Foto: Sherdog
With UFC 186 hours away it seems to me that people should be talking a whole lot more about Demitrious Johnson. Personally, I think it’s an absolute crime that people don’t talk about him nonstop or at the very least, more.
If any fighter at any other weight fought like him people as a whole around the world, not just the Nordic’s would say he was fighting with fist like Thor’s hammer and had The Great Zeus’s beard. The man consistently out grapple’s grapplers the way GSP does/did, he out strikes, strikers and out submits, submission fighters and he’s just as creative in the ring as Jon Jones. He also has the most perfectly fitting nickname for a man of his size and even after he wins his spinning fist pump thing is fantastic. Maybe the guy just needs a promotional company to get his name out there, get him a couple movie jobs or a chance to moon walk along side a hologram Michael Jackson, give a few awards away and be a guest speaker at the AVN Porn awards, something. Maybe it would help if they have him some barb wire tattoo’s, threw a tapout shirt on him and told him to stop smiling so damn much and being so nice to everyone. People all through Rich Franklin were so nice, so after that, every interview, black eye. Gave him street credit, made him look tough. (Also from training, but that guy had a black eye every time you seen him didn’t he?) I mean, the guy is even sponsored by Xbox because he moves and fights as fast as a Street Fighter set in turbo mode. For now, I’ll stop talking about how awesome and overlooked I think Demitrious Johnson is and start talking about UFC 186 as a whole and why we should care to spend our/your money on it, because from the outset, it doesn’t seem like something to spend money on. So, thank goodness for bars and UFC Fight Pass.
Demitrious Johnson vs. Kyoji Horiguchi
Just because you’re the best 125’er and the return to Japanese prominence in MMA that has been missed for some time. (That’s a HUGE MMA community and currently, outside of Aoki, I don’t think they have anyone who can match up well against current UFC Champs, not that Aoki would, but in a submission match it’d be neat.) I don’t think outside of Demitrious Johnson breaking his ankle doing his nifty jumping spinning flip after his victory will he be in any danger. Few other fighters out there have improved as much and Demitrious. The best example is he vs. Benavidez. There are times when rematches live up to the hype. There are fights when the second time around is another one-sided beating like Ortiz vs. Shamrock (II or III) repeats itself. There are times when the fight completely swings in the other guy’s direction and from that point on it would probably always go that way, like Jackson vs. Silva III. Then there are times when going into the fight we think that it could go either way, both have had a chance to study each other and have a couple of fights in between and they both looked amazing. Then when they fight each other again you can instantly tell that not only is one of them going to get destroyed in the rematch but it is going to happen in a way where no human watching will be able to say, “He only won because of a lucky punch,” – “He only won because it was just his night,” – “He only won because he got a lucky submission.” We watched that fight and no one said any of those things. Demitrious beat Benavidez so badly that he made it look like Benavidez should not even be in the same ring with him and each of us agree that there was no one else on earth more deserving to be in that ring than Joseph Benavidez. So, I’m guessing we will see another insane performance where everything is perfect, everything is fluid and we are once again left saying, why isn’t this little guy on Wheaties boxes and talked about more. We all agree he is the greatest in his division, but that is about the last thing we can say about him, most can’t even name who’s beaten.
Michael Bisping vs. CB Dollaway
Dollaway had his best chance at beating Bisping if he made a time machine and went back and fought him when he was on Season 2 of the Ultimate Fighter. But even the battle tested Bisping that is entering the cage tonight is better than the improving Dollaway. That’s of course my opinion and Dollaway can easily prove me wrong, it is a fistfight after all. I like the way this is shaping up to be two rhino’s just crashing into each other resulting in a magnificent energy that if bottled could fuel three large apple stores and a Tesla for a month. The problem will once again, as I’ve said a whole lot of times, be the first round, and it’s up to Dollaway to win or lose in that round. I think Dollaway’s best chance at winning is to swing for the fences and try to end it right away. He’s a strong guy, he’s capable of landing some good shots and altering the fight in that first five minutes. But he probably won’t do that, he’ll try to rag doll Bisping, which might work, but Bisping is good at staying upright, getting his back to the cage and letting it hold him while the person drains their own energy trying to get him down. Dollaway can zap his own gas tank doing that and it will cost him dearly. Anything after round 1, like I said with the VanZant fight, will just get worse and worse for Dollaway. The problem with Bisping is he doesn’t have the type of power to just end your night mercifully. That’s a blessing and a curse for anyone fighting him, as he will just constantly punish you and grinds you out with 200 or so punches rather than 1 big one. People can say he has pillow hands, and maybe he does, but getting socked around constantly by a hard pillow 200 times sucks no matter what the thread count is or how luxuriously soft. I think Dollaway is a good fighter, he’s looking better and better but I also think the Bisping that lost to Rockhold can still better the Dollaway that showed up to fight Ferreria.
Quinton Jackson vs. Fabio Maldonado
This fight scares me as personally I see it as a way to get people talking about Rampage again. The history of MMA is very short and people’s attention spans even shorter (or else people would remember Rockhold beat Jacare not so long ago and Jacare being ranked higher, oddly) Maldonado if he’s going to box he should stick the boxing when the gloves are bigger than 4oz. The man is in fact a decent boxer but when you mix in takedowns, and leg kicks and clinched against the fence, this and that and being in a cage and good looking ring girls, things get much different. Once your energy gets drained from you, the first thing to go is your movement and depending on whom you are, your will to fight. It’s been said by everyone who’s fought or ran up a lot of steps or large hill, “exhaustion makes cowards of us all.” Without Maldonado moving around this fight instantly becomes a match of Rock’em Sock’em robots. Maldonado is without a doubt, technically and skill wise a better boxer than Rampage. But Masaki was a better kickboxer, so was Vovchanchyn and even though the Jackson from then has since left us and left us sad missing that side of him, no matter who he is now we are at least promised a guy that for 5 minutes will come straight out and start throwing angry hooks and maybe, just maybe… One kick. But probably not, so don’t put to much money on that stock advice. If you really break this fight down this is Maldonado coming to box and Rampage coming to street fight. And this is why the UFC was invented, to show people that just because you are really good at this one thing and I am not, I will drag you into this thing and watch you drown. Or, as Renzo Gracie said, “A boxer is like a lion, the greatest predator on land. But you throw him in the shark tank and he’s just another meal.” That was of course about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but I think fundamentally it applies here. Sadly, Maldonado is a punching ticket (bag) for Rampage, and they specifically chose him to make the announcement that Rampage is back in the UFC and we want to sell some tickets. Even more than that, it’s a way for Joe Silva to show Bellator how you should set up a fight to please fans, this fight is a giant F you to the Bellator on more levels than just the court room.
The only other fight that I think anyone else is interested in, or should be, is Joe Riggs. Benson Henderson claims he is the next welterweight champion of the world. Everyone, Bas Rutten, Greg Jackson, EVERYONE has ALWAYS said, if Joe Riggs could fight in the cage the way he trains in the gym, he would be the best in the world. But something doesn’t work right in Joe Riggs’ head. There’s a spark plug loose or something because come fight time, he isn’t the unbeatable monster everyone knows him as, he’s a battle scared fighter who has tapped himself out to a back spasms. Hopefully, he has all of that figured out because I would really like to see this Joe Riggs that we’ve all heard about but never seen. It could happen, it’s happening with Anthony Johnson right now. At some point in these guy’s careers they just said, I’m too damn talented to be losing fights the way I have been. And then, they change their careers.
Why did I only write about those fights, in all honesty I thought everyone would be sick of reading by now and let’s be talk as friends do, it is a slightly weak card that will most likely perform poorly in PPV buys and most people only care about the top three in this card. The undercards lately have been great, so I hope I’m wrong, I’m hoping I regret not writing about them and if I am wrong, I’ll be sure once again to say so, and make sure I write of them in glory and praise.
