One minute, Jorge Santiago was just another dude on the records of Chris Leben and Alan Belcher.
The next minute, he was racking up victories over the likes of Jeremy Horn, Andrei Semenov, Kazuo Misaki, Trevor Prangley and Siyar Bahadurzada.
The minute after that, he lost—and subsequently avenged his loss to—Mamed Khalidov and went on to rematch Misaki in the fight that some, including B/R Featured Columnist Jason Schielke, have considered “the greatest fight in MMA history“
You’re probably asking yourself, “Well, what does that have to do with Santiago’s return at UFC 130 this Saturday against Brian “All American” Stann?” So here’s how it breaks down.
If UFC 130 is your first time watching MMA—or if you know for a fact that you were only watching it for Quinton “Rampage” Jackson vs. Matt Hamill—then Santiago’s return could be “just another fight,” or it could mean that a technically new face is coming in for a guy like Stann to easily dispose of in the first round.
However, there’s a difference between what one thinks Santiago’s return will tell us, and what it will really tell us.
It could tell us that this is just another fight, it could tell us that Stann is looking to be the next big name in the UFC Middleweight division and needs a few notables on his resume before Dana White & Co. attempt to persuade us that Stann is a future middleweight champion, or it could result in us once again seeing what happens when a top name from a Japanese MMA promotion like Sengoku travels to the States and faces a “legit fighter,” as some people call UFC fighters.
It could tell us all of those things, but what this fight will really tell us is the story of how Santiago has evolved from a young up-and-comer who could not hit his mark against mid-tier UFC Middleweights to a man responsible for what some have considered to be the perfect example of what a Mixed Martial Arts contest should be.
If you’ve never seen Santiago in action and believe that Stann will win this bout with no problem apart from perspiration, you’re giving the former Sengoku Middleweight Champion a lot less respect than you should.
Remember, the consensus said that Stann’s had little to no shot of beating Leben at UFC 125 unless the three ringside judges were all people that Leben bullied in high school, and what happened then?
Leben got knocked out in the same way that I thought Leben was going to knock out Stann.
What makes it a certainty that Stann will cause Santiago to fall just as easily as Leben did when this Saturday rolls around.
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