Filed under: UFC
Quinton “Rampage” Jackson is, yet again, fed up with MMA. I guess that means it’s time to rotate the tires on my Toyota and change the air filter in my furnace. Who needs a calendar or a planner for that stuff when you’ve got Jackson, whose frustration with this sport is the most reliable natural phenomenon outside of Yellowstone National Park?
This time, Jackson told an ESPN UK podcast that, after his loss to Jon Jones at UFC 135, he’s tired of “fighting people who are scared.”
“That’s why I’m going to go to boxing,” said Jackson. “I’m going to try boxing because they’ve got to stand with you. If I get knocked out I don’t care, because at least it’s a fight.”
Right. Because that was his big problem with Jones. The champ was “scared” to stand up and fight him. That must be how Jackson ended up getting kicked around the cage like a hacky sack at an Ani DiFranco concert.
Not that any of us should be surprised to hear Jackson threatening to take his talents elsewhere. As recently as May he proclaimed that “as soon as movies start paying me more than I make to fight, I’m gone.”
A year and a half before that, when the UFC gave him a hard time for taking the A-Team role rather than fighting Rashad Evans right away, he declared he was “done fighting” and “hanging it up.”
His movie career must not be panning out like he’d hoped, because now boxing is his new frontier. Six months from now he may decide wants to be a male model instead, or maybe an astronaut. In other words, anything but MMA, the one thing he’s made a reliable living at for the last decade or so.
It’s not that I don’t understand the motivation behind comments like these. We’ve all romanticized the notion of a different career in our minds. No matter how good you have it in your current job, other people seem to have it better. Especially when you’ve never actually tried that line of work, the way Jackson has never tried to be a full-time professional boxer. Then it exists solely as an idea, wholly perfect and unmolested by reality.
How else could Jackson have convinced himself that boxing is a sport where he won’t have to worry about supposedly scared fighters running from him? Has he not heard that boxing has its share of “elusive” fighters? That even if opponents aren’t shooting for takedowns or tenderizing his legs and ribs with kicks, there are still plenty of ways for them to avoid slugging exchanges in the ring?
If he thinks boxing is a sport where men stand directly in front of each other and trade haymakers, he’s about a hundred years late to the party. These days, boxing has its share of runners. It also has its share of skyscraper heavyweights who could jab him from across the street and give him the same distance problems that Jones did. That is, unless he thinks he can drop down to cruiserweight (quick: name your favorite cruiserweight, and no, Chris Jericho doesn’t count), where there’ll be less money on the table than he seems to think.
I don’t blame Jackson for feeling like he wants to do something else after the loss to Jones. That fight was so thoroughly one-sided that he has to know he’ll never get his belt back as long as Jones is breathing air in the light heavyweight division. That leaves him with limited options. He could rematch “Shogun” Rua or Forrest Griffin, both of which he seems open to. But what then?
And of course, there’s always the need to find some excuse for a loss, a pastime that even Jackson will admit he’s an old pro at. Jones dominated every second of the fight? So what. It’s only because he was running scared. Things will be different in the faraway land of boxing, where the streets are paved with gold and there’s not a college wrestling All-American in sight.
Sure, it doesn’t really make sense, but it doesn’t have to. A few months from now the UFC will have given Jackson another fight, another guaranteed payday, and he’ll have forgotten all about it. He’ll be back to doing the one thing he knows and kind of hates, and all be well again.
At least until the next time. And you know there will be a next time.