Imagine, if you will, that you are very good at a certain thing. Imagine that you’re one of the best in the world. You are young and in your prime and you feel untouchable, mostly because you are. Imagine the confidence that comes along with that knowledge.
And now imagine that it’s all taken away. Not once or twice, but repeatedly. You’re resigned to the sidelines. You cannot do what you excel at, and it is more than frustrating, infuriating or depressing. Situations like that have the ability to change who you are, way down in your core, because you start to lose your sense of self, and once you lose that, everything just starts rolling downhill.
Dominick Cruz knows that feeling all too well. He was the World Extreme Cagefighting bantamweight champion, and then he was the UFC’s first bantamweight champion. He hadn’t lost a fight in years, and he had become one of the more unique fighters in mixed martial arts.
And then the floor fell out from underneath him.
Cruz tore his ACL in May 2012 before a scheduled grudge match with Urijah Faber. He underwent surgery, where doctors replaced his frayed ACL with one from a cadaver. A few months later, while he was on the road to recovery, Cruz’s body rejected the cadaver ACL. He was back to square one, starting a year-long recovery process. Thirteen months later, just as he was preparing to return to the Octagon, he tore his groin.
The UFC, left with no other choice, stripped Cruz of his championship. No opponent could beat him in the cage, but his own body, the tool of his trade, kept failing him. His identity as one of the world’s great prizefighters began to erode and crumble. And though that sounds like a terrible thing, to lose your sense of purpose, Cruz now says losing himself was the only thing that kept him going.
“That’s exactly what I had to let go of. I had to understand that my identity as a prizefighter was gone. And that was the only way I could find my peace,” he says. “I realized I needed to focus on other aspects of my life if I was ever going to fight and compete again, much less live a happy life.”
Cruz found some solace in television work. Like many other fighters on the UFC roster, Cruz got a few calls to help fill in for Fox Sports 1 broadcasts, where he would use his expertise to help the viewer at home understand the nuances of what they were seeing in the cage. But unlike many other fighters who try their hand at television, Cruz was an immediate sensation and quickly made his mark as one of the sport’s best analysts.
Before he started working in TV, he had no idea if he was any good. And there was no “a-ha” moment where he realized he had a very high aptitude for analysis.
“You just hope that you get called back,” he says with a laugh. “You don’t know if you’re going to be nervous or how you’re going to feel or how you’re going to do or if people are going to like you. All of that stuff goes through your head.”
Cruz did get called back, repeatedly, and he began gaining confidence in what he was saying during broadcasts. He knew he saw things from a different angle than any other fighter doing the job. He was already a diligent student of the fight game, but he also became a student of television and, in particular, an avid watcher of former football coach John Gruden.
“He’s the best analyst and TV speaker there is,” Cruz says. “If you listen to that guy talk football, he can explain everything that’s going on, even if you’ve never watched football.”
A future in UFC television broadcasts is a certainty for Cruz. But more pressing now is his January 17 fight against TJ Dillashaw—the former Team Alpha Male fighter who molded himself in Cruz’s image and became champion in his absence. All of Cruz’s time on the television screen has also sharpened his ability to talk in the service of promoting a fight.
Never has this been more evident than a recent face-to-face interview segment Jon Anik conducted, where Cruz and Dillashaw sat face-to-face in the style of old HBO boxing promotional interviews, ready to do verbal battle.
But this was no battle. Cruz, ready with an answer for everything Dillashaw said, calmly and logically pestered the champion until he essentially shut down and refused to speak. It became awkward to the point where you sort of felt bad for Dillashaw; he is a fighter, not a broadcaster, and he was clearly out of his element when going up against one of the sport’s fastest thinkers.
Cruz says the way the interview unfolded had nothing to do with him, but rather with Dillashaw.
“It had nothing to do with him being out of his element. It had to do with him having no answer for true statements. And I knew that was going to be the case when we talked, because he’s kind of a meathead. He’s not a big thinker,” Cruz says.
“I was doing nothing but explaining numbers and facts and honest truths. I didn’t say anything that was false. I didn’t attack his character too much until I said he was fake, and I said he was fake because he is. He’s pretending to be something he’s not.
“I got the emotion to come out of him when I started to bring up true numbers to him. When he started hearing me say the truth, he had no answer for it because it was the truth.”
Cruz has the ability to separate the various facets of MMA into their own containers. When it’s time to fight, he is ready to fight. But the process of selling a fight, of promoting and trying to get the public to tune in, is an entirely different thing, and Cruz believes it’s something Dillashaw just doesn’t really grasp.
“All he wants to do is fight,” he says. “But we weren’t there to fight. We were there to talk, and he didn’t want to do that, and he just shut down.”
The major theme of Dillashaw vs. Cruz is the perceived fighting similarities between the two men. To the naked eye, Dillashaw is something of a clone of Cruz, having adapted the style the former champion uses to befuddle opponents, to hit without being hit. Dillashaw has done this with great success, of course. But Cruz disputes the notion Dillashaw is a clone of the things that made him successful.
The two men share a wrestling background, Cruz says, and that’s why they look so similar in the Octagon. But he believes Dillashaw adapted only a few things from the things that turned Cruz into a champion, and that the current champion isn’t even close to unearthing the footwork patterns and other little things Cruz does in the midst of a fight.
Cruz’s biggest strength is one that you may not notice at all: his ability to scout his opponent in real time, as a fight is happening. What appears to be random feints and steps are actually a weapon. Cruz uses them to see how his opponent reacts and then adjusts his game plan accordingly. The idea that it happens as a fight plays out is almost mind-boggling, but Cruz says it’s just the product of long, hard hours at his gym in San Diego.
“I’m still a prizefighter at the end of the day. I’m not some intellectual genius. I fight for a living, for God’s sake,” Cruz says. “What I’m doing in there is just the product of round after round in training camp. Eric del Fierro tortures me during camps. When you go through what I do, the actual fight is enjoyable. It makes it so I can do things that look different than what you’ve seen from other fighters.
“But it’s only because of the work that I put in. It doesn’t just come to me naturally.”
That work, and all of the other things Cruz does behind the scenes, helped turn him into one of the UFC’s more fascinating fighters. His influence can be felt everywhere, even far beyond the bantamweight division he plans on ruling again. Heavyweight Matt Mitrione has told Cruz he’d like to move the way he does. Cruz’s former teammate Travis Browne, another UFC heavyweight, mixes in some of Cruz’s footwork patterns, albeit with far less success.
It’s an interesting thing, this shift in the way we view Cruz and his style. It used to be weird and awkward, and nobody really understood what he was trying to do. He was herky-jerky, moving this way and that, and rarely did it earn him fans. But over the years, as Dillashaw and others have attempted to adopt certain Cruz fundamentals, there has been a change in the way he is viewed by those in the sport. Most of us will never understand the finer points of what he’s actually doing as he moves around the Octagon, but we realize there’s a point to it all.
Dillashaw won’t be the last fighter who attempts to mimic Cruz, and there may even come a day when he is viewed as one of the most groundbreaking athletes the sport has ever seen. To Cruz, that brings a great sense of accomplishment.
“I’m proud to say that I’ve made a mark in the sport of mixed martial arts,” he says. “There’s no doubt about it.”
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