Nate Diaz
In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, we’ll talk a look at the lawsuit filed against the UFC this week, as well as the future prospects for everyone from Nate Diaz to Renan Barao to Henry Cejudo to Rory MacDonald.
Got a question of your own? Send it off to @BenFowlkesMMA. If I use it, we can even be Twitter friends. You know, sort of.
If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s an expert on antitrust law. I have a few friends who are lawyers though, so I asked them to look at the lawsuit against the UFC. You know what they said? They said they’re super busy being lawyers, so I should leave them alone and go back to watching GIFs of sweet takedowns on the Internet. I did that for a while. Then I went and read this interesting breakdown of the lawsuit by Michael McCann at Sports Illustrated.
The big takeaway? Actually winning the lawsuit would be tough, and likely take many years, but the plaintiffs don’t necessarily have to win in court in order for this to be worthwhile:
“If Le’s complaint can advance past Zuffa’s motion to dismiss, a judge would likely order pretrial discovery. This could force Zuffa to reveal sensitive information about fighters’ salaries and UFC contracts and potentially help fighters negotiate better pay. The risk of pretrial discovery might also motivate the UFC to offer Le an attractive settlement that, if accepted, would increase fighters’ pay.”
That point about pre-trial discovery is important because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the UFC is pretty into secrecy, especially on financial matters. It doesn’t want us knowing anything, aside from the occasional brag about how much it thinks it’s worth. Without knowing how much the UFC takes in each year, and without a full and accurate accounting of what it pays out to fighters, it’s almost impossible to say whether fighters are getting a fair cut. If a court forces Zuffa to open up its books for examination, that could be painful. It could even be something the company would be willing to pay to avoid. And that, in itself, would tell us something.
I’m guessing “doormen” is your own personal version of “gatekeepers,” and you are not asking if I think Lyoto Machida will eventually be forced to take a job as a literal doorman at some fancy Manhattan apartment building (though that would make a great sitcom; think about it, Fight Pass). And while I don’t think any of the fighters you mentioned are yet doomed to any specific fate, to some extent it might already be happening.
Look at Machida. He fights C.B. Dollaway in the main event of UFC Fight Night 58 this weekend. It’s a forgotten card, sandwiched between two blockbuster ones, and it goes down early in the morning in Brazil. If Machida beats Dollaway, it means next to nothing. We expect him to win that fight. It won’t earn him another title shot, or even nudge him much closer. It will just tell us that both Machida and Dollaway are who we thought they were. It’s a pass-or-fail test for Dollaway, who might be looking at his last best chance to be somebody in this division, and in the meantime it keeps Machida away from the potential contenders that the UFC might have an actual interest in pushing. He’s the worst type of gatekeeper, from the UFC’s perspective, because there might not be anyone in the 185-pound class right now who can slip by him.
Is that such a bad place to end up? I don’t think so. Machida’s fight with champion Chris Weidman was a fun one, and I wouldn’t mind seeing them run that back eventually, once we’re out of other ideas. Like Urijah Faber and Frankie Edgar and Junior Dos Santos, Machida is still on the list as one of the best in his division. He’s just going to have to wait his turn before he gets another chance to prove he’s the very best.
Henry Cejudo did look pretty great in his long-awaited UFC debut, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet. He has yet to prove that he can make flyweight for a UFC bout, though he does seem pretty set on trying. It seems too risky and too soon to book him in a flyweight eliminator fight. It also seems a little unnecessary for him to put so much pressure on himself to make that drop.
I mean, sure, I get it. Flyweight is a wide open division right now. If you can win a couple in a row, and if you have any personality whatsoever, you could be fighting for the belt in a heartbeat. But what will Cejudo give up just to get down there? He looked pretty solid as a bantamweight on Saturday. Whatever that was, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of it.
First of all, mad props for throwing in Bildungsroman (psst, everybody else: it’s basically a coming-of-age story, like “Catcher in the Rye” or some crap). To answer your question, it’s tough to say for sure, since the Nate Diaz story is still being written, but at the moment it feels a lot like a Greek tragedy.
Our protagonist starts off well enough. He follows his older brother into the wilderness of MMA, earns many victories, wins a season of “The Ultimate Fighter” before that distinction starts to become meaningless, even earns a title shot. But then the flaws start to show. His hubris (demanding a new contract after his buddy Gilbert Melendez got one) angers the gods (you know who), and he is punished with a fight against Rafael dos Anjos, for which he is clearly not 100 percent, but still must show up and “get paid.”
But even while suffering his beating, he remains defiant to the end. That defiance is both the source of his strength and a fatal flaw. It unravels him even as it propels him on toward his own self-destruction, flashing the double-birds as he goes, his face growing older and heavier with the scar tissue of every advancing year. For “great words of haughty men exact in retribution blows as great, and in old age teach wisdom.”
That’s actually a really good point. For whatever reason – lack of popularity, our short attention spans, the gradual way that one UFC event bleeds into the next – there are some fighters whose brains we don’t think to worry about. Gabriel Gonzaga showed up and got knocked out at a UFC event last weekend, you say? Sounds about right. Then we move on with our day.
I’m kind of torn on the idea of calling for a fighter to retire. After talking to different people for this story, I started to realize that sometimes the formula we use to determine who should quit, when, and why, is a little too simplistic. We think it’s just about finances or about belts. We think that when it gets too dangerous, they should stop. We conveniently ignore the fact that it was always too dangerous, and that most fighters knew that, but they accepted the risks anyway for reasons that might only make sense to them. We get so caught up thinking about the outcome, we don’t consider the possibility that, for many fighters, the process is the whole point. They aren’t in it so they can make enough money to stop. They’re in it to be in it.
But then, everybody has to stop eventually. And your brain can only take so much, regardless of how much fun you’re having. In that sense, I think my friend Danny Downes is right to compare being a fighter to being a drug addict. You know that what you’re doing is destructive, and you know you’ll have to quit some day. At the same time, there’s a reason you got into this in the first place. With what will you fill the void once this part of your life is over? Whether we’re talking about Gonzaga or Chuck Liddell, I think sometimes those of us on the outside assume this is an easier question than it really is.
Really? Because I do. This wasn’t Paul Daley walking over to Josh Koscheck well after the fight had ended and trying to sucker punch him like some drunken football hooligan in a Nottingham pub. What we saw between Claudia Gadelha and Joanna Jedrzejczyk was a striking exchange that went right up until the horn … and then a little past it. Was Gadelha wrong to throw that punch? Absolutely. But she seemed appropriately apologetic afterward, and it was close enough to the end of the fight that you could argue it was more reflex than malice. Male or female, they’re still fighters trying to hurt each other in there. Sometimes the switch doesn’t get turned off exactly when it should, but it’s a forgivable sin in this instance, especially when the sinner asks forgiveness with a recognizable remorse and sincerity.
Interesting question, but I need more information about my hypothetical situation. First, did I pay attention in school? Did I earn an actual degree that might count for something (no offense, Anthropology majors) in the actual world? Do I have options, in other words?
Because brother, if you have the choice to do anything but fight in a cage for money, and if you don’t feel like you absolutely must fight in a cage for money, you’d probably be better off doing something else. Even if you don’t have many good options career-wise outside of MMA, this had still better be something you feel compelled to do. Otherwise, you’re in trouble.
I remember Daniel Cormier telling me about a job he had selling ad space for a local news channel in Oklahoma. This was after his wrestling career was over, after the debacle at the Olympic Games in Beijing, but before he started MMA. He sat in an office and worked the phone, sleeping on his lunch breaks and playing in an adult softball league after work. Most nights he drank. “I was miserable,” he said, as if he’d just described a job rowing one of those ships from “Ben-Hur.” It didn’t sound so awful to me, but for him leaving that life and starting a career in MMA was like waking up from a bad dream. It helped that he was also really, really good at this.
Point is, this isn’t something you should do unless you feel like you absolutely have to do it. It’s too hard, the risks are too great, and the rewards, at least for the vast majority of fighters, are too meager. I’m reminded of something Xtreme Couture head coach Robert Follis said to me recently, when explaining why he doesn’t recruit anyone to be a fighter:
“I almost try to push them away to see if they really want to do it,” Follis said. “To me, fighting isn’t something someone should be encouraged to do. They should have a burning desire to do it. I’m not going to tell you that you should fight. You tell me why you want to do it.”
That’s possible, though I still think the idea of the UFC has a stronger hold on the imaginations of fighters than does Bellator. No one who isn’t already employed by Bellator is hitting pads in a gym right now, dreaming of being Bellator champ some day. Even if we get to a point where the rank-and-file fighters in Bellator earn more than those in the UFC, how many fighters think they’re going to be rank-and-file, or stay there forever?
Those are all tempting options, and if you’d forced me to write my letter to MMA Santa a few weeks ago, any or all of those might have made the list. But now? All I want for Christmas is one fight in 2015: Phil “CM Punk” Brooks vs. Nate Diaz.
Would the UFC ever do it? Probably not. Would an athletic commission even sanction it? Almost certainly not. But Mr. Punk wants to try his luck in the big leagues, and Mr. Diaz thinks that’s a joke. Why not let them figure it out among themselves? Brooks has said he might aim for 170 pounds, and Diaz has fought there before. The pro wrassler would have a little bit of a size advantage, and he’d need it. The build-up alone would be worth buying a ticket to.
That’s a fair point, but I can’t bring myself to get too worked up about the idea of Rory MacDonald getting passed over. He already lost to Robbie Lawler once, and his three fights since then have included two underwhelming decision wins and one TKO finish. The top contender spot is his until someone takes it from him, but Lawler and Johny Hendricks do seem to have some unfinished business with the UFC welterweight title right now. I don’t have any problem seeing those two in a rubber match while MacDonald gets a chance to solidify his claim on the next shot. At least it’ll give us a chance to think about something other than his attempt to change his nickname for the third damn time.
By soon you mean this weekend, at UFC Fight Night 58, where Renan Barao will take on Mitch Gagnon in what seems like a bit of a punishment booking following his failure to make the UFC 177 main event rematch with T.J. Dillashaw happen. Gagnon is one of those fighters who’s tougher than most people realize, and the reason they don’t realize it is because they don’t care, possibly because they haven’t ever seen him before. Gagnon’s most recent win over cable guy Roman Salazar marked the first time he’d appeared on the main card of a UFC event in five outings. The fight before that he was opening the show on Fight Pass — and that was him coming off a two-fight win streak.
So yeah, not exactly a blockbuster fight for “The Monster.” If he loses, it’s a catastrophe. If he wins, it’s hard to see a victory over Gagnon being the thing that catapults him back into a title shot. But you can’t keep a good fighter down. Not forever, anyway. Barao beats almost all the bantamweights in the UFC right now, in my opinion, so he’ll get back to the top eventually. It’s just a question of how long it’s going to take.
Filed under: Bellator, Featured, News, UFC