say he can distinguish between gain and loss pretty well at two entirely different ports, and now he gets the chance to split the difference in Miami.
This is some samurai ish.
Never forget the top knot.
(Handout via Getty Images)
6. DEVELOP INTUITIVE JUDGMENT AND UNDERSTANDING IN EVERYTHING
This means to sharpen awareness, and that’s a Procházka specialty. This is a dude who spends three days in total isolation, depriving himself of worldly distraction. He was doing this stuff long before Aaron Rodgers discovered his darkness retreats. And he uses nature to tune himself. Have you ever seen the video of him striking a tree 500 times? Or him with his hand in an ant pile, letting the little suckers bite the hell out of him? These are training techniques, meant to sharpen focus. Unorthodox? Maybe.
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But the samurai used to meditate under icy waterfalls and leap through fire, so offering your hand to some ants is a nice compromise.
7. PERCEIVE THOSE THINGS WHICH CANNOT BE SEEN
This one’s self-explanatory. And for this one, let’s remember what Procházka was perceiving when he was getting ready to rematch Alex Pereira at UFC 303. Namely, that Pereira was using a kind of black magic in his fights, a kind of bully-aura shamanism that helped Pereira prevail the first time through.
“Everybody knows that he’s doing these rituals before the fight,” he said. “Everybody can feel that — what’s around him and what’s going on. I think Alex can’t fight without that. That’s something [that] he uses normally in a fight.
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“Right now, this is my challenge to him: If we can fight in a clear way in this case. … Let the higher power be there in the cage to see who’s the best in the world. In the performance. In the pure performance.”
That’s the third eye of a samurai.
8. PAY ATTENTION EVEN TO TRIFLES
This I take to mean as treating the details with equal significance to the objective at hand. By breaking things down to the molecule, Jiri can enter a flow state in his fights — or what he calls, a “no-mind” state. Here’s what he told UFC.com ahead of the Ulberg fight.
“He’s fast, he loves to move on the legs. Lots of left hands, checking the jab and hook, all these things. And this is what I like to have as an opponent. And these types of opponents, like Ulberg — I don’t want to say it, but it’s naturally in me — I see him as a really dangerous animal that I like to hunt. I have to be precise, I have to be really patient, I have to pay attention to all of his sharp weapons. Do no underestimate him, any action, every action, for 200%. So yeah, that’s why I like this matchup.”
OK, 200%? Most scales stop at 100%. My math’s not great, but I believe that’s double the focus on details. The calculations of a samurai.
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9. DO NOTHING WHICH IS OF NO USE
Have a purpose, in other words. And Jiri has a purpose that the UFC could build a bandwagon around, to the point they could refer to themselves as “cartwrights.”
As Procházka told Uncrowned’s Ariel Helwani in 2024:
“For me, to be a samurai, it’s about attitude. What you have in your life. About the paradigm in your life. How to see some situation. Sometimes you don’t need to be a samurai, because this attitude, this role, is not effective in every piece of your life. That’s why I’m not just using that for fight, but like I said many times, we all need to follow something. We need to understand our lives — our brain, our minds need to understand our lives and what we’re doing, why we are doing that, by some theory, some ideas.
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“These ideas about bushido moral code help me to be honest to the way that I’m following. That’s all. You have to find something that resonates with you, and samurai ideas resonate with me.”
Me too. Call him an anachronism if you want, but Jiří Procházka is as samurai as we’re ever going to get in the UFC.
