You’re in a building. Big one, lots of floors.
You’re on the ground floor, and you have to get to the top. There are stairs, but you’re lazy and you don’t want to take them. Luckily, there are two elevators: One that goes up, and the other that comes down.
Press the button for the ‘up’ elevator and you’re on your way to the top, just as you’d planned when you came in the door.
For all intents and purposes, this elevator setup is what you’re fixing to see at UFC 183 in a couple of months when suddenly-pretty-legitimate prospect Kelvin Gastelum will take on potentially-worrisome-contender Tyron Woodley.
Gastelum is doing nothing but going up, and with one misstep, Woodley will be on his way down. Elevators passing in the shafts on a giant UFC building, if you will.
Gastleum had been largely dismissed by many since he broke out of The Ultimate Fighter as an undersized middleweight and started trucking irrelevant warm bodies at 170 pounds. He was young and showed interesting flashes, but years of TUF producing forgettable talent stacked the deck against him in terms of gaining attention.
Woodley, after winning some fights and losing some fights in the UFC, rode a Carlos Condit knee injury to the No. 3 ranking in the welterweight division. He was badly outworked by Rory MacDonald when they met but rebounded with a vicious knockout of Dong Hyun Kim to keep his place in line.
Given how he rocketed up the charts on a win over Josh Koscheck, an injured opponent and a one-minute knockout, though, anyone who isn’t wary of his credibility as a top contender isn’t doing the situation justice.
And so it is that these two men come to meet at a most perfect time in their MMA journeys. After romping Jake Ellenberger at UFC 180, Gastelum is ready to stake his claim as a contender. Woodley has been inconsistent in the UFC and is beatable, and he comes with a pretty appealing number next to his name in the rankings. He’s also powerful and dangerous, so taking his spot will be no walk in the park.
Rest assured, though, that Gastelum is up to the challenge. It’s time for him to be taken seriously because he’s already good and is one of the few guys in the UFC who’s visibly improved every time you see him. The guy who beat the tar out of Ellenberger won’t be the guy who shows up looking to do the same to Woodley, and in a sport so clearly influenced by the evolution of its athletes, that’s half the battle right there.
Woodley won’t be an easy task for Gastelum, and it’s no guarantee he’ll win. You can be certain, though, he’s going to show up and prove that he’s ready to swim with the sharks of the division now and in the years ahead.
For a guy who just turned 23 years old and made himself famous as champion of an afterthought reality show, that’s already pretty impressive.
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