Photo by Josh Hedges/WEC Productions LLC/WEC Productions LLC via Getty Images
How I thought I knew things about MMA, and how Joseph Benavidez proved me wrong.
What can you learn from watching MMA? The benefits of being a dork who has spent years seeing people beat each other up are pretty minimal. The ones that do turn up often tend to be perceptual, in the way that sometimes you can recognize changes that you’ve seen before. You can catch a career turning.
The first time I can remember seeing something like that was when Lyoto Machida fought Chris Weidman. The peak of the karateka’s middleweight run, it was his second chance to be a champion. He wasn’t favoured: at this point Weidman was still undefeated, and broadly considered to be near enough invincible. More to the point, he still believed it himself, and so he walked the Brazilian down over and over. By the fifth, Machida was down on the cards. As the fight ticked away he did something un-Machida like. He threw himself into the clinch, roaring in behind elbows and knees.
His career had been defined by a monastic devotion to karate ideals, the distance management and all that one-strike-one-kill and sen no sen stuff. Seeing him cast it away for a hopeless last charge at the bigger man felt like something peeling away. It felt like an abandoning.
Nate Marquarrt’s turn came when he fought Tyron Woodley for the Strikeforce welterweight championship. The King of Pancrase had been punted from the UFC for “medical discrepancies,” leaving him looking for an organization with the right attitude to supplementary testosterone. His fights had been getting swampy and dull, and there was no reason to give him a shot against a hyperathletic championship wrestler with a nuke in his right fist, and less so on a debut cut to 170lbs.
Instead Marquardt had the best fight of his career, eating Woodley’s best shots and wedging him up against the cage to be clobbered with a brace of uppercuts and an doubled up elbow which neatly and unpleasantly planed a wide swathe of skin from Woodley’s lip.
Then there was Robbie Lawler against Carlos Condit, the mad bloody surging fifth where the welterweight champion battered away at Condit’s chin and cardio, until he broke them both permanently.
These fights all played differently, but with a familiar melancholy echo. Trying to turn it into words, the ones which felt like they fitted the best were: you are never doing that again.
Most of those men would go on to pick up wins, but they never had those kind of bouts again. They quietly and clearly dropped into a lower tier of competition, and never came back. I learned that there’s a point at which something in a fighter goes away.
Second place
The first few times I saw Joseph Benavidez fighting in the WEC I mostly remembered him as “the dude who looks like a Romulan.” A ferocious throwback with a helmet of black hair, who looked like he had been hitting the weights in the gym of his warbird. A tiny bantamweight who tossed bigger fighters around the cage, and then battered and throttled them.
In the time since he got a better haircut, perhaps due to the influence of his wife Megan Olivi. He learned how to strike. Not a textbook kickboxer but a remarkably scary one, bounding up behind salvos of punches and kicks, closing engagements with a shin to the gut or a little dipping fastball of an overhand. He still notably did better than his far bigger, far more famous mentor Urijah Faber in a largely stand-up affair with divisional gatekeeper Eddie Wineland.
He beat a lot of people, and he made the cut to flyweight, but he never won a belt. In one of those great and cruel coincidences, he had the misfortune to have his career perfectly overlap with Demetrious Johnson, who beat him twice, once in a classic war, once in a shockingly quick stoppage.
The position of de facto #2 to a great fighter is not necessarily the worst thing to be. Alexander Gustafsson, for example, made a pretty good career out of doing OK against Jon Jones one time. But throughout his time at flyweight, there was never any doubt that Benavidez still wanted that title.
He took pretty much any bout he could, and the UFC, seeing someone who would sign anything, duly appointed him as Divisional Trash Compactor. He was the solving point for no-reward fighters that couldn’t fight DJ, and were too tough and weird to risk fighting against title prospects: flyweight’s tough Dagestani wrestler (everyone gets at one!); a tricky karate-wrestler hybrid; a hobofied version of Dominick Cruz; a backtake specialist; an endlessly energetic younger version of himself. This being the flyweight division, they were all skilled and determined and athletic, and typically wedged into the back end of obscure fight cards, and they all failed to beat Benavidez.
Turning
The turn came when he fought Henry Cejudo. It was a pure head-to-head war (sometimes literally, thanks to Cejudo’s sizable noggin), the kind which literally can’t exist in most other divisions. It was power shots and body kicks and clinching and power shots without rest. Benavidez still pulled out an achingly close decision win, but it was perhaps the first time that I’d seen him looking like he was at a genuine power deficit. The absurd vitality of Cejudo also helped to paint Benavidez by contrast. It illuminated how much he was relying on cunning and experience, on how many steps had been lost to time since that tiny battering ram in the WEC.
I felt and saw the turn as strongly as I’d ever seen it with Machida, or Marquardt, or Lawler. It wasn’t that the fight hadn’t been great, but because it had been great. I decided that I would not be picking Joseph Benavidez in fights against top-level flyweights any more.
Sure enough, his next fight was Sergio Pettis, a fighter who probably understands more than a little about living a career in someone’s shadow. A careful striker built for a hypothetical sport which is just a little bit less chaotic than MMA, Pettis’ intense focus on intercepting the centerline made him a decent matchup for Benavidez in normal circumstances, but not someone that you would expect to beat him. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and Benavidez lost. The turning point had come and gone, and that was that. The swing of a career goes in one direction.
And then… he pushed it back.
Alex Perez is a big physical bull of a flyweight, and Joe B cowed and clubbed him. Men like Formiga and Ortiz that had given him tough fights returned, determined to even up the score with the help of cleaned and refocused games. The bouts were harder, but Benavidez still won, in part by stepping past the sense of what made his division and still being simply impossible to outgrapple. The Ortiz fight in particular was exactly the kind of who-wants-it-more, relentlessly physical war that I thought had probably slipped out of possibility.
I’ve seen fighters resist the passing of time in this sport, but I’m not sure that I’ve seen someone turn it back quite as authoritatively as Joe B. I still find it very hard to fathom the sheer competitive will that it takes to be fighting as perhaps the most unloved #2 spot in MMA for quite this long.
Title Fight #3
The flyweight division has decayed around him, equal parts neglect and deliberate organizational sabotage, no-one who came to it when he did is still fighting in the UFC, and this Saturday Joseph Benavidez is fighting for the title for the third time.
MMA specializes in brutal ironies, and so it is entirely possible that Deveison Figueredo, an absolute madman with a knack for sudden moments of gruesome violence, might just smash Benavidez as he comes in. The erosion of his offensive wrestling may leave him in a standup battle with a big, powerful man who sees his entries not as something to be avoided but as something to hit as hard as possible.
Should this happen, then it is virtually impossible that Benavidez will ever make it back to a title. No belt, no marker in history. Instead he’ll drop down into a less august place: the one where nerds and trivia geeks bat his achievements back and forth. “The best fighter never to win a belt? Yoel Romero? Alexander Gustafsson? Does Dan Henderson count?” You know the types of conversation.
It’s probably something I’ll do. I’ll likely bore the socks off people about the will and determination necessary make it to the top of a mountain that no-one appeared to give a shit about, even as said mountain fell to pieces. I’ll explain, poorly, what it was like watching someone holding back everything that should swing downward.
This will be cold comfort. What can you learn from watching MMA? You don’t learn much, but you learn that it is absolutely, wholly merciless. You know how fast it moves and how quickly it forgets. You know that when hinge turns and the trapdoor finally opens up, that the drop goes down to nowhere much at all.