Jon Fitch still raining icepicks on those steel shores

But up until UFC 94, he had never seen grown men in sequins before a fight.

“I was standing right behind him in the tunnel as they called him, and I was like, ‘what the hell are these ring girls doing, and why are they wearing sequin dresses?’” he says. “Then I realized, Jesus—it’s Gono and his crew.”

Unnerving, sure, especially for those who saw the whole choreographed dance step that Akhiro Gono and his cornermen performed on the way to the Octagon. Fitch? He just stared at the ground to keep from laughing. Moments later he came out with his trademark snarl to Johnny Cash’s version of “Rusty Cage.”

“The funniest part of the whole thing was I looked up from my corner in between rounds and you could see this girl walking in and she had a t-shirt and you could see this gold skirt underneath. It was Gono’s corner—his guy didn’t have time to change, and he was still in a dress and panty hose. That was pretty hysterical. Crazy Bob [Cook] in my corner had to keep grabbing me by the chin and making me look him in the eyes because I kept leaning over to look at his corner.”

Of course, Fitch’s amusement didn’t prevent him from going on to win his ninth fight in ten UFC contests (22-3, 1 NC overall). He was able to drag out a unanimous decision win over the 15-year veteran Gono with the familiar Octagon control and doggedness that have made him one of the toughest outs in the welterweight division.

At one point late in the second round he gave up his back and shot for an armbar to try and finish the fight. He chased the guillotine in the third but, as he now says almost as a parable, “a veteran like that, who knows how to survive and not get finished, is hard to finish.”

He brought his lunchpail and scored a victory, something that has become expected of him almost every fight; they raised his arm, and it was onto the Penn/GSP fight.

And isn’t that just like the former Purdue wrestler Fitch? He is the quiet professional, never the spectacle. He is the blue-collar guy from the Midwest who doesn’t try to get into people’s heads with pre-fight talk, and—with a tendency to be brutally honest with himself—he certainly doesn’t sugarcoat things after a loss.

Take the St-Pierre fight, where he enduring five rounds of shutter-speed kicks, knees and fists. Forget lessons on feinting and jabbing, Fitch took a whole chapter out of the fight that borders on eastern philosophy.

“I had a lot of defensive flaws that night,” he says. “And I had the wrong mindset as far as my view on talent. I now believe 100% that ‘talented’ is just a myth, and I think people use it too often to make excuses for themselves for why they can’t do things. People say, ‘oh he’s so talented at being fast,’ or ‘he’s so talented with his balance,’ and you’re basically writing yourself off as never being able to do that.”

So what he did was enlist a strength & conditioning coach—or a speed coach—because he knew he had to become a better athlete, to “retrain neurons.” Some of the things that are attributed to GSP as a natural gift he sees as imminently trainable, that it’s a nurture question, not necessarily a byproduct of nature.

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything,” he says. “Just little things. Like, you wouldn’t think that you’d need to know how to jump correctly, you just think ‘I know how to jump.’ There’s a right way and a wrong way.”

GSP has a way of teaching hard lessons, even for guys riding a 15-fight winning streak.

But it’s not the first time that Fitch has used a loss to recalibrate his thinking. After losing two of his first four pro fights to Mike Pyle and Gouveia, he made his move to San Jose, California, to begin training with the guys at the American Kickboxing Academy. At the time he had a lot of want but a very limited stand-up game. That part of his story is pretty well-documented.

But there were also things like integrity and dignity issues at stake. Before there was such thing as The Ultimate Fighter television series, Fitch made a contemplative distinction of something that would shape the trajectory of his career.

“The bigger thing that happened I think was the transition of being a fighter-based mentality versus being a martial artist-based mentality,” he says. “I think that a lot of people need to realize that there’s a huge difference between a martial artist and a fighter. A fighter’s main concerns are money, fame and hurting people. Where a martial artist is more about self-improvement, self-growth and all-around becoming a better athlete and a better human being. And I think that was the big change for me and in my career, when I made that step into wanting to be a martial artist.”

People remember that Fitch narrowly missed being on the cast of the original Ultimate Fighter, and that his marketability suffered from having come up into contention the old-fashioned way—one fight at a time.

Looking back on it, he says there’s a great chance he could have won that show—which is hard to argue—and that his omission had less to do with talent and more to do with his principles.

He wasn’t about to change who he was to solidify his spot, especially if that meant mugging for the camera.

“I knew that I could put on an act or put on a show and gain myself a solid spot on that show, but I chose not to,” he says. “I wanted to pick the

martial artist path—I wanted to be humble and reserved and let the technique and the fighting speak for itself the way it should. And I’ve taken a huge hit in the pocket because of it with sponsors and popularity and all that. But again, that’s the mindset of a fighter.”

Ever an ambassador, but never a spectacle.

Next up on the docket for Fitch is a fight with the undefeated Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner Paulo Thiago (11-0) on July 11 at UFC 100 in Las Vegas. The one thing that Fitch knows about Thiago is that he TKO’d his training partner, Josh Koscheck, at UFC 95 in London this past February with a well-timed uppercut.

The rest, as they say, is Googleable.

“You can’t get a lot out of the Kos fight; you can’t define who Paula Thiago is as a fighter from that,” he says. “I’ve had to go and look elsewhere and find videos on him on YouTube and whatever else, to get a better perspective.”

Though it may (or may not) have been a premature stoppage when Koscheck was dropped and scrambling to recover, Fitch isn’t about to get sentimental because it was his training partner who suffered the wrong end of the controversy.

“You can’t call it a fluke because Thiago threw that punch with the intention of landing it,” he says. “I can criticize the referee, as I think he made a poor decision in stopping it when he did. But those things happen. It sucks, but it is better to err on the side of safety.”

Now he gets to test Thiago himself, as guys who win in the UFC have a tendency to find one another.

“Just give me fights against tough guys,” he says. “Paulo Thiago is undefeated and he beat Koscheck, so he’s definitely a tough guy.”

He is, and it’s doubtful he’ll show up in sequins.