Since the beginning, the only real constants in the UFC heavyweight division have been disorder and delay.
Even in a sport that so often thrives on chaos, the 265-pound class has always been an abject mess. It stumbles from one calamity to the next, stuck in perpetual rebuilding mode, as one champion after another proves incapable of being the breakout star it so desperately needs.
This is the way it has always been and maybe the way it will always be.
So when Fabricio Werdum toppled Cain Velasquez to claim sole possession of the heavyweight title on June 13 at UFC 188, he may have defied the odds and made fools of most prognosticators, but his victory really only confirmed the one thing we know for sure about this weight class:
The people on top don’t stay there for long.
At this point, it’s unclear what it even means to be the UFC heavyweight champion. They still go through the motions of wrapping a belt around your waist when you win it. You still get to spend a fight or two on top of everybody’s Top 10 rankings—longer, if you manage to get injured—but experience tells us you’re just housesitting the place for somebody else.
You don’t take your place as part of any meaningful history. There is no benchmark by which to be judged, no Anderson Silva or Georges St-Pierre-style character to chase. You simply become part of a group of 15 men who at one time or another did more or less the same thing you did.
There is no greatest UFC heavyweight champion of all time, because no one has yet managed to do anything particularly great as champion. Mostly, heavyweight title reigns are defined by the premature ways in which they end. The sad truth is, no one has yet been able to be any better (or worse, really) with the title than anybody else.
In just over 18 years since the advent of this particular championship, there have been 18 individual title reigns. That gives you some idea how long these things typically last. Nobody has defended the belt more than twice in a row without losing it. Five times the championship has been stripped or vacated, owing to injuries, contract disputes and positive drug tests. Four times, UFC brass has had to establish interim champions to prevent the whole system from lapsing into stasis.
The championship’s troubled history dates all the way to its origin, when Mark Coleman defeated Dan Severn at UFC 12 to become the company’s first recognized “heavyweight” titlist (at the time, that just meant he weighed “more than 200 pounds”).
It was 1997, and the victory boosted Coleman to 6-0 in MMA competition. It also solidified his status as one of a string of early UFC stars who seemed like they couldn’t be beaten.
Spoiler alert: Coleman could be beaten. He lost his next fight, to Maurice Smith, and was soon exposed as a guy whose gas tank couldn’t match his fearsome appearance. He slipped into a three-fight skid and then abruptly left the UFC to chase bigger paydays in Japan. He didn’t return for 12 years.
With that, the bizarre life of the UFC heavyweight championship was off and running.
Bas Rutten won the title in 1999 and almost immediately announced his retirement. He didn’t fight again until a one-off bout for WFA in 2006.
Frank Mir’s heavyweight reign ended in 2004 after a horrific motorcycle accident.
Two of Randy Couture’s stints with the title, in 2000 and 2007, respectively, were fraught with bickering over his contract.
Brock Lesnar was set to be the biggest star in UFC history, but in 2009 he was struck down by a rare intestinal disorder we’re told nearly took his life. After his return, he went 1-2 and retired in late 2011.
It has all made for an inexplicably strange ride, and the above list doesn’t even include positive steroid tests for Josh Barnett and Tim Sylvia, or Kevin Randleman getting scratched from a title defense at UFC 24 after slipping on some junk backstage and hitting his head just before fight time.
The promise of Velasquez, in fact, was our hope that he might just be good enough to break the heavyweight division out of its longstanding malaise. Any talk of him as a potential greatest of all time was always based in the speculative notion he could actually become the dominant force guys like Coleman, Mir and Lesnar were supposed to be.
He certainly looked the part. Velasquez seemed to usher in the future of heavyweight MMA fighting—one that might at least catch it up with the rest of the sport’s weight classes. He was relatively light and quick, hyper athletic, well rounded and capable of setting a pace few of his peers could match. Unfortunately, we found out he was also held together with chewing gum and peanut brittle.
Velasquez tore his rotator cuff in his title victory over Lesnar and after the first of what would become many delays, lost his initial defense, to Junior dos Santos in the UFC’s odd one-fight debut on Fox. He won the belt back 13 months later, but the defining characteristic of his two turns as champion would prove to be an inability to stay healthy.
His first scheduled meeting with Werdum was postponed due to a knee injury. When he finally did make it back to the cage, he lost in a fashion very much in keeping with the rest of the heavyweight title’s history.
The UFC had bent over backward to try to get Velasquez’s big fight in Mexico. He came in as a heavy favorite to Werdum but showed up looking shockingly ill-prepared to fight at the altitude and—lacking his usual cardiovascular superiority—got pretty badly beat up before succumbing to a guillotine choke in the third round.
Along with the title, Velasquez coughed up the chance to become the heavyweight division’s first truly great champion—at least for now.
Now comes Werdum, the latest in a long line of fighters with an opportunity to bring stability to this most volatile weight class. At 37 years old, his evolution from Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion to complete MMA fighter took 26 fights and more than a dozen years, but the end result leaves him as the most improved fighter in the history of the division.
Coupled with a Strikeforce victory over Fedor Emelianenko—the consensus best ever outside the UFC—his own fledgling title reign already has people mentioning his name as a potential all-time great.
We’ve been down this road before, right?
Only about 17 times?
The good news for Werdum is that, in terms of becoming the greatest UFC heavyweight champion of all time, the bar is set low enough that it could be totally doable for him, even at his advanced age.
Really, all he has to do is win his next three fights, against some combination of opponents likely including dos Santos, Andrei Arlovski and/or Stipe Miocic and Velasquez again. If he can manage that, he’ll fill the vacant throne as the UFC’s heavyweight GOAT—which has been sitting empty this whole time, waiting for someone, anyone to fill it.
Given his amazing recent track record, Werdum seems fully capable of accomplishing the mission. He just has to steer clear of injury, contract holdouts, disease, speeding SUVs, altitude sickness and prove he’s bigger than nearly two decades of disappointment and mediocrity.
No sweat.
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