The downtime is upon us, MMA fans.
With just two UFC events on the books this month, October will go down as one of 2015’s least action-packed. Aside from UFC 192 near the beginning of the month, it features only October 24’s Fight Night 76, which airs exclusively on the fight company’s digital streaming service and therefore may not even count at all.
Oddly—or maybe because of that dearth of action—this month has called some of MMA’s biggest stars back to the headlines. From Ronda Rousey continuing to be ubiquitous, to Nick Diaz taking his case straight to the president, to both Jon Jones and Georges St-Pierre hinting at comebacks, it’s actually been kind of a wild one.
Luckily, Bleacher Report Lead Writers Chad Dundas (that’s me) and Jonathan Snowden are here to help separate the fact from the fiction. Read on to find out which news to believe and which to toss away like so much trash.
Fact or Fiction: The media turns on Ronda Rousey. And soon.
Jonathan: Fact. Ronda Rousey has become a feminist athletic icon in large part because the world needs her to be one. It’s one thing to tell young girls they can be just as tough, strong and capable as any man. It’s another to show them.
Ronda Rousey is in the ultimate “show them” business.
But Rousey‘s string of wins in the media can’t last forever. No one’s can. Navigating the media is a high-stakes game of Jenga. At some point, no matter how carefully you play, it all comes tumbling down. And Rousey isn’t particularly careful about the things that come out of her mouth—or her ghostwriter’s pen.
Rousey‘s popularity is a house of cards, Chad—and a blustering wind of her own devising is bound to knock it down.
Chad: I’ve never encountered a fighter who stirs more complicated feelings in my MMA fan’s heart than Rousey. As an athlete, she’s breathtaking—perhaps the most can’t-miss attraction in UFC history. As a personality? I’m strangely unmoved.
As a middle-class, middle-aged white guy, I don’t think it’s my place to delineate who can and can’t be a feminist icon, but from a broader standpoint I agree that Rousey is an awfully strange human to prop up as a family-friendly crossover megastar.
From her Sandy Hook tweet to her comments about Fallon Fox to her budding relationship with Travis Browne, we have to ignore a whole lot about her to do that.
Frankly, though, so far the media is content to go on ignoring it. There may be a lot more Matt Hughes in Rousey than Muhammad Ali or Billie Jean King, but never underestimate the popular culture’s ability to ignore facts in favor of a more palatable fiction.
Jonathan: She may be awful, but my God it’s wonderful to behold. Perhaps Rousey‘s true contribution to the broader sports culture is this—she’s proving that women at the top of their sport are every bit as myopic, selfish and flawed as their male counterparts. And isn’t that what we want?
Instead of soft-focus features on motherhood and sisterhood and all the other tropes reserved exclusively for our female sports stars, Rousey‘s legacy can be rooted in her athletic glory. She’s an athlete, not a “female athlete.” That’s what progress looks like.
Fact or Fiction: Georges St-Pierre has an itch he must scratch.
Chad: I wish I could dismiss this as utter fiction, but you and I both know I can’t do that, Jonathan.
When St-Pierre first walked away from the UFC after a hard-fought win over Johny Hendricks near the end of 2013, I suspected he’d be back. If he never returns, it would make him perhaps the first MMA fighter to turn his back on the sport while still on top and never look back.
Now, while in discussion with Canadian media outlet RDS (via Fox Sports’ Damon Martin), GSP appears well into the process of hedging his bets:
I’m starting to get the taste, more and more, to comeback. I watch the fights to see what’s going on in my division, and I’m staying in shape. It’s like a knife that I have to keep sharp just in case I ever decide to jump back in the mix. It is pretty sure that it won’t happen in 2015, but I don’t know yet.
We all know St-Pierre is the greatest welterweight of all time, but is he great enough to stay gone? I have my doubts.
Jonathan: This summer I went to a Bellator event in Temecula, California, to talk to President Scott Coker for a story. As we sat cageside, a grizzled old cowboy ambled up and demanded a chance to return to the fight game.
Don Frye is 49 years old and doesn’t look a day over 60. He walks with a pronounced limp. In his last fight, someone named Ruben Villareal knocked him silly in half a round.
The point of this little interlude? If we can’t convince Frye that the gig is up, how can we possibly convince St-Pierre?
Chad: I don’t really want to believe there are many similarities between Frye and St-Pierre, but your point is well-taken.
And hey, make no mistake, if GSP comes back, I will watch and I will enjoy. It’s just that part of me will worry for that guy we saw on the dais after UFC 167. The guy who looked battered by life (not to mention Hendricks) and kept saying he had to go to a dark place to make this fighting stuff work in his life.
He’s on the short list of all-time greats, and I’ll always be rooting for him. I just hope he knows what he’s doing and—if he returns—it’s for the right reasons.
Fact or Fiction: Nick Diaz beats the rap and returns to his leisurely fight schedule.
Jonathan: At the risk of delving into the nebulous world of wish fulfillment, I think this is probably fact. My beloved Nick Diaz‘s case against Nevada is fueled by both fanaticism and righteousness. That’s a dual whammy powerful enough to knock the sense into even the most pernicious knuckleheads.
His case, perhaps because he chose to plead the Fifth and let his lawyers do the talking, is pretty compelling. The labs certified by the World Anti-Doping Agency indicate he isn’t even guilty, let alone deserving of a career-killing five-year ban. When the evidence is presented to an adjudicatory body that is actually interested in facts and not just their feelings, a different outcome is likely.
I hope a court clears the way for a Diaz return. We need his brand of strange in the sport.
The homogenization of MMA is nearly complete. The fighters are slowly morphing into mainstream athletes, delivering the same bon mots and corporate talking points we’ve come to expect from the airbrushed and disconnected players we see nightly on SportsCenter. Heck, when fighters like Jon Jones offer a peek behind the curtain, we actively encourage them to get back on brand.
Diaz will never be that fighter. He’s the kind of socially awkward no amount of media training can cure. He reminds us of a time when every MMA star was a secret weirdo, when this was a sport on the fringe of decency. We need Nick Diaz.
Chad: Nothing would be more shocking—or delightful—than Diaz turning out to be MMA’s bird-flipping, tree-puffing answer to Curt Flood. But just as Flood ended baseball’s dreaded reserve clause and ushered in the era of free agency, it’s possible the exalted ruler of Planet Diaz leaves the first meaningful dent in the NSAC’s pathetic little dictatorship.
My gut tells me not even a stodgy old Nevada judge will be able to look at Diaz’s five-year marijuana ban and the flimsy evidence supporting it with a straight face.
But then what, Jonathan? Say Diaz returns to active duty in the UFC or elsewhere, picks up his 0-2-1 record dating back to the beginning of 2012 and continues right on losing a fight every year or so for the next year or three. Is that a win for the good guys?
Will that be enough to satisfy the 100,000-plus who inked their names on that petition so some junior White House staffer could chuckle over it while dragging it directly to the trash? Or has this been much ado about nothing?
Jonathan: Diaz‘s importance can’t be judged by anything as insubstantial as W’s and L’s on a ledger sheet. Fighting is bigger than that.
Diaz matters because of the way he makes us feel. No, he’s never been the best fighter in the world. Neither was Arturo Gatti, blown out of the water by every great boxer he ever faced. But Diaz, like Gatti, has that rare ability to remove artifice and leave legerdemain behind. What’s left is fighting at its most distilled, the essence of what it means to test yourself all that remains.
That’s a beautiful thing we shouldn’t take lightly.
Fact or Fiction: Jon Jones comes back scarier than ever.
Chad: Actual factual.
Look, it made me a little nervous that Jones’ very first salvo back in the MMA world was him looking glassy-eyed and goofy while reverting right back into social media troll mode.
So far, nobody can say for sure Jones has made any changes in his personal life while spending the last five months stripped of his title and on indefinite suspension. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d wager he has not.
You know what I can say for sure, though? When Jones finally returns to the Octagon he’s going to be mad as a hornet, and he’s going to have something to prove.
You can’t take this man’s title away and give it to somebody else and expect him to just take it—are you crazy? Nope. No way. Jones returns to the cage in 2016 better than ever, not because he did a bunch of soul-searching or successfully chased the demons from his life, but because the sport, his bosses, his peers and the fans have finally really pissed him off.
Jonathan: There’s a class of competitor known in athletic circles as a “gym rat.” Defined by their grit, work ethic and perseverance, gym rats push themselves to the limits in practice in order to maximize what is usually a dearth of actual athletic skill.
Jones has never been mistaken for a gym rat. Teammates rarely see him when he’s not preparing for a fight—and sometimes not even then.
But something funny is going on in New Mexico at the famed Jackson-Winkeljohn gym. Jones has been spotted often, not just working with teammates like Holly Holm, but working out. Like lifting weights and doing other assorted body maintenance. The kind of thing he’s rarely done before.
I don’t think that’s good news for poor Daniel Cormier or whoever else is foolish enough to consider stepping into the cage with a man who is already the best fighter of all time.
Chad: You’re absolutely right. While it’s a long shot to think Jones has “learned anything” from this ordeal, it’s totally believable to me that his athlete’s mind could turn all this business with his hit-and-run accident into a me-against-the-world call to arms. That likely translates into harder gym work than he’s ever done before.
Jones is a master of competition and is very sensitive to perceived slights. If he believes we’ve wronged him in some way, or challenged his dominance, he won’t rest until he’s beaten his point into our skulls again and again.
And probably the skulls of a bunch of UFC light heavyweights, too.
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