“I am going to kick him repeatedly. He’s going to try to shoot, and when he shoots I’m going to stop his takedown, and I’m going to hit him more and more and more until somebody pulls me off of his lifeless corpse. I’m going to dribble his head off the canvas like it’s a basketball and I’m playing in the NBA Finals. I will walk through him and destroy his whole life, his whole meaning and purpose. I’ll be the man that he wishes he was. Everybody’s wondering what I’m going to do? It’s going to be murder, death, kill. I’m going to murder Demetrious Johnson inside the Octagon, kill the hope he once had and [it’ll be] the death of his title reign. That’s what it’s going to be when our fight comes up on September 5.”
This is John Dodson talking.
This is what he says when I ask him how his fight with Demetrious Johnson at UFC 191 on Saturday will look if everything goes according to plan.
This is his idea of a best-case scenario.
It’s eight days before he’ll rematch Johnson for the UFC flyweight title, and at almost 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon Dodson says he’s “just out driving around” Las Vegas.
He’s waited a long time for this fight. Maybe, after a grueling training camp and a full day of media obligations, he’s laying the prefight trash talk on a little thick.
Like everything Dodson does, the words come in a rush. Almost 150 of them spilling out as more than a minute of uninterrupted talk. He says them with the conviction of a true believer, but since it’s hard to imagine Dodson doing anything without a smile on his face, it’s unclear how seriously I’m supposed to take these threats on Johnson’s life.
UFC fighters have been punished for saying less.
Just so there’s no misunderstanding about what this fight means—Dodson essentially casts it as a battle for the soul of the 125-pound division.
At various times during the lead-up, he refers to himself as the savior of the flyweight class. He calls Johnson a plague and says he will be the cure. When I try to think of a nice way to talk about how fans have received Johnson’s title reign, Dodson interrupts me to say: “He’s unpopular. It’s OK, you can go ahead and say it.”
He doesn‘t literally want to kill the champion, but he does want to take the title for himself and go on to prove his brand of fighting will be better for the flyweight division at large. He wants it badly.
Johnson has been champion for nearly three years, and while he’s been a revelation inside the cage, he’s mostly flopped at the box office. The last three pay-per-views featuring him in the main event are among the worst sellers in the UFC’s modern history, according to estimates from MMAFighting.com’s Dave Meltzer (h/t MMA Payout).
Whether it’s Johnson’s technical but monotonous style or his understated nature, consumers have been slow to embrace him. The sluggish numbers have raised questions about the entire division—whether Johnson himself is the problem or if MMA fans just won’t shell out their hard-earned cash to watch two 125-pound guys fight.
Dodson is adamant that they will.
He says the UFC just needs to find the right champion.
“DJ is a good fighter, but he’s not selling any tickets because he has no personality…,” Dodson says. “With me as champion they’ll have somebody they can market. Look at what happened with Ronda Rousey. Look how much that blew up. If that can happen for women in the UFC, why can’t I do that for the [flyweight] men?”
So, maybe that’s what he’s doing here. Maybe he’s just trying to sell the fight.
The people who know Dodson don’t describe him as the kind of person you might have to pull off an opponent’s lifeless corpse. His reputation as a fighter is quite the opposite. He’s the guy with the 1,000-watt grin, always bouncing off the walls. Even while describing what he plans to do to Johnson, he says his powerful punches come flying with “such creativity, with such positive energy behind them” that the champion won’t know what hit him.
“John is probably the most selfless fighter that I know,” says coach Brandon Gibson, who works with Dodson at the vaunted New Mexico fight camp run by Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn. “Most fighters, the job requires them to be selfish. John’s just always giving, always caring, very generous. Just a great guy to be around.”
Three days after our talk, Dodson flies home to Albuquerque to witness the birth of his first child—a daughter, Delilah. By Tuesday evening, he and Gibson are both back in Vegas, prepping for the press conference, open workout and official weigh-in that precede every UFC event.
Back to selling the fight.
For Dodson, Saturday night’s main event represents the second part of a journey that began with a loss to Johnson in January 2013. He started strong during their first fight but faded down the stretch, eventually conceding the unanimous-decision loss that kicked off the champion’s current run of six straight title defenses.
Dodson rebounded with back-to-back knockout victories, but in July 2014 he suffered a torn ACL in training that kept him out for the next 11 months. That kind of injury sounds like a terrible punishment for a guy who is known for his energy and constant movement. Dodson admits it was hard but says in a weird way all that down time was good for him.
He had to learn a different part of the fight game, he says. The part he’s doing right now. The promotional part.
“You know how hard it is to sit still for me?” Dodson says. “It’s impossible. I had to learn how to talk now. I had to learn how to communicate with my words. I had to increase my vocabulary, so I could be able to just sit here and grind like this, just sit here and spit.”
And spit he does—a constant torrent of hot fire following almost any question he’s asked about Johnson.
In response, Johnson calls Dodson a mental midget and “a little Chihuahua.” He tells me Dodson likes to “run” in his fights and says he fully expects Dodson to break once the champ pressures him for 25 minutes, just like he did in the first fight.
It’s a little bit weird to see two guys renowned for their niceness go at each other’s throat like this. Gibson says the animosity between the fighters is real and not just a marketing ploy.
It’s in stark contrast to the cordial demeanor they displayed during their first meeting. Even after the official decision was announced that night, Dodson smiled and clapped for the victorious Johnson. He even offered a congratulatory hug.
Years later, Dodson has decided he thinks he won that fight, though he certainly didn’t act like it in the moment.
The second time will be different, Dodson assures me. I ask him where all these bad feelings come from, and he seems to shrug off the question. He stays on message, and the message is bad for Johnson.
“I used to be a fan of his,” Dodson says, “but now I’m that dude who is going to be his assassination squad.”
Near the end of our conversation, Demetrious Johnson starts talking about history.
Not history as in ancient Rome or the Revolutionary War, but the history of combat sports and his own place in it. More specifically, going down in it. Johnson abruptly imagines a future where the UFC no longer exists. If that time ever comes, he tells me, people will go to their history books to learn about MMA.
They’ll open those books and see his face.
His voice takes on a different tone when he talks about it. He adopts the cadence of a movie voiceover, pretending to read aloud from this history that doesn’t exist yet.
“Oh, the sport of mixed martial arts,” Johnson says, as if he’s discovering his own legacy for the first time. “One of the biggest organizations was the UFC and it had champions and one of the first ones was Demetrious Johnson, a local poor black boy from Parkland, Washington.”
He pauses and his voice goes back to normal. “Then people will look at my history,” he says, a little bit defiantly, “and that will never be taken away from me.”
Like Dodson, Johnson talks the way he fights—fast and with relentless enthusiasm. There’s a bluntness to him, an edge you might not expect from a man who is largely regarded as one of MMA’s easygoing good guys. He swears a lot and has an unpredictably crass sense of humor.
He says that his first fight against Dodson would have looked like “two jackrabbits jacking off” if Johnson hadn’t worked so hard to chase Dodson down and engage him. He dismisses the recent trash talk between the two fighters as just Dodson being “butt-hurt about stuff.” Apropos of nothing, he makes passing reference to rumors that UFC fighters might soon unionize as “f—ing crazy, man.”
It can be dizzying to try to keep up with him, especially when he starts indulging in alternate histories.
Then again, maybe Johnson’s imagining his way into these books alongside the all-time greats isn’t that strange at all. At least in his own make-believe future he’s finally getting the respect he feels he deserves.
The 29-year-old Kentucky native’s inability to draw has been the biggest topic of conversation to emerge from his title reign. While Johnson has more or less effortlessly dispatched a half-dozen challengers, the popular discussion has focused on what’s wrong with him and/or what’s wrong with the fans who don’t like him.
Even his nickname—Mighty Mouse—carries an undercurrent of self-deprecation. A wink at his own shortcomings.
At this point, Johnson is clearly over it. His conversation on the topic drifts back and forth between acceptance and out-and-out disdain. During the UFC 191 media conference call a few days after our talk, Johnson lashes out at the people who can’t appreciate what he’s trying to accomplish.
“It’s only the fans and uneducated fools out there that say, ‘Oh, you’re boring,’” Johnson says. “You just don’t understand what I’m doing. There’s a process going on with the technique I bring to the table.”
The frustration is easy to understand. It’s tough to imagine going through as much adversity as Johnson has, reaching the pinnacle of his chosen profession—being regarded among a handful of people who are the best in the world—and still being judged wanting.
Keep in mind, we’re talking about a guy who up until a few years ago (and more than a dozen fights into his professional MMA career) was still working 40 hours per week in a manufacturing plant, trying to get by. He never met his father—”I’ve never seen a picture of him, not a glimpse, nothing,” Johnson told Sherdog’s Yael Grauer in 2011—and was raised by a deaf mother and stepfather he says was abusive.
He finally made the transition to being a full-time fighter before his bantamweight title eliminator against Miguel Torres at UFC 130 in May 2011. Throughout the lead-up to that fight, his mother battled cancer and Johnson drove her back and forth to her therapy sessions every day. Once the fight started, he broke his leg throwing a kick early in the second round but still won by unanimous decision.
He lost his 135-pound title shot against Dominick Cruz five months later, but fast-forward to 2015 and he has to be considered among the UFC’s most dominant champions. His record is 22-2-1 overall; he’s won eight fights in a row and finished four of his last five by submission or referee stoppage.
And still, nobody cares.
If there is any truth to the things Johnson and his team say about how hard he works and how seriously he dedicates himself to excellence in this sport, then being greeted with indifference must be a bitter pill indeed.
Especially as he outdistances the rest of the best 125-pounders in the world, seemingly by magic.
“The magic is hard work,” head coach Matt Hume says during a recent appearance on Inside MMA. “This guy works harder than anyone I’ve ever seen in this sport. That’s the magic.”
Now, Johnson tells me he’s done trying to impress people. His fans are his fans, he says, and they will remain his fans regardless of how many fights he wins or how long he remains the champion.
But perhaps this deafening lack of praise in real time explains why Johnson is choosing to focus on more historic accolades. Prior to this rematch with Dodson, he’s talked publicly about his desire to break Anderson Silva’s record of 10 consecutive UFC title defenses.
He’s already at six, and if he gets by Dodson on Saturday, the goal won’t seem all that outlandish. In fact, it’s not unthinkable that he could attain it by the end of next year or early 2017.
“The reason why that’s important to me is that it’s always about setting records and leaving your mark in the sport,” Johnson says. “Regardless of what happens, I will always be the first flyweight champion ever in the UFC.”
So go ahead, Johnson seems to say, turn your back. Ignore him. Willfully miss the greatness he puts on display once every six months or so, albeit in front of the UFC’s smallest pay-per-view audiences.
He’ll be laughing at us all from the history books.
Unless Dodson can stop him from getting there.
Here’s the thing about that first fight: It was close.
Dodson started like a house of fire, dropping Johnson with his signature power punches three times during the first 10 minutes.
This was before Johnson had ensconced himself as the UFC’s most successful but polarizing champion. We had no idea yet how good he was going to be, so maybe the fact Dodson nearly took him out in those early moments failed to make the proper impression as it happened. Go back and watch it now, however, and it’s kind of remarkable.
“It was definitely a frustrating fight for us,” Gibson says. “We were being patient and John was finding the knockdowns in the first round and the second round. I remember even talking to Winkeljohn and Jackson in the corner, like ‘OK, he’s seeing it. Let’s not rush it, one of these next ones is going to put him out.’ Hats off to Demetrious and his team for making the adjustments in the later rounds.”
Dodson puts it more succinctly: “I hit him. I watched him fall. I watched him walk away with my title.”
Johnson weathered the early storm and took over in the late rounds—a thing he says he knew was going to happen after training for the bout with Pat Runez, the last man to defeat Dodson prior to that fight. He says the plan all along was to keep pressing, to keep Dodson working and to eventually make him crack.
“I kept pushing forward and (ended up) taking the fight away from him,” he says. “He might believe he was winning it, but he wasn’t.”
Then there were the fouls.
Uncharacteristic of Johnson, he tagged Dodson with a bad low blow and an illegal knee to the head over the course of the fight. None appeared intentional, and he was not penalized. Nobody wants to say it now, but there’s no telling how those transgressions might have nudged the momentum one way or the other.
All told, there was just enough weirdness in the bout and Dodson did just well enough to make a second fight seem worthwhile—and like the best possible matchup in a division that Johnson is quickly cleaning out.
Dodson comes into the second meeting as a 4-to-1 underdog, according to Odds Shark, though the only real way to make sense of those lopsided numbers is by looking at the two fighters’ divergent recent paths.
Johnson has fought five times since (all wins) and has only seemed to get better and better while launching himself to the forefront of our public consciousness, if not our hearts.
Owing to his injury, Dodson has fought just three times.
His most recent appearance was a lackluster unanimous decision against friend and former training partner Zach Makovsky. It was just Dodson’s second UFC win to go the distance, but his underwhelming performance stoked fears that he won’t be ready to go 25 minutes with the hard-charging Johnson. His camp, naturally, says that’s not a concern.
In fact, Gibson says Dodson used his injury time off to get better at more than just the verbal side of fighting.
He says when Dodson returned to training, he was still limited by the injury, so his coaches took the opportunity to keep him away from the high-flying, explosive moves that typify his normal offense. Instead, they focused on the basics—fine-tuning his technique in order to boost his existing speed and power.
“He’s always been a ferocious body puncher and has put plenty of dudes to sleep with head shots,” Gibson says. “That’s something that has really multiplied since that injury. He’s hitting so much harder than he ever was before.”
Johnson says it won’t matter.
He respects Dodson’s power but considers himself just too technically superior everywhere else. He’s not sure if Dodson will come out swinging or—in his words—try to run again. He admits it will likely be impossible to steer completely clear of Dodson’s punches, but he expects the end result to look like a replay of their first fight.
The UFC has worked hard to position Dodson as Johnson’s most dangerous challenger to date. Dodson has obviously worked overtime to raise the stakes and turn this into a grudge match.
As for Johnson? That’s just one more piece of media hysteria he won’t quite dignify with his full attention.
“I don’t buy into the hype,” the champ says. “I think that’s just the UFC [advertising strategy]. I think every opponent is dangerous. … Yeah, John Dodson has the skill set to beat anybody in the UFC, including me. But can he go out there and do it?”
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