Conor McGregor and Jose Aldo
In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, we look at rumors of a rift between Conor McGregor and the UFC brass, plus insinuations that Jose Aldo and other Brazilian fighters have been harmed more by USADA testing than by their opponents.
Also, now that movement coaching is all the rage, who should be the next fighter to get himself chased around by a dude with a broom? And what’s up with these heavyweights at UFC on FOX 17 this Saturday? All that, plus many other very, very important questions.
You can ask a question of your own by firing it off to @BenFowlkesMMA on Twitter.
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By “every Brazilian champion,” you mean one guy: Jose Aldo. He’s the only Brazilian champion who has lost a UFC title since July 1, 2015, when the USADA testing program went into effect. And he lost that title in 13 seconds, via one-punch knockout. It’s not like he gassed out in a grueling fight or even fought long enough for us to see any change in his skills or abilities. He got punched and he fell down. That’s it.
Just generally, we need to stop doing the thing where we try to identify broad, damning trends that have developed in the slightly less than six months that the USADA program has been in place. At the very least, we need to hit the pause button until we have a larger sample size. This thing hasn’t been in play long enough for us to know what the effects will be. Although, of course, that clearly won’t stop us from speculating.
According to UFC President Dana White, rumors of a rift between McGregor and the UFC brass are all a creation of the “hair dresser media.” (Shows what he knows; hairdressers have to have licenses and skills, unlike MMA media.) At the same time, there’s a lot of smoke for there to be no fire here.
Even if there’s not an actual rift, at this point McGregor is a big enough star that he can call his own shots. That hasn’t happened a whole lot in the UFC. It’s happened even less in instances in which the potential shot-caller actually seems inclined to do so.
If it makes me happy, it’s only because I like to see fighters getting what they’ve earned. We talk a lot about the low pay for fighters on the undercard, but it’s the superstars like McGregor who are actually underpaid. He’s bringing in huge sums of money for the UFC, and these days he could do it more or less by himself. What’s more, he seems to realize that. He seems willing to flex the muscle he has, which is what it’s going to take for fighters to get more control over their careers and their finances.
But really, this is the kind of fighter whom the UFC brass has claimed to want at various points over the years. A fighter who understands this business, one whose ambitions stretch beyond one weight class and into superstar legend territory, a fighter who realizes that you only get a short time in this game, so you’d better make all the money you can, while you can. How often have we heard White wishing out loud for just such a fighter?
Now he’s got one. If there’s no rift whatsoever, I don’t see why he wouldn’t be absolutely thrilled about it.
Not really. Luke Rockhold said he’d had a staph infection during training camp, and had been on antibiotics up until the fight. Generally, staph stops being contagious shortly after the antibiotic treatment begins. The real danger was to Rockhold’s teammates, who might have shared mat space with him before he recognized and treated his infection.
Side note: As someone who has had a grappling-related staph infection, let me say that it’s no fun at all. Even if you treat it right away, the strong antibiotics doctors usually prescribe for it can be really tough on the stomach. And if you don’t treat it right away, perhaps because you’re in denial about what it is, let’s just say you’re only making the eventual medical intervention much, much worse.
On a UFC TV broadcast, you usually only get a good view of the seats at cageside. Particularly at Las Vegas pay-per-view events, these seats are often reserved for VIPs, casino comps, the guy from the Red Hot Chili Peppers with the ill-advised mustache, etc. If they don’t belong to famous people, these seats were likely purchased by rich people, who may feel like they have other things to do in Vegas than watch Court McGee fight in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.
We’re talking about the guy with the yoga teacher hairdo who chased McGregor around with a broomstick at open workouts, right?
Look, I’m not saying that “movement coaches” can’t be helpful, or that a lot of fighters in MMA couldn’t stand to do more non-contact training, particularly as fight time nears. What I am saying is that Gunnar Nelson was right there with McGregor for all that movement training, and it didn’t save him.
I suspect that, if McGregor’s movement training is fueling his success, it’s for the same reasons that eating ice cream before bed helped Rickey Henderson steal bases. When you’re already great at what you do, you can make a lot of unconventional training methods seem genius.
As for who should be next to bring in a movement coach, well, if UFC Fight Pass had a show that was just Ido Portal, Mark Hunt and a broomstick, you better believe I’d watch it.
It’s actually a little closer to four years than three since these two were first scheduled to scrap, but man, am I the only one to whom it feels like much, much longer?
Back in the spring of 2012, when Alistair Overeem’s drug-test failure knocked him out of a UFC heavyweight title bout against then-champion Junior dos Santos, we were living in very different times.
For instance, the scourge of testosterone-replacement therapy was still alive and well. That’s how we got the great cosmic joke of Overeem being pulled from the bout due to unauthorized testosterone use, only to have Frank Mir step in and fight JDS with the help of sanctioned testosterone use.
Also back then, Anderson Silva was the UFC middleweight champ while Georges St-Pierre (and also Carlos Condit) as the UFC welterweight champ. McGregor was just a guy who Irish people wanted the UFC to hurry up and sign, and Dos Santos was still up one fight to nothing against Cain Velasquez.
What happens to the winner of this fight probably depends, at least in part, on who the winner of the other fight is. If Velasquez ends up with the title and Dos Santos ends up with a win over Overeem, I suspect the UFC will take a closer look at that upcoming bout between Stipe Miocic and Andrei Arlovski at UFC 195.
If Werdum keeps the belt, however, that could be very good news for JDS, who has a win over the current champ from back in the days when Dos Santos still had hair.
In other words, the distant future at heavyweight is subject to what happens in the near future. And if you think you can guess how it’s going to go, just look at how weird the recent past was.
It very well might be. Donald Cerrone has been forced into his version of hibernation, waiting for this bout since May, when he usually prefers to fight every few weeks. If he can make that work for him by showing up fresh and hungry, I think he stands a very good chance of taking the lightweight title from Rafael dos Anjos.
If, however, all that extra time to dwell on the fight ends up hampering his mental game, he could be in for a rough night. All I know for sure is that if Cerrone is ever going to capture a UFC belt, the time, as they say, is now.
Honestly, once I saw what White actually said about Donald Trump, it seemed to me like “endorsement” was maybe not the right word for that situation. It wasn’t so much White saying that Trump was a brilliant man who’d make a great president. Instead, it was more like White saying that he doesn’t love any particular candidate but Trump was nice to him and helped him out so, fine, he’ll vote for that guy.
True, if I were, say, a Muslim fighter from Dagestan, I might be rooting against the guy who wants to keep me out of the U.S. based on my religion. Then again, I’m not sure you need to be in one of the many groups targeted by Trump to be against the guy.
Still, so what? You and your boss don’t have to agree on who should be president. In fact, I might even say that workers opposing the preferred political candidates of the rich people who employ them is the American way.
Claudia Gadelha has earned that UFC women’s strawweight fight. As soon as Joanna Jedrzejczyk is healthy enough to fight, those two should do it again in what might very well be the most competitive women’s 115-pound title fight we’ve seen yet. After that? That’s where it gets tricky.
Rose Namajunas seems like the rising star in the division, especially after her one-sided win over Paige VanZant. But Namajunas is still officially just 4-2 as a professional, with her last two UFC wins coming against similarly inexperienced opposition. In short, it seems like “Joanna Champion” might murder Namajunas right now, which makes you want to wait until she can get a little more seasoning.
But what are we supposed to do in the meantime? That’s the hard part, because you look around that strawweight division right now and you see a lot of inexperienced, still relatively raw fighters populating the top 10. It doesn’t make sense to promote lower-ranked fighters ahead of someone like Namajunas just because we want to make the most of her chances. At the same time, if the 23-year-old “Thug Rose” goes out there and gets smashed before she can even come into her prime, watching from our couches might not be such an enjoyable experience.
It might have an effect on athletic commissions, at least the ones that are paying attention. But then, that in itself is a pretty short list, and some of those commissions – most notably California – are already hip to the dangers of extreme weight cuts.
As for whether it will be a wake-up call for fighters, sadly, I doubt it. It’s not that fighters don’t know how dangerous weight-cutting can be. It’s just that many of them thinks it’s dangerous for other people, but not for them.
Just look at these two tweets from recently retired lightweight Nick Newell, who’s about as reasonable and introspective fighter as you’ll find in this sport (as evidenced by his explanation for his early retirement).
Cutting weight, not unlike getting hit in the head a bunch, is something that fighters know to be dangerous. But so much of the fighter mindset is on disregarding danger and silencing doubts that it’s sometimes hard for them to even get themselves to believe that they’re facing the same risks as everyone else. Ideally, that’s why you have athletic commissions, to help protect them from themselves to some extent. You know, ideally.
Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.
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