Application at the expense of technical perfection

I've asked the question in practice recently, "does your mighty instructor fight a technically perfect fight." My guys want to say yes, mostly out of loyalty and politeness, but in truth the answer is no. I doubt anyone has ever fought a technically perfect fight, there are too many internal and external variables that take the ultimate combat stud we are in practice on the pads and makes them a little more full of mortal foibles when the chips are down. Perhaps this is an artifact of rarely allowing ourselves to see ourselves train, we don't tape or have spectators for practice like we do for events. Perhaps I'm just overly critical, but if we fall into the trap that victory means excellence then we allow our ego to rather than our needs direct our training. Just because you got away with something once doesn't make it right it makes it lucky. We must practice endlessly for technical perfection, but we must also accept that realities of application, that we will make mistakes when the chips are down but that by repeated, correct practice we will minimize the repercussions of those less than desirable actions while maximizing the effects of the things we do right in the fight.

This is my MMA fight from the Total Fight Challenge, February 25, 2005. I was pretty ripped for this fight due to the same day weigh ins, so that's dehydration (and a profound inability to tan) your seeing. The Monday after I fought, unbeknownst to me, I was diagnosed with a rip roaring case of mononucleosis, explaining why I'd been feeling so tired for the past few weeks before the event. An ultrasound a few weeks after that revealed my spleen to be at the upper limits of normal, that is I'm lucky that between training and fighting I didn't end up in the emergency room with a splenic rupture. I also have a subtle limp, my standard prefight ritual is to thoroughly mess up my knee about 3-4 days before the fight, after weeks of it being solid as a rock. During the fight look for a lack of extension on my punches, allowing my significantly shorter opponent to reach out and tag me solidly in the nose and snap my head back, fortunately I've killed all the weak brain cells. This probably could have been remedied by more sparring w/ smaller gloves. I could easily have thrown a solid head kick and had been doing so for weeks up until my knee worries. We end up on the ground due to his take down attempt, all I did was step over his sacrifice throw (this is clipped from the video due to spectators moving around). I also just ride him on the ground, with poor mount control. In essence I'm suffering from a lack of commitment and being reactive rather than being proactive, but I still scratch out the win by rear naked choke set-up with punches to his right orbital socket.