These are the times we should all hold dear.
Six months from now, if things go south again and 2015 turns into a repeat of this year’s drudgery, MMA fans will look back in awe at Jon Jones vs. Daniel Cormier.
The extended lead-up to Saturday night’s UFC 182 main event has been pure pleasure, with Jones and Cormier establishing themselves as one of the greatest pairings in our sport’s short history.
At this point, their actual fight will merely be the icing on the cake.
Until it’s over, we won’t know for sure if we can consider their rivalry the best ever though it’s certainly already in the running.
MMA has perhaps never seen a matchup that can compete with Jones-Cormier in all categories—including sheer stakes, prestige, competitiveness and actual, honest-to-goodness dislike. If the bout itself can even halfway live up to the hype, we’re talking about a clash for the ages.
In many ways, Jones vs. Cormier is a throwback to the light heavyweight division’s glory days. Their names don’t feel at all out of place in the same sentence with all-time UFC greats Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture and Tito Ortiz or iconic Pride standouts like Wanderlei Silva, Dan Henderson or Shogun Rua.
This feud has come close to matching the genuine bitterness of Ortiz’s trilogy with Ken Shamrock, which spanned 2002-06.
The two men now feel as intertwined in each other’s career paths as Georges St-Pierre and B.J. Penn did during their pair of fights in 2006 and 2009.
The on-stage brawl Jones and Cormier started at a media event in August bested anything Chael Sonnen and Anderson Silva did for actual fireworks back in 2010.
When they meet in the cage on Saturday, it’ll feel as significant as Fedor Emelianenko finally getting together with Mirko “CroCop” Filipovic in 2005. It’ll seem as big a moment for the fight company as Eddie Alvarez vs. Michael Chandler was for Bellator in 2011. At least on paper, it could be as evenly matched as this year’s epic welterweight title bouts between Robbie Lawler and Johny Hendricks.
In fact, depending on exactly how things shake out this weekend, Jones-Cormier has a chance to surpass them all.
Jones has already established himself as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world and the greatest 205-pounder of all time. Back in 2011, he saved the vaunted light heavyweight division from the listlessness created by Liddell‘s decline and—with one notable exception against Alexander Gustafsson in Sept. 2013—has seemed all but untouchable.
He’s the odds-on favorite to go down as the best ever at any weight by the time his career is over. Yet all that doesn’t even tell the whole story.
Jones is a unique figure in the history of MMA. His signature complement of size, athleticism, creativity and occasional mean-spiritedness is unmatched even by the Emelianenkos, Anderson Silvas and St-Pierres of the world.
He’s so talented, he’s known to beat his opponents at their own game, attacking them where they are strongest in order to prove himself better there. When he takes on the former captain of the U.S. Olympic wrestling team, he says it’ll be no different, as he told MMA Fighting’s Shaun Al-Shatti last week:
I will try to wrestle Daniel Cormier. I definitely plan on making him work extremely hard for any takedowns he’s going for, and I’m definitely going to be looking for takedowns myself. I’m more than capable of taking him down, and I believe in my top game. So I’ll definitely look to attack Daniel at his strengths, and weaknesses.
Jones was such an athletic revelation when he first broke into the big time back in 2008 that some fans flatly didn’t buy his humble, “nice guy” act. They charged him with being fake. When Jones opened up and showed the world a bit more of his true self, they called him arrogant.
He’s the sort of guy who could easily play either the hero or the villain in the greatest MMA story ever told. Depending on how you feel about him, he’s ever more detestable or likable simply because nobody’s really been able to beat him.
Now comes an undefeated challenger to test everything we think we know about Jones and every conclusion we’ve already jumped to about his legacy.
Cormier was 13-0 at heavyweight from 2009-13, and were he not close friends with reigning UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, he likely would’ve stayed there. Instead, Cormier dropped to light heavyweight early in 2014 and through two fights at 205 pounds has proved the weight cut doesn’t deprive him of any of the fearsome skills that made him a force in his previous division.
He figures to be the stiffest test of Jones’ career and was so confident about his chances, he let it be known he planned to fight the champion with an injured knee when their bout was first scheduled in July. When Jones himself dropped out with a knee injury a month later, Cormier couldn’t help but note the differences in their approaches.
“It can be a blessing,” he told Mike Hill of Fox Sports 1’s America’s Pregame (h/t UFC.com’s Thomas Gerbasi) at the time, “but I would be outside of myself to not say that I went into this fight knowing that my knee was pretty jacked up and I was gonna fight through it to get a title. I don’t think (Jones) is ducking me. … Sometimes, you gotta just tough it out and go in there and fight.”
When they finally do that this weekend, Cormier will have to overcome Jones’ significant size and reach advantages, but his previous experience at heavyweight makes that nothing new. It’s hard to think back on him beating up Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva and Roy Nelson or body-slamming Josh Barnett without figuring he’ll be a handful for Jones, too.
Nobody knows for sure how it’s going to play out—if they say they do, don’t trust them—and that just adds an extra layer to an already stellar fight.
This event likely won’t crush any pay-per-view buyrate records. It stands to be a nice little seller for the UFC, but it won’t match the huge numbers put up by guys like Brock Lesnar and St-Pierre during the prime of their careers. That says more about the slumping state of the sport at large than the greatness of this matchup, however.
If you spent much of 2014 waiting for something to cheer for, or if you were part of the throng who drifted away from this sport during the last few years, now is the time to go all in once again.
Even if it’s for one night only.
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