There’s nothing to be gained, nothing whatsoever, from asking MMA fighters if they can beat Floyd Mayweather.
When all other things are equal, that’s a life rule you can set your watch to. But for one shining moment earlier this week, the world flipped upside down. The stupidest question in MMA—and that’s not a title one confers lightly—actually, magically bore unto us the succulent fruit of knowledge, even if it did so without its full consent.
Why don’t we back up for a second. To understand why any conceivable answer to that question could qualify as revealing, first you have to understand Demetrious Johnson, who is not in the business of revealing things.
That’s the conflict, you see. See, Demetrious Johnson is the reigning UFC flyweight champion. The 28-year-old from Washington state is 21-2-1, with no losses coming after he joined the UFC’s new 125-pound division back in 2012. He is the first and only person to hold the company’s flyweight belt. This Saturday at UFC 186, he defends the title against exciting but unknown Kyoji Horiguchi for the sixth time.
There’s no definitive speedometer or anything, but he’s probably the fastest athlete in the UFC. He can knock you out or submit you and shift effortlessly between those phases. He can grind or he can finish. He has the perfect game plan and executes it to a tee.
All of this taken together, he’s one of a handful of human beings with a place in any discussion designed to identify the world’s best MMA fighter. It is a discussion we shall not actually have at this particular point in time.
Because the real point here is that, for all Johnson’s physical and mental gifts between the horns, he doesn’t count for much when the lever-pullers are counting their money. Maybe it’s because smaller fighters don’t capture the public imagination like their heavier brethren. Maybe it’s because Johnson talks like he gets paid by the cliche.
Maybe that’s a shame. It’s definitely the truth. Johnson is an enormous talent and one of the best fighters in the world. But he doesn’t put bodies in the seats, as evidenced by the historically poor performances of the UFC events he has headlined. The UFC’s best athlete? Arguable. The UFC’s worst pay-per-view draw? Not arguable, at least not among its champions.
Is there change afoot, though? Did Johnson get the message? Did he see guys like Conor McGregor dancing circles around him without even the benefit of a belt? Is that a needle on Johnson’s leg-press machine?
It began Monday, when Johnson uncharacteristically played along with one of MMA’s silliest subplots. That’s right: Can you, Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson, beat Floyd Mayweather in a fight?
Typically Johnson wouldn’t be a party to such frivolity. Apples and oranges, next question. This time, Johnson took the bait in an interview with Fox Sports:
I can do it in 15 [seconds]. The skill set of a mixed martial artist outweighs a boxer’s by far. The reason why is a boxer is one dimension, while mixed martial arts, we have so many dimensions. We can take it to the ground. I can blow out his ACL, LCL, MCL, all that stuff with a heel hook…For me, being the fastest man in mixed martial arts, I think I can get it done in 15 seconds.
Nice.
Demetrious Johnson said he could beat Floyd Mayweather in 15 seconds. Mayweather responded by googling “Demetrious Johnson”
— MMA Roasted (@MMARoasted) April 22, 2015
But Floyd was only the beginning. On Thursday, Johnson clapped back against his naysayers, which is noteworthy because it involves acknowledging them first. In an interview with broadcaster Ariel Helwani posted at MMAFighting.com, Johnson said that “if you don’t want to watch me, that’s your f—— bad. Go watch soap operas. Go watch WWE.”
He also said in the on-camera interview with Fox Sports that he has been a more dominant champ than Ronda Rousey. Spicy!
That’s a little more fire than MMA media consumers are used to from the flyweight champ. Although to be fair, they don’t have the world’s largest sample size.
If Johnson’s bark can catch up just a little with his bite, everything he touches will be far shinier for it. That includes UFC 186, which early signs and ticket sales are showing just might be, for various reasons above and beyond Johnson, a financial disaster in the making.
Here’s hoping Johnson is catching on to the fact that fighting is only part of the game, especially in a game that relies more on tweets than beat writers to spread its daily word, and banks on one monthly pay-per-view for most of its bites at the apple.
Either way, it’s a good thing if Johnson is finally giving himself the recognition he deserves. It all starts with the man in the mirror. Sorry about that, Floyd.
Scott Harris writes about MMA for Bleacher Report. For more stuff like this, follow Scott on Twitter.
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