Life is full of funny little coincidences, isn’t it?

I’m sitting down to write this article on Sunday, July 7, 2013, and the subject we’re going to look at is completely different from the one I had been previously working on for this month. I had an idea a few weeks ago, and I’ve been developing an analysis of it. It was supposed to go in this issue you’re reading right now. But I’m going to kick it to the curb and write about something completely different because of two things that have happened in the sports world over the last twenty-four hours. We’ve basically had an emergency situation that’s just begging to be written about. Since my mind is practically a freaking steel trap of perceptiveness and insight, I’m gonna pounce on this opportunity.

Last night, one of the greatest fighters in history got his butt kicked. Anderson Silva, UFC middleweight champion, got knocked out in the second round by a guy named Chris Weidman. For those of you who don’t follow the fight game, this was earth shattering. Silva hasn’t lost a fight in seven years. His dominance over the sport of mixed martial arts has been…well, complete. Nobody has been able to beat this guy. Nobody has even been able to come close to beating this guy. When he steps in the Octagon, he toys with the best fighters in the world and then just casually knocks them out when he feels like it. Some people love him and some people hate him, but it has been impossible to argue that he’s one of the greatest fighters ever. He’s one of those athletes who always seemed to be two or three levels above everybody else. And last night, he fought an underdog named Chris Weidman who was absolutely not supposed to be the guy to beat Anderson Silva. Weidman is a tremendous fighter, don’t get me wrong. But this wasn’t supposed to happen, and I’ll tell you more a little later about some other circumstances of the fight that made it one for the history books.

That bout wasn’t the only momentous sports event of this weekend, however. This morning, British tennis player Andy Murray won the Wimbledon championship. Since Performance Menu is a strength sports publication, I have a feeling many of you knew about the Silva fight because weightlifting people usually follow anything that has a hardcore ass-kicking element to it. But tennis is more of a classy gentleman’s game…not many tattoos, half-naked chicks, or people screaming “f**k” at your average Wimbledon tournament. So I’m gonna make the assumption that several of you don’t follow the sport, and I’ll give you a little background. Wimbledon is the biggest tennis tournament in the world. It’s the Super Bowl of the sport, held right in foggy old London. The Brits are crazy about it, and it hasn’t been won by one of their countrymen since 1936. That’s right. Andy Murray is the first British player to win their beloved Wimbledon Championship since the Great Depression. It’s basically the tennis version of when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 after the eighty-six year Curse of the Bambino.

Like the Silva fight, there’s an extra backstory to Murray’s victory that makes it even juicier. I want to look at the unique circumstances surrounding both of these big moments, because there are some incredible connections we can make to our careers as strength athletes. Trust me, the events of this weekend can teach us a lot. If you’re an athlete or a coach, you would be a fool to ignore them.

Anderson Silva’s Cocky Beat-Down…

Anderson Silva… Well, there’s a lot we can say about this guy. We already mentioned his greatness, which is a pretty easy thing to see. World champion, seven years undefeated, generally regarded as one of the greatest fighters ever, etc. Several people in the fighting world would say that Silva is THE greatest fighter ever. So his level of excellence is obvious. He’s a legend.

However, his cockiness is another aspect we need to look at, because it’s a pretty important part of this discussion. If you watched the Weidman fight, you know where I’m going with this. Silva is well known for the way he treats his opponents in the Octagon. He drops his hands to his sides while he’s fighting and sticks his chin out, daring the other guy to take a shot at him. He mocks them, taunts them, shouts insults at them, etc. Losing obviously isn’t a big concern with Silva, and he fights like he’s not too worried about it. Most of the guys he faces have very little chance to take him down, so he just dances around and makes fun of them before he wipes them out at his convenience.

And that’s what cost him his title this weekend. He was running his usual game on Chris Weidman, holding his hands down around his waist to demonstrate his lack of respect for Weidman’s punching. It was the typical Anderson Silva show, with most people just waiting for him to drop the guy or submit him. This fight was different, though. The universe decided to give us another reminder that nobody is invincible, because Weidman caught Silva on the chin with a couple of sharp punches in the second round. The champ went down, and then Weidman jumped on him and finished him off with a few more blows until the referee stepped in and put an end to it. No dispute about the stoppage, no doubt that Silva was knocked cold, and no more championship belt for one of the greatest of all time. His over-confidence finally cost him his title. Chris Weidman pulled off one of the biggest upsets in fight history and knocked out Anderson Silva. Silva fans were crushed, and Silva haters were delighted.

People have different opinions about cockiness, trash talking, excessive celebration, etc. Some people love it because they find it entertaining. When they watch sports, they want to see a gaudy, outrageous spectacle. Fighters like Silva, sprinters like Usain Bolt, and basically every athlete in the NFL or NBA give them what they want. They combine athletic performance with circus behavior, and fans eat it up.

Some people go the other direction. It’s usually the old guys and the “old school” crowd that despise the swaggering attitude, the mouth, and the antics. They hate it when athletes act like Anderson Silva because they find it disrespectful and self-indulgent.

You can have your own opinion about it. The main point we’re looking at is the fact that Silva’s arrogant behavior got him beat. He lost because he was too cocky, and the anti-cocky crowd now has a free pass to point their fingers at him and laugh while they say, “Serves you right, jerkoff.” So put that thought on the back burner for a minute while we shift gears. We’re gonna transition from talking about a Brazilian wrecking machine who hits people in the face to a British honky who hits little yellow balls with a racquet.

If it’s not Scottish, IT’S CRAP!

Andy Murray won Wimbledon today. Holy tea and strumpets! The last time a British player won this sacred tournament, it was 1936. Roosevelt was winning his second presidential election, and Jesse Owens was at the Olympics sticking his foot up Hitler’s cornhole. I think it’s funny that Murray is actually Scottish. But that doesn’t stop Great Britain from applying the same we-own-everything thinking they’ve been using since the Dark Ages. Murray is a native Scot, but the Brits are still celebrating it as their own victory. If William Wallace was still alive, I’m pretty sure he would have hit somebody with a battle axe today.

As with the Silva fight, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Aside from the whole 77-year British thing, Murray himself has a hell of a background. For the last five years, he has basically been a professional second-place finisher. The phrase “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” seems to have been created specifically for his tennis career. He’s a great player, consistently one of the best in the world. But people have grown to think of him as the guy who can’t seem to win the big one. 2008 US Open, 2010 Australian Open, 2011 Australian Open, 2012 Wimbledon, 2013 Australian Open…second place. And that’s not even counting all the other big tournaments where he got bounced out in the semi-final rounds or whatever. Fans have felt a lot of frustration for him over the years because everybody has expected him to break through, but the losses just kept popping up.

You can see it in his eyes after a defeat. I’m a tennis fan, so I’ve seen a lot of his matches. When he loses in a final, and he has to sit there while the winner gets celebrated and congratulated, his agony is written all over his face. I’m sure Andy Murray has asked himself some pretty ugly questions over the last few years. “Am I ever gonna make it to the top?” “Is there something wrong with me?” “Am I missing something inside, something the great champions have and I don’t?” I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I know what it’s like to be stuck in a rut as an athlete. It screws with your head, big time.

But as of this morning, Murray doesn’t have to carry any of that crap around anymore. Even if he retires tomorrow (which he won’t), he gets to live the rest of his life knowing that he made it to the top. He’s a champion now, and nothing can ever take that away from him. I think I can safely say that he’s probably feeling the greatest rush of relief today that any of us could ever imagine.

Anderson Silva and Andy Murray. Neither of these guys are weightlifters, so you’re probably asking yourself why the hell we’re reading about them in a magazine that’s specifically directed towards strength sports. Well, you’re all smart people and you’ve probably put two and two together at this point, but let’s get it all out there anyway.

Stay level…

James Gandolfini once said something I never forgot. He was giving an acceptance speech for winning his first Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his role in “The Sopranos.” At the time, he had been acting in movies and TV for twelve years with very little success. He was a marginal B-list name in Hollywood. Then he got the job of playing Tony Soprano, and he became an instant sensation. The industry started heaping money and awards on him after just one season. When he got his first Golden Globe in 1999, he said, “For all of you actors out there struggling to make a name for yourself, remember this. Things can turn around pretty fast.”

Things turned around pretty fast for both Anderson Silva and Andy Murray, and this is where we find some wisdom for coaches and athletes. In Silva’s case, things turned around in a pretty bad direction for him. He developed a god complex after so many years of victory and unrestrained praise from the media. The fight world crowned him, worshipped him, and celebrated him. Opponents feared him, and he snuffed them out one by one when they stepped in his Octagon. Obviously I don’t know Silva, but his actions speak pretty loud. He stopped taking his opponents with the seriousness they deserved because he believed he wasn’t human. And things turned around for him. With one series of punches, his whole career changed. His life will always be different after this knockout. His turnaround was humbling, embarrassing, and painful. His life will go on and he’ll probably even win some more fights. But this moment will never die.

Andy Murray had the opposite kind of turnaround. This guy spent years coming up short. Championships and victories stayed just a little beyond his grasp, and he had to smile and play nice while other players basked in the glory at his expense. I feel pretty confident in saying this must have felt like a belly full of acid for him. He was basically on the opposite end of the spectrum from Silva. While Silva’s brain kept telling him “Everybody else is beneath me,” Murray’s brain kept telling him, “There’s always somebody ahead of me.” But he kept playing and kept working hard, and today he gets to sit on his couch with a nice cold brew, his hot little girlfriend, and the Wimbledon trophy. That sucker is living the life right now. And you know what? He deserves it.

You understand what we’re getting at, right? In our own athletic lives, we don’t want to be too extreme in either direction. Great success shouldn’t make you think you’re the lord of all creation, and tough defeats shouldn’t make you think you’re a boil on the ass of humanity. The best place to be is right in the middle, I guess. That territory where victories make us say, “That’s awesome, and now life goes on” and losses make us say, “That sucks, and now life goes on.”

It’s really hard to keep a healthy perspective on everything when you’re an athlete or a coach. Emotions are running high in this business, and I think every intensely competitive personality has a touch of bipolar in them. But whether we’re on the top or the bottom, we need to remember that things can turn around pretty fast. Keeping this idea constantly floating around in your brain is what keeps you sharp. If Silva would have realized that a bad turnaround was possible at any moment, he probably would have kept his hands up. Some of you are red hot right now, like he was for seven years. Things are rolling for you, and you feel pretty special. That means you need to remember the lesson we learned this weekend when the champ hit the canvas. If you think you’re invulnerable, somebody might just tag you on the jaw.

And on the other end, those of you who are getting your butt handed to you regularly these days, like Murray was doing for years…you need to keep the turnaround in your mind too. Your turnaround will be a reward, a time period when the pain gets replaced by glory and success. It might happen next month. It might happen ten years from now. But it will happen. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for a long damn time.

It didn’t take you long to figure out that weightlifting (or whatever sport you’re into) is 50 percent physical and 50 percent mental. The physical part is easy to figure out. All you have to do is learn, get coached, do the research, and practice. The mental part, on the other hand, is murder. Nobody can really help you with it. You have to learn to master your own mind, which is the biggest challenge you’ll face in this business. Just remember that there are lessons about the mental game all over the place. Sometimes they’re right in front of you. This weekend, they were right in front of all of us. So good luck to you, and stay frosty.