In 2014, the UFC’s heavyweight division remains enthusiastically unknowable.
Andrei Arlovski, whom many had stamped for the glue factory after his fourth straight loss in early 2011 to Sergei Kharitonov, is both a gradual and sudden UFC contender, depending on your point of view. He’s gone 8-1-(1) since that twilight spiral when people kept folding him up like a dinner tray. And in his second stint in the UFC, people — oddsmakers, matchmakers, air-breathers — keep waiting for him to get smashed to smithereens. Yet they keep waiting. Belarus’s most popular lycanthrope nickel-and-dimed his way to a decision over Brendan Schaub, and followed that up with a knockout of Antonio Silva in Brazil. Suddenly Arlovski’s relevance is being crammed back into actuality.
Suddenly this is all we see. (And before him there was Ben Rothwell, who was doing a Saltine hokey pokey after landing one on Alistair Overeem. [Somewhere behind all these heritages is the 6-foot-8 figure of Tim Sylvia. None of this will be scrubbed away easily]).
Then there’s Mark Hunt. As you should know by now, Hunt was an inherited property that came with the PRIDE FC purchase, and it was with contractual reluctance that he stood in against Sean McCorkle at UFC 119. In what can only be considered one of MMA great mysteries, Hunt lost that fight. In retrospect it wasn’t so much a mystery as it was a travesty.
That’s because Hunt won his next four fights, three of them by knockout, en-route to a title eliminator with former champion Junior dos Santos. He lost that one, but by then he’d made the spirit of the Maori vicarious. His next fight with “Bigfoot” Silva was considered one of the best heavyweight fights in UFC history, and it ended — somewhat poetically — in a majority draw. That was before Silva was popped for elevated testosterone and all the poetry was lost in the fire.
That’s just how tumultuous, even in the age of Cain, the UFC’s heavyweight division is.
All of which brings us around to Roy Nelson. Nelson is 38 years old and an eclectic fixture in the weight class. He’s been heralded as a heavy-handed Buddha, because of his prodigious belly and ability to knock people out, as well as a cultural oddity in that he can braid his mullet and comb his gray-streaked beard. He is considered a grappler, but unless he’s a contestant on TUF he doesn’t prefer that route. He likes to bang, bro.
And one of the most fun-to-contemplate fights that felt forever in the making was a clash between Hunt and Nelson — which just so happens to be the main event of UFC Fight Night 52 in Saitama, Japan.
“This is one of those fan-friendly fights,” Nelson says. “The only thing that’s going to be more epic than Roy Nelson fighting Mark Hunt is Roy Nelson fighting for the belt. Those are two fights that I know fans want to see.”
Nelson is coming off an absolute starching of Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira from back in April. That fight happened in Abu Dhabi, where Big Nog has gyms set up and is part of the martial arts topography. In Japan, Hunt is the icon from his days competing in PRIDE, as well as his knockouts of Cheick Kongo and Stefan Struve during his resurrection process in the UFC.
After 29 professional fights in the mixed techniques, Nelson is headed for Nippon, where back in June he slipped into a mawashi and did a sumo demonstration.
“It was just for PR, but it ended up being a workout,” he says. “But earlier in my career when Pride was around and K-1, that was the Mecca of martial arts. That’s when I really wanted to fight in Japan. That was like the pinnacle of your fight career, being able to fight in front of 60,000 people.”
There won’t be that many people on hand when he fights (early Saturday morning for Americans), but the stakes for both Nelson and Hunt fall in the range of “fairly dire.” If the 40-year-old Hunt wins, he’s right back in what Dana White proverbially calls “the mix.” If Nelson wins to make it two in a row, he’d once again be closing in on a shot at Cain Velasquez (or a rematch with Fabricio Werdum, if things go haywire in Mexico City at UFC 180).
Hunt is ranked No. 6 right now on the media-driven UFC rankings, while Nelson is No. 8. Some of the people in front of them (Josh Barnett, Junior dos Santos, Travis Browne) are coming off of losses. Stipe Miocic is right up there, too, and owns a win over Nelson, but it’s really just a bunch of monolithic slabs in interchangeable positions. A convincing knockout for Nelson might be enough to warrant some leap-frogging.
“The one thing about the heavyweight division, or actually just being in the UFC, anybody can win and anybody can lose,” he says. “You’re competing with the best in the world. It’s like watching a football game. You can go 16-0 in football and then lose the Super Bowl.”
“Big Country” has never fought for a belt in the UFC. He was the last champion of the IFL, and he was the guy who further demystified Kimbo Slice on season 10 of the Ultimate Fighter, but he has never had a chance to land one of those ridiculous overhand rights on whoever is carrying the UFC’s heavyweight belt.
He says that’s still the goal. In a division with a dearth of obvious challengers, he knows what a knockout of Hunt could mean. He also knows the other end of the scenario, that twilight can show up in the Land of the Rising Sun, which becomes his more immediate goal to avoid.
“I wouldn’t be fighting if I didn’t think I had a shot or even a chance for the belt,” he says. “Right now I think I can beat Cain Velasquez, and if Werdum wins I could beat Werdum in a rematch. In our division, you can win some or lose some. Look at Cain. Cain lost to Junior dos Santos the first time he fought him, then beat him up the next two times because he learned from the first one. It’s like Werdum fighting Alistair Overeem. Werdum knocked him out the first time, then Overeem beat him the second and third. That’s just how it is. You learn from your mistakes, and you grow from them.”