Boy, what a time everyone’s going to have on Saturday.
The UFC is back with a pay-per-view presence befitting its price tag, serving up fight after fight built on big names and big excitement.
Dominick Cruz.
Tim Kennedy.
Cat Zingano.
Donald Cerrone.
Dustin Poirier.
Conor McGregor.
It reads like a who’s who of the sport, a collection of names who are far more likely to be placed atop a Fight Pass card or a Fox Sports 1 show instead of being used to fill slots so far down as the pay-per-view prelims. It’s the deepest card of the year, perhaps longer, and it’s worth every penny.
Oh, and it’s headlined by Demetrious Johnson pursuing his fifth straight title defense. But you already knew that. You were just excited about something else on the card.
Maybe everything else.
That’s the nature of life for Johnson as a world champion. He sits atop a thin division at a time where he’s demonstrably better than everyone else and demonstrably less interesting as a guy than everyone else. He just goes out and beats people with bewildering ease, then makes blase, complementary statements while they nurse their (never-gruesome-enough-to-satisfy-fans) injuries.
Nobody wants that.
They want pomp. They want circumstance. They want to feel like this matters.
Johnson doesn’t provide that. He provides death by a thousand paper cuts to guys who probably shouldn’t be fighting him to begin with on merit, and that’s a tough sell to keep people coming back. Actually, it’s been a tough sell to keep them when they’re already there.
Which is why UFC 178 is the best imaginable time for Johnson to do something outrageous or unpredictable. Something to steal the show. Something to get people talking.
It’s clear that won’t come by way of simply racking up another win. It may even be clear that spectacular finishes won’t do the trick, considering he’s been good enough to provide a few and people still didn’t care.
Perhaps it’s an unexpected war, one with a challenger no one saw coming in Chris Cariaso. Maybe Johnson took his foot off the pedal a little this camp and Cariaso trained for the fight of his life, and all of a sudden, the champion has to dig down deep and fight like a dog to keep his belt.
Maybe it’s a post-fight callout of John Dodson, the only man alive to whom Johnson has ever shown even an inkling of not liking. Get on the mic, talk a little trash, get people interested.
How about a shocking announcement of a move back to bantamweight in hopes of becoming a two-division champion? Call out T.J. Dillashaw, who doesn’t really have a clear contender in his wake and is the type of stylistic matchup that Johnson might actually do well in.
Sure, sure. None of those are realistic. Well, they’re not unrealistic, but they’re not things that have made Johnson the man he is.
He almost surely put together a perfect camp and executed it with a champion’s drive.
He won’t call out Dodson because he doesn’t want to give him that satisfaction.
He’s not going back to bantamweight because the risk of being second best there isn’t worth leaving the top spot at flyweight.
And that’s the problem. The things that have made him a champion are the same things that have made him almost entirely uninteresting to fans.
But one can dream.
With so many people watching for so many other reasons, such a dream coming true would be about as welcome a surprise as you’ll get in MMA.
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