Thousands of fans will flock to the Philips Arena in Atlanta Saturday to see Tyron Woodley (15-3 MMA, 5-2 UFC) challenge Robbie Lawler (27-10 MMA, 12-4 UFC) for the UFC welterweight champion. None, however, will have the vested interest of a man who will be watching closely from more than 2,000 miles away.
Top welterweight contender Stephen Thompson will be joining the Fox Sports team to break down the action at UFC 201 from their studio in Los Angeles.
And, while he will be concentrating on entertaining and informing fans, part of him will be watching with a competitor’s eye. The winner, most likely, will be next on Thompson’s road to UFC gold.
Bleacher Report went five rounds with the former kickboxing prodigy to discuss the title fight, falling into a rut, and why Johny Hendricks is easier to fight than Rory MacDonald.
Round 1
Bleacher Report: Lawler had lost three of his last four fights before coming to the UFC, and it looked like he was on his way out of the sport. Normally in athletics older competitors don’t come out of death spirals like that.
And then, out of nowhere, he lit the world on fire. He’s been 8-1 since returning to the Octagon, and it got me wondering—what’s different? Can a fighter get hot the way a basketball player or baseball hitter does, going on a streak for games at a time? Or is something else going on?
Stephen Thompson: A lot of times you can get into a rut. You find yourself going to training and you don’t have that passion anymore. I was actually in that situation in kickboxing before I hurt my knee. When I hurt my leg, I was out for almost three years. I’m actually glad it happened.
If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I was in that rut and actually thinking about retiring. I had been training and fighting since I was 12 years old and had never had a break. Sometimes you need one. When I did come back, I had a fire under me and was fully interested again. And now I’m the No. 1-ranked guy in the world.
A lot of fighters, they get into a rut and they’re not out there to win. They’re just out there because that’s what they’ve always done. And they’ve never taken a step back and rested their bodies, rested their brains and taken a step back.
Looking in from the outside, just from what I’ve seen, Lawler took some time. For a while he wasn’t even sparring. He’d taken a lot of damage from all the wars and took some time off. He had time to heal up a little bit.
You could see, when he came back to UFC, he was a different fighter. He got that fire back. A lot of guys never do that.
Round 2
B/R: Woodley hasn’t been out with an injury like you were, he’s kind of gone through something similar. He’s been out of action for 18 months.
When you were on the shelf, I know you were still around the sport, watching your dad’s students and your friends compete. How tough is it to sit and watch when you’re geared to get in there and do it?
Thompson: It’s difficult and very frustrating. When you’re on the sidelines, whether because you’re injured or you just don’t have a fight coming up, it’s very hard to watch your teammates go out there. You want them to do a great job, but inside you want to be out there.
I want to be champion. I want to be out there. That’s why you see so many retired fighters come back. They keep going to the gym and they start doing well. They aren’t injured and they feel good. Pretty soon they start thinking ‘I can still do this.’
I was at the UFC Fan Expo at UFC 200 and saw a lot of these retired, old-school Pride fighters, UFC legends. A lot of these guys, they’re still in shape. When you’re a fighter, you’re always a fighter. Even when you’re body can’t keep up, in your head you believe you can do it.
So, for someone like Tyron, who is at his best, I know being out for 18 months had to be hard. Has he prepared himself? Has he taken advantage of the break? That’s the question.
Round 3
B/R: He’ll be returning, but to a situation he’s never been in as a UFC fighter—a potential five-round fight. Is it significantly different to prepare for 25 minutes instead of 15?
And how does it feel to enter into those championship rounds as you did for the first time against MacDonald? Is that all hype? Or can you feel the difference in body and spirit when the clock ticks 15:01?
Thompson: There is a difference in fighting for five rounds and a difference in training for the fight. Your training session have to be a little bit longer—but you have to be smart with it, because it’s easy to overtrain.
You know you’re going five rounds and a lot of guys plan to preserve their energy so they can be fresh at the end. I’ve never been that kind of fighter. I want to go for five five-minute rounds non-stop. That’s my goal.
I learned that from training with champions like Chris Weidman, Georges St-Pierre and Rashad Evans. That’s their mindset and how they got to the top and how they stayed there for a long time.
For someone who has been out 18 months—I don’t know. What’s his mindset going to be? Is he prepared for a five-round war? Or is he going to try to pace himself?
Those guys who try to pace themselves, sometimes their light dies out a little if their opponent pushes them from the beginning. And Robbie Lawler goes non-stop for five five-minute rounds. The guy is a monster.
Round 4
B/R: Woodley has an impressive wrestling pedigree. We’ve seen Lawler get taken down—five times against Hendricks and four times against MacDonald in recent years. How does that ever-present threat of a takedown impact a fighter who wants to keep the fight on the feet?
People have been trying to ground you for years. How do you maintain that trust in your training and keep doing what you do? Is it hard not to take fewer chances and stop doing all the things that got you to the top in the first place?
Thompson: It all comes down to the training you do before the fight. To be successful at this level you have to prepare in every way. For me, I know I’ve prepared as well as I can with the best guys in the world.
In MMA, that’s fairly difficult, because you have three styles to prepare for. You have to prepare for the wrestler. You have to prepare for the jiu-jitsu guy. And you have to prepare for a striker as good as Robbie Lawler.
Despite the Johny Hendricks fight and the first fight with Rory MacDonald, we’ve seen his takedown defense get so much better. You have to be confident in your wrestling to succeed the way he has.
One thing you can do, as a striker, is not be real aggressive right off the bat, because you know your opponent is looking for a takedown. You have to draw the takedown out.
When I fought Rory MacDonald, I knew he was waiting for me to close the gap so he could shoot in on me. So I had to back off a little bit and throw a lot of feints out there.
B/R: And that helped you get an idea of what he was likely to do in response to your techniques? Or is the idea to keep him too busy worrying about you to focus on what he wants to do?
Thompson: When I feint, he’s going to react. And sometimes he’s going to get frustrated at all the feints and just go for the takedown. That was my game plan, to try to lure him into a takedown before he was ready.
I’m glad I did, because he was trying some things that were really crazy. But once I knew what kinds of takedowns he was going for, it made it easier for me to go out there and tee off, because I knew what I was going to have to defend against.
Lawler knows he’s going to have to look out for that double-leg takedown from Tyron. He’s going to try to lure it out. Tire him out a little bit, make him work. The more times they shoot for a takedown and don’t get it, the tireder they get.
That’s my goal against a wrestler, to move side-to-side so he has a hard time finding an angle to shoot in on my leg. That gets him frustrated and leads to him shooting from further out. And I know Lawler is going to be prepared for that.
Round 5
B/R: You’re most likely fighting the winner here right? I know nothing is set in stone in the UFC, but it seems likely that you’ll be on Fox Sports talking about the guy you’re fighting next.
Thompson: I think that’s the plan. I haven’t actually got a call from UFC, but that’s the talk. I’m thinking, if Lawler wins and comes out unscathed, hopefully he’ll be ready for Madison Square Garden in November.
If Tyron wins, I’m not sure, man. Maybe Lawler will get a rematch. So we’ll see.
B/R: I can tell you’re going to do great in the studio role talking about this fight. But what about as a fighter? What will you be watching for in there? Is there something you can take away from consuming a fight in real time? Or do you wait for your coaches to really dig into it and enjoy it as entertainment?
Thompson: I look to see if they make any changes. It’s easy to prepare for somebody who doesn’t change.
One example is Johny Hendricks. If you’ve seen him fight once, you’ve seen him fight a million times. He doesn’t change. He’s very good at what he does, but he does the exact same things.
So that’s the first thing I look for. I compare the fight to previous fights and see if he’s doing the exact same things. This made Rory MacDonald, actually, very difficult to prepare for. Because he’s always evolving and throwing out new tricks. I was very nervous stepping in there against Rory because I knew he’d do things I hadn’t seen before.
The second thing I do is break down the fight a little bit. Where are the openings? Does he react to feints? I like to throw a lot of feints to see how they react. From there I can adjust and maybe throw something a little bit different. Or, once I know how they are going to react to my feint, counter their reaction to me.
There are a lot of fighters who don’t really think about any of this stuff. They just go out there and wing it. They just do it. I’m not one of those. Me and my dad and my coaches, we always go back and reevaluate even after my first-round wins. To see where I made mistakes and where I could have gotten hurt. And how I might have done something a little better.
That keeps you evolving, keeps you learning. You see a lot of guys out there, they don’t go back and look at their fights and try to change anything. Those guys don’t stay on top very long, and they don’t get any better.
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
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