MONTREAL — If you step out of your hotel in downtown Montreal and walk far enough down Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest you’ll find yourself in a diverse part of town called Shaughnessy Village. You’ll have walked there on the advice of both the hotel concierge and the insane lunatics of Yelp, two parties that agreed La Station des Sports was the best bar in Georges St-Pierre’s hometown to watch the longtime UFC welterweight champion defend his title against Johny Hendricks. You’ll be doing this because watching St-Pierre fight in Montreal is a Canadian sports bucket list item—one that may no longer be possible to cross off-and since that night’s fight is in Las Vegas, watching it in a bar crammed with fervent Montrealers is the next best thing.
St-Pierre is a rare athlete in this country. He manages to be both underappreciated and over-lionized, largely depending on what province you live in and how you feel morally about mixed martial arts. Among UFC fundamentalists, depending where they fall on the spectrum of the sports’ tactical-entertainment complex, he’s both loved and hated-either a true master technician and the greatest champion there ever was or a defence-first sedate and one of the most boring fighters you can find. He’s both a tremendous representative of our country, an elite athlete who has stayed at home to complete all of his training in the great white north, and a near insurgent, a subversive francophone-first apostate who doesn’t seem to give much of a damn for any part of Canada that isn’t French-speaking.
It is that last point that pushes St-Pierre’s popularity in Quebec over the top, past hero-status and into the stratosphere of demigods. He is ride-or-die with this province, these people, this gorgeously eclectic city that brazenly smashes modern architecture into timeless Art Deco. That collision of old and new is St-Pierre himself—a tireless student of martial arts history who revolutionized MMA with tremendous athleticism and impenetrable tactics.
He is from Montreal before he is from Canada, and that distinction may just be what’s held him back from being one of our nation’s most celebrated athletes. The credentials are there. Aside from Wayne Gretzky and Glenn Howard, no Canadian has ever dominated a sport so thoroughly, so consistently and for such a long period of time as St-Pierre. And while Gretzky and Howard did it in games that are intrinsically Canadian, St-Pierre did it in a sport that was technically illegal until this past June, according to Canada’s Criminal Code, and is still only sanctioned in a handful of provinces. He did it in a sport that we aren’t raised with—a massively popular competition with incredibly technical complexities that the majority of people in our country don’t even have the faintest grasp of. Arguably, what St-Pierre has done is far more impressive than what Gretzky or Howard achieved. Arguably, he falls victim to our country’s hesitance to accept a francophone as a sporting hero, much like Maurice Richard or Jacques Villeneuve. Arguably, he is our greatest athlete—current or past. Of course, like all things, it’s a matter of perspective.
So, with that in mind, you walk. You walk past the men in Letterman jackets selling roses; the girls in high boots screaming into cell phones; the dudes in tight t-shirts puffing their chests out and bro-hugging to infinity. The strip clubs; the doner kebab houses; the piss-puddled alleyways. The bouncers in Canada Goose jackets; the police cruisers lined in rows; the tiara-adorned, just-turned-eighteen adolescent in the tight dress crouched on a curb, head buried in clutch on the best night of her life. You walk past it all, a passerby in the drinking world.
Montreal is energetic, eager, anticipating. There was a Habs game Saturday, but that didn’t go so well—Montreal loafed through 60 minutes of tepid hockey and didn’t score a goal—meaning that by halfway through the third period all attention was turned to the looming fight. The streets are busy; the bars are packed. You arrive at La Station du Sports to find a roped-off line of fight fans queued halfway down the block. Sports bars aren’t supposed to have lines. This is a regular occurrence, however, on fight nights in Montreal, which is why the bar has affixed high-definition televisions in its windows pointing out to the street, where dozens of people who arrived too late to get in will watch the fight in the cold this evening.
Turned away from your destination, you walk two bars down Ste-Catherine and come across La Boite a Karaoke, a wonderfully dank karaoke bar that has opportunistically been repurposed to accommodate fight fans this evening. La Boite has a line, too, but you explain to the bearish bouncer with the thick Russian accent that you’re but a party of one and you’ll happily slide into an unassuming corner of the establishment and not take up much space. “I’ve already let in way more than capacity,” he explains, conceding to permit you access if you stand along a wall in the back. “I wouldn’t have let you in if I knew you were from Ontario,” he adds, after inspecting your driver’s license.
You’re in the thick of it now. The place is teeming with the young, belligerent, disposable-incoming-holding males who make up the majority of UFC’s most fervent followers and buy-in rabidly to the agro-culture surrounding the sport. It’s all garishly designed t-shirts, neck chains, flat brimmed hats and dragged-along girlfriends doing their best to be supportive of the obsession. That’s not to say there isn’t a sizable, passionate female proportion of the UFC fanbase. They’re just far too wise to crowd themselves into a mass-trampling-in-the-event-of-fire waiting to happen.
The co-main event-an uncomfortable pummeling of Chael Sonnen at the hands of Rashad Evans, who handled the task of battering his close friend with the bleak mixture of misery and non-joy you might expect-goes by without much fuss. Hardly anyone’s watching it, focusing more on shout-talking to each other and throwing back plastic cups of domestic beer. But every time the broadcast flashes backstage to show St-Pierre pacing around his dressing room or launching kicks at his padded trainers the bar erupts. The chants of “G-S-P! G-S-P!” start before he’s even making his way to the ring. You don’t get that in many other sports—where the mere sighting of an athletic star sends a world into a frenzy.
And now the fight. St-Pierre scores a takedown less than 30 seconds in and La Boite nearly crumbles to the ground as hundreds packed into the room leap from their seats. You think you have but you’ve never heard a roar like that. You’ve never felt that jolt of delirium rush through you, as if all of your bone tissue separated and reformed in one sudden surge. Whether you’re a fan of the sport or not, whether you’re invested in the outcome or uncaring of the result, you can’t stay detached through that. You’re part of it now.
If you’ve read this far you probably know what happened Saturday night. St-Pierre lost the fight everywhere but on the scorecards, and everyone knew it. St-Pierre knew it when he started the fifth round like a freshly-prodded bull and ended it with a series of desperate submission attempts. His corner knew it when they lifted him on their shoulders after the fight in the traditional combat sport attempt to convince the judges they saw something they didn’t. The entire bar knew it, and you could feel the thud in your feet as hearts all around you hit the floor. This was it. He had been beaten. The demigod was mortal all this time.
Of course, St-Pierre didn’t lose, officially at least. He was awarded the fight and the bar got to erupt one last time, screaming wildly and breaking into a minutes-long “G-S-P! G-S-P!” chant as lager was spilled and chairs were toppled all around. The place stayed so loud for so long that everyone missed St-Pierre’s post-fight sabbatical announcement, a revelation that might mean Saturday night was the last time Montreal had the opportunity do this—to lose its collective mind for the hometown hero. In the fight’s wake Sunday morning, St-Pierre’s possible retirement is big news in this province, but chances are it hardly resonates elsewhere around the country. It won’t lead any sports highlight shows; news websites will banish it to the “Other Sports” section. Here it’s all anyone’s talking about.
We are, as a country, still hesitant to accept the UFC as a sport worth caring about and a francophone champion as a hero worth celebrating. And fine, feel how you will about mixed martial arts, but it is becoming increasingly evident that Georges St-Pierre means something, whether we’re ready to accept it or not. He represents something for all of us Canadians, regardless of heritage or mother tongue. The way he competes, the way he respects his opponents, the way he approaches his vocation with endless pursuit and passion—it’s what we want the world to see of us. It’s what we want people to think Canadians are like. On the heels of a week when the most publicized Canadian in the world was a mayoral embarrassment, to have St-Pierre go five rounds with an incredible opponent like Hendricks means something. To watch him surging almost impossibly in the fifth—his face bloody and deformed, his legs wobbly, his right eye nearly blind—and catching Hendricks with a stiff left-right before shooting beneath his legs and driving him to the mat means something. The way he competed means something.
Even if many of us won’t acknowledge that now, someday we will. Here in the Montreal, they already understand.