Johnson is completely happy in his fight retirement and has no interest in coming back to prove anything to anyone, not even current UFC flyweight champion Pantoja.
Demetrious Johnson hasn’t always gotten the respect he deserves as one of the best UFC champions to ever do it, so it was nice to see the MMA world unite on Saturday night to call for his return against flyweight champion Alexandre Pantoja.
Pantoja had just dispatched RIZIN champion Kai Asakura in a round and a half (highlights here), leaving him with few options at the top of the 125 pound division. So he called out “Mighty Mouse,” and for a moment it sounded like the perfect way for Johnson to return to the UFC and wrap his career against the second best flyweight champ in the promotion.
The only problem? Johnson retired earlier this year and isn’t interested. At all. Less than an hour after Pantoja’s callout, Johnson shot the idea down. Now he’s explaining why in a new video on his YouTube channel.
“My black ass ain’t coming back,” he declared. “You know what the beautiful thing about the position I’m in is? I’ve been offered $2 million to come and do one fight. One fight, and what do you guys think I said? I said no. I said absolutely no and it wasn’t with the UFC. It wasn’t against Alex Pantoja.”
“I’m not gonna tell you who it was with,” Johnson continued. “But I got offered $2 million a fight, and there comes a point in time in an athlete’s career where you sit back and you’re like, why? Why? Why am I fighting? Is it to be the best in the world? S—. I was the best in the world for 6 years, not just in America, but also in Japan. And I went up a division. I went 135 instead of 125.”
“Then when I made the decision, I don’t care to fight anymore, I gave myself a full blown year. A full blown year to see if I’m gonna miss it. If it’s my identity. And I didn’t miss it.”
Johnson is still showing up at grappling tournaments, so the competitive fire is still active within him. He just got bored with what mixed martial arts was offering him. And while it’s nice to imagine a situation where the UFC makes up for years of under-promotion and disrespect to set up a big final fight for “Mighty Mouse,” his confident disinterest in even considering the idea tells you he doesn’t need anything from anyone to validate his career.
As for Johnson’s opinion of Pantoja’s submission win over Asakura?
“I was not surprised one bit,” Demetrious said. “When you have a guy who’s so damn dangerous in one area of mixed martial arts, that’s where he needs to to stay in order to be successful. Meaning that if Kai Asakura went on the ground with Alex Pantoja, Pantoja is gonna eat his ass up alive, and that’s exactly what Pantoja did.”