It’s a struggle.
Blood on the canvas, smears of sweat.
Panting, heaving, straining every muscle to its very limit and then beyond.
Weeks and months spent in the gym, pressed against cages and mats in live fire drills, trying to get that last edge, searching to find that little wrinkle that will be the difference between the glory of victory or the sting of a loss.
Fifteen minutes they give you. Twenty-five if you’re the best in the world.
And you earn it with maybe 300 of those hard hours of preparation.
They’re hours both Dominick Cruz and Cat Zingano would have given anything for over the past couple of years. Both were at the highest peaks of the UFC not that long ago, and both had the rug slipped from beneath them in the most disheartening ways imaginable.
Cruz, the seemingly invincible bantamweight champion of 2011, went through a series of increasingly absurd events that first cost him pay-per-view points, then cost him a prolonged run of defending his title, then cost him that title altogether.
It’s almost a guaranteed fact that people who’ve been watching him as an analyst on various Fox broadcasts didn’t even know he was an active fighter. However, it’s arguable he really wasn’t.
Zingano, although saddled with a shorter layoff, was perhaps an even more tragic figure. She beat the second-most famous woman in MMA for a chance to spend 12 weeks coaching The Ultimate Fighter opposite the most famous woman in MMA and lost it in the blink of an eye.
After besting Miesha Tate, she blew out her knee for her season of TUF with Ronda Rousey. She lost that opportunity (to Tate, no less), the exposure it would have offered and the title fight it guaranteed.
During her rehab, her husband and coach took his own life.
There’s a real case that no one in the UFC has had it harder than Zingano in the past 18 months.
And strangely, for two of the UFC’s most downtrodden figures, all roads eventually led to UFC 178.
Cruz, finally healthy but relegated to the meager status of contender despite being unstoppable the last time he was seen in a cage, drew Takeya Mizugaki for his comeback. Zingano landed Amanda Nunes.
Both have varying degrees of assurance that they’ll have a title shot in short order now that they’re formally back in the mix. Win on Saturday night, and that shiny belt could soon be yours.
But in a sport as fluid as MMA, nothing is ever that easy. Assurances are oftentimes forgotten or waylaid by external forces. People get hurt, crazy things happen, fame and money come and go before they were ever even here and now in the first place.
Nobody needs to tell Cruz or Zingano that.
It’s also likely, though, that no one needs to tell them of the redemption they can find in the cage. That they’re still standing after what they’ve each been through is remarkable. That their feet are planted firmly enough to keep fighting is otherworldly.
They’ve spent days and months in hospitals, in rehab, in gyms as spectators with nothing but the sound of pads being thumped and the smell of teammates’ sweat to console them. And it’s all been building to this: to a single night, a single chance.
For both Cruz and Zingano, the journey to UFC 178 goes well beyond those 300 hard hours in the gym. The journey just to get to those 300 hours would have stopped many.
But here they are, each ready to make that walk again like they never left.
The past is past. The blood and sweat have been spilled. The work is done.
Redemption awaits.
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