Bad blood. It’s so often sold in MMA that it’s become a cliche.
To have the UFC tell it, nearly every guy on the roster hates every other guy and they’re ready to beat them into a living death at the drop of a hat.
But every now and then one of those blood feuds comes along and, buddy, you better believe it’s real. It’s as real as it gets, if you will.
It goes beyond the usual promotional bluster of balding, middle-aged men in the closing moments of a pre-show and enters into the realm of the historic. It spills into a world where unsanctioned brawls and multiple pre-fight specials are produced, where people examine every step a man took to become embroiled in such a feud and ponder every step he’ll take when it’s over.
And when the final horn sounds and one guy’s hand is raised, there’s no mistaking it is over.
Unarmed combat will have that effect on someone; one of you is the better man and the other has to deal with it. It was proven on the basest level of humanity, where everything else was stripped away and it was two guys just fighting, and it all came out.
Jon Jones knows that going into UFC 182. You best believe Daniel Cormier does too.
Anyone who has been around this sport long enough has seen it happen time and again, this storied history of men who hate each other in the only sport on Earth where one can truly do something about it.
The earliest blood feud the UFC could promote was perhaps that of Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock. Shamrock was a supremely confident, musclebound shoot fighter at a time when mixed martial artists were anything but mixed and were damn proud of it, while Gracie’s jiu-jitsu might as well have been a mystical power for how well understood it was in 1993. When the two met it led to some hostility.
Gracie choked Shamrock out, Shamrock offered up a kind of phantom tap and Gracie decided to leave no doubt by holding the choke a little longer. The two had words after the fact. That was at UFC 1, and some two years later the two met in a hotly anticipated (though highly unsatisfying) superfight rematch at UFC 5. It ended in a draw.
It was a long time before legitimate beef existed in the UFC again, at least to the point it was saleable to a larger audience. It’s pretty difficult to promote John McCain crusading against an entire sport in any meaningful way that can draw on pay-per-view.
Then Tito Ortiz showed up, and all of a sudden the UFC had more feuds than it had events on which to place the payoff bouts.
He had fights with Guy Mezger that were rich in hate-filled promotion before moving onto Frank Shamrock, and then onto Frank’s brother Ken. Ortiz’s best work could be boiled down to an overarching distaste for Shamrock’s famed Lion’s Den fight camp, the stuff dreams are made of in the fight game. It was a chance to continually line up opponents with similar name value or backgrounds and let the rivalry take on a life of its own.
Ortiz split the bouts with Mezger and lost to Frank, before trucking Ken Shamrock on three separate occasions. He was in his prime for much of that time and had one foot in the door of his Lion’s Den grudge while stepping into a room that contained another: Chuck Liddell.
Liddell was a former training partner who was rapidly rising through the light heavyweight division, but whom Ortiz had claimed was too good a pal to ever fight. Liddell saw it differently and the two found their way into the cage together after the type of protracted verbal battle that could only ever be born of a soured friendship.
Liddell obliterated Ortiz in just over five minutes, scorching him with one of the most iconic finishing sequences the sport has ever seen. They would rematch a couple of years later and, though it took a little longer, the result was the same. Liddell was now in his prime and would not be denied, ruthlessly wailing away on an Ortiz who hadn’t lost since their first meeting, putting an end to any debates over who was the better of the two.
Blood feuds were less prominent in the UFC for a few years after that. The evolution of the sport saw things shift more from hate-fueled warfare into competitive rivalries where simply being a better martial artist was enough. People loved the action regardless, so the spectacle of personal rivalry was less important.
However once Brock Lesnar entered the picture and was fortunate enough to meet up with Frank Mir, things changed. The fires of genuine bad blood were stoked again, and the sport had its first proper feud since Liddell and Ortiz.
Mir was tapped as Lesnar’s introduction to the UFC, and the 1-0 former WWE star seemed happy enough to meet the challenge. Their first bout saw him overwhelming Mir with ground-and-pound before succumbing to a crafty leglock, the exact type of thing a proud, hypercompetitive individual like Lesnar would never let go of without a chance for redemption.
He got it a little over a year later, when he was a UFC champion and Mir was challenging. In one of the more violent displays of offense from inside half-guard MMA has ever seen, Lesnar pounded Mir’s face for a round-and-a-half before the bout was stopped. He then gave one of the most radical, intense post-fight speeches in combat sports history while Mir was left to slip off into the night with a face that resembled the Toxic Avenger.
Nearly a year after the fact, Mir was still bitterly proclaiming he’d like to see his nemesis die in the Octagon. Some five years later, Lesnar is looking at returning to MMA after another pro wrestling stint and any reasonable expectation of his abilities would surely include a trilogy bout against Mir.
In the time since the best blood feuds of the 2000s, some modern rivalries have been born but seem to lack the sheer irresistibility of those that came beforehand. Rampage Jackson and Rashad Evans came closest, building their bout and their disdain by stewing as coaches on The Ultimate Fighter and getting to the point a genuine dislike had been fostered. They sold a million pay-per-views together even in spite of an ill-timed move of the payoff battle, which truly speaks to the magnitude of their quarrel.
Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen got pretty far on Sonnen’s ability to fabricate heat, Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate didn’t like each other and Nick Diaz and Georges St-Pierre did well on the challenger’s hostility towards the machine of MMA and its most pristine champion.
Still, each had an element of feeling manufactured. There was volatility there, but it was coming as much from a desire to get paid or perhaps get Twitter followers as it was from any type of raw hatred that would exist outside of the world of prizefighting.
However now, with Jones and Cormier, the bad blood that exists is palpable. It’s true. It exists in a space that harkens back to the early days of the sport or the boom period that happened only a few years ago.
It’s had a press conference brawl, top secret private exchanges, exchanges thought to be private but that were quickly made public and all manners of insult and nastiness. It’s impossible not to think Jones and Cormier would fight the same in an alley, at a birthday party, on the moon or in the Octagon.
They outright hate each other.
It’s real in a way the UFC could never hope to concoct and doesn’t often get the chance to replicate. These are historic, generational feuds that come around very rarely between men in the process of defining what it means to be the best at a given time.
UFC 182 is providing the next bout in that lineage, one that will be recorded a little further on Saturday night in Las Vegas.
That which has come before it has given reason to expect something memorable, something that will influence the course of this young sport as it enters a new year and as it extends into the years ahead.
Enjoy that it’s upon us. It could be a while before you see it again.
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