“Check the record, bud.”
With this titanic and oft-played verbal blast, the hype surrounding Urijah Faber vs. Dominick Cruz III was reignited and running. Not that the machine has a ton of heavy lifting to do for this co-main event at Saturday’s UFC 199. It’s not just a title fight. It’s not just a fight between probably the best MMA bantamweight (that would be Cruz) and, in Faber, arguably the most famous sub-lightweight fighter in history.
These two don’t like each other, and it’s not hard to understand why. Cruz (21-1) is the technical master—a meticulous student of boxing and movement…a fighter and promoter whose mouth seeks as much heat as his hands. Faber (33-8) is the epitome of California cool—the naturally gifted athlete whose hair always seems perfectly mussed.
If one of them was driving down the road on a stormy night and saw the other one stranded on the side of the road, would there be a stop? Probably not.
So it wasn’t a huge surprise when Cruz came out firing recently, saying Faber was over the hill and one-dimensional. Faber responded with a wink of his chin cleft and the internet-troll-level quotable above.
True, Faber has beaten Cruz before, although that was in 2007 back in the WEC featherweight division, which Faber used to rule. Cruz was 24 years old back then, and it was his first—and, to this day, only—pro defeat.
Cruz got revenge in the UFC bantamweight division. That was 2011, and it was Cruz’s turn to defend the strap.
Now here we are. Cruz is the favorite to defeat the 37-year-old Faber, but that’s almost beside the point. This is the final, necessary chapter in a rivalry that spans decades, weight classes and organizations. In advance of the rubber match, here’s a refresher course on their long and colorful history as opponents.
A Feud Is Born
Look how young they look. That’s crazy.
According to Faber, speaking on the Fox Sports Ultimate Feuds program, the rivalry began when Cruz “was an immature little baby” who got beaten up at World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC) 26 all those years ago.
Urijah Faber on fighting Dominick Cruz: This is a big opportunity and I’m going to seize… https://t.co/hfOU20RQOS pic.twitter.com/5ZHn20jpsR
— MMA News Source (@MMANewsSource) May 27, 2016
A first-round guillotine choke—a favorite of Faber and his entire Team Alpha Male training collective—did the trick.
It also lit a fire under Cruz. In his next WEC fight, he made his 135-pound debut and hasn’t lost since, ripping off eight straight wins there and locking down the WEC bantamweight strap.
The Rematch
He carried that strap with him to the UFC after parent company Zuffa purchased and retired WEC. Cruz’s opponent for his Octagon debut and the first bantamweight title fight in UFC history? One Urijah Faber.
This time, Cruz was ready.
He had worked for four years to improve, after five rounds of action, Cruz was too evasive, too quick and too crafty for Faber’s rugged wrestle-boxing game to get off. He retained the title by a close unanimous decision.
“He barely edged out a decision I won,” Faber said of the result, per Ultimate Feuds.
On the same program, Cruz said, “I’ll fight him 25 times if I need to. I don’t care. It’ll always be a good fight because [we] both bring it.”
UFC light heavyweight Anthony Johnson summed up the real difference.
“Dominick definitely changed since the first time they fought,” said Johnson on Ultimate Feuds. “The second time they fought, [Cruz] was a completely different fighter.”
The Ultimate Fighter
For all its faults and foibles, The Ultimate Fighter does a pretty darn good job of fanning the flames of rivalry between the two coaches, always both active UFC fighters. Shouting matches were common. And incredulous laughing? Oh, sure. You bet. Enough incredulous laughing to fill an infinity pool.
“It’ll be a new thing for me, training arm’s length from the dude you’re gonna fight,” Faber told then-UFC on Fox broadcaster Ariel Helwani in early 2012, before the show began taping. “Am I going to play mind games? I don’t think I need to. He kind of plays mind games with himself.”
Faber did get drawn into a few different exchanges, but the fireworks hit federal-holiday levels in the run-up to UFC 148, where they were scheduled to conduct their rubber match after the TUF coaching stints.
In a video interview conducted with both men sitting next to each other for MMA 30 on YouTube, Cruz recited a few paragraphs’ worth of cliches about how rivalries really just make both fighters better. He ended the monologue by saying, “[It] doesn’t matter how much of a prick or a dummy [Faber] is. This rivalry’s making me a better man, a better person and I’m learning from it.”
OK then.
Faber responded. “Normally when there’s some kind of confrontation, the [tension] kind of blows over, and I don’t see this blowing over for a while.”
Then things began to go downhill a little bit. Maybe the tensest moment was when Cruz said Faber wasn’t physically intimidating, to which Faber responded, “You’re still alive today because there’s rules in MMA,” referring to his tapout from the guillotine in the first match. Each man began cutting off the other’s responses, and, well, it got a little heated.
Feel free to check it out for yourself. It starts slow but builds big time.
Of course, two months before the big day, Cruz suffered his first ACL tear, which famously started him on perhaps the longest injury layoff of any major MMA fighter in history.
Injury Ices Cruz, But Not The Rivalry
As most fans know, Cruz has been out for most of the past five years with knee and groin and more knee injuries. But even as he rehabbed and rehabbed, he never lost sight of Faber.
Between October 2011 and January 2016, Cruz fought precisely once. It was a first-round knockout of Takeya Mizugaki in 2014. And as is his wont, Cruz didn’t let the resultant screen time pass him by, taking the opportunity to swipe at Faber and his training teammates as “Alpha Fails.”
But then, a few days later, Faber—not typically known for creative or vigorous smack talk—responded with one of the sharpest broadsides of the rivalry.
“I mean, we weren’t really sitting around thinking about Cruz these past three years,” Faber said in an interview with Dave Doyle on MMA Fighting. “We’ve been out winning fights and winning titles and starting businesses. I guess he was just sitting around with his surgeon thinking about us and thinking about what he’d say when he came back. And then all he could come up with was a third-grade insult.”
Faber loosed a few arrows at the familiar target of Cruz’s historical inability to finish fights—a trend he bucked with authority against Mizugaki. Faber, one might say, was impressed by the performance—not!
“I mean, the impressive thing here was that he actually got a finish, you know,” Faber said, per Doyle. “I didn’t think he could do that. I’m pretty sure the only guy he ever actually had a finish over was something like 1-5. So to see Dom do that, yeah, that was impressive.”
In 2013, they came face to face (sort of) on UFC Tonight, where Cruz was serving as co-host (and still chips in as a top-notch fight analyst) during his layoff. There was talk of whether Cruz should vacate the title for inaction. Faber had another stroke of inspiration on the sarcasm front.
“Dom, keep the belt. Shine it. Sleep with it next to your pillow,” Faber said in his typical upbeat surfer-dude voice, as Cruz grew more and more visibly upset. “
They went on to discuss Cruz’s upcoming fight with Renan Barao. That bout never materialized, as Cruz suffered another injury.
Coming Full Circle
Maybe their bodies have matured, but their views on this rivalry haven’t over the past few years. Now here in 2016, they’re still going at it full bore.
At a UFC 199 media event in April, Cruz gave an insight (h/t Marc Raimondi of MMA Fighting) not only into why he thought he could win Saturday but also why he didn’t care for Faber in the first place:
Ego. I think his ego is too just big for me to handle. I think that’s his worst enemy. I don’t need to beat Faber, because his ego will always beat him himself. I said that’s why I don’t think that he’s grown. It’s because of his ego. Your ego, if you’re not able to accept the things you haven’t done right and look at them and put your ego aside and say, ‘You’re right, I’m not good at this, this and this,’ then you can’t grow, you can’t build those things.
He’s unwilling to do so. … He’s been TKO’d three times and still doesn’t admit any those losses or being TKO’d. How do you grow from an experience like that if you don’t accept the way that you lost by the person that beat you? You can’t grow.That’s his ego talking. He can’t admit the fact that he’s been beaten, so therefore he won’t grow from those experiences, which creates a stationary, stagnant mindset in a sport that you can only grow in otherwise you get passed by.
Ouch.
Meanwhile, in May, Faber accused Cruz of performance-enhancing drug (PED) use and said he wasn’t “made for battle,” and asked the UFC to help Cruz take extra safety precautions so Cruz would make it to fight night without getting injured.
“[Cruz] is a dope, man,” Faber told John Pollock in an interview on Fight Network. “I’ve always been under that guy’s skin. I don’t really think about him, but he spends a lot of time thinking about me. I think the reason is because I’ve been fighting. He’s been sitting around doing whatever. Who knows what he’s been doing? He’s been commentating, whatever. I’ve been fighting man.”
Double ouch.
At another news conference in March, it all reached a head. This is must-see TV.
In any case, barring injuries or something else crazy, they will face each other for the third time. Though it may no longer be the titanic physical matchup of bantamweights that it may have been a few years ago, there’s still plenty on the line in this long-running feud. One of those things is the belt. But there are other things, too.
Just check the records, bud.
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