UFC Preview: Can 'Iron Turtle' Jung Yong Park drown Brad Tavares like other recent foes?

Val Dewar

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UFC Preview: Can 'Iron Turtle' Jung Yong Park drown Brad Tavares like other recent foes? image

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Brad Tavares once held a defining role in the middleweight division; his quality was undeniable, if a fighter wanted a chance to get to the top they had to out-strike Brad Tavares, because they were not going to beat him with wrestling.

He was what Derek Brunson was, a highly respectable gatekeeper. To this day Tavares holds an 81% takedown defense rate, even now that he is 36 and has lost three of his last four.

Dricus du Plessis himself, who took down Robert Whittaker, Israel Adesanya, and Sean Strickland went zero of seven on takedowns against Tavares; he even had an infamous blunder where he fell and dragged Brad on top of himself into full mount.

Where Dricus du Plessis did find success against Tavares was pressure, nothing but pure unrelenting force in the face of superior striking technique.

That was Tavares’ 21st UFC fight, he has been through his knockout wins and his beatdown losses, his all-out wars and his close split decisions. That takes a toll, and Dricus’ was young, athletic, and unrelenting enough to wear Brad down, something we had rarely seen before.

Now, however, it has become commonplace. His only win since then was against a man older than him, Chris Weidman, while his other two recent bouts saw Tavares take knockout losses to fighters who came straight at him, swinging for the fences. Bruno Silva got it done early and Gregory ‘Robocop’ Rodrigues got it done late, both with punches and at least one knee.

‘The Iron Turtle’ may not be the explosive force that any of the men who beat him recently are, but he is just as unrelenting as the best of them. Jun Yong Park has made it his brand to take a beating willingly, to walk through fire to drown foes in the smoke.

The only men to beat ‘the Iron Turtle’ in the UFC have done so with either high-level grappling or beating him with pure force, by being as relentless as Park and twice as violent. I am, of course, talking about Gregory Rodrigues again. Tavares possesses none of those attributes.

Park himself does not pack enormous force in any one blow, but he wins fights with volume. He has the record for most total head strikes landed in any UFC middleweight fight at 260, but has yet to finish a fight by knockout with the promotion.

I picked Tavares to beat Dricus du Plessis back in the day, and after one round it looked like I would be right. Since then, he has been through two wars and two knockout losses in the octagon, and I can no longer favor him to keep up with younger (even if not by much) fighters who will pressure him inexorably, to stay on the outside and use his technical striking proficiency to pick them off like he would have in his prime.

At this stage of his career, wrestling may even work on the man who is still in the top ten of best takedown defense rates in UFC 185-lb history. ‘Robocop’ is a good grappler but is not the caliber of takedown artist that some wrestlers who beat Brad in the past were (Yoel Romero, Elias Theodorou), but he was able to ground Tavares.

If ‘the Iron Turtle’ does the same, especially after wearing down his foe, he could finish the fight there even though Tavares has never been submitted in his career. Park possesses a wrestling attack which always pursues doing damage or finding a submission.

Expect a fun fight, but one in which Tavares starts strong and then progressively weakens until falling apart.

Val Dewar

Val Dewar Photo

Val was initiated into Steelers Nation from the moment he was born — his first memory is a game vs. New England from when "Slash" was QB — and doing sports writing has always been a dream career for him. In 2022 he broke into the industry by writing about combat sports for Cageside Press, and now has the opportunity to continue that work with TSN as an MMA writer, as well as get his feet wet on the Steelers beat.