Jon “Bones” Jones and Daniel “DC” Cormier couldn’t be much more different. That’s part of what makes their bout on Saturday night at UFC 182 so compelling. Their personalities clash—which explains why they hate each other. Also, their fighting st…
Jon “Bones” Jones and Daniel “DC” Cormier couldn’t be much more different. That’s part of what makes their bout on Saturday night at UFC 182 so compelling. Their personalities clash—which explains why they hate each other. Also, their fighting styles are different as well.
Jones is an unorthodox, gifted striker with excellent takedown defense. Cormier is a world-class wrestler with quick hands and good boxing. This explains why, even aside from the mutual malice, the fight is so intriguing.
Last but not least, this fight is for the UFC undisputed light heavyweight championship of the world. Jones is already an all-time great, and Cormier might be his most significant test.
Put it all together and you have the most highly anticipated fight perhaps in UFC history. Bleacher Report’s Jeremy Botter agrees with me.
You can watch any number of the hype videos to see the storyline for this feud, but let’s take a closer look at how these two men match up physically. Here’s a Tale of the Tape with information per Fight Metric.
Each Fighter’s Best Physical Attribute
Jones’ Length
Not only is Bones 6’4″, but he also has an 84″ reach. That just measures his length from armpit to knuckle. His legs are also very long.
What makes all of these length numbers all the more relevant is the fact that Jones is the rare tall pugilist who knows how to use his height. He’s a master at using his limbs as a first line of defense and using spatial awareness to know when he’s out of range.
Opponents must wade through his arms and knees before getting in striking distance. All the while, they must remain on the lookout for spinning elbows, fists, knees and educated feet.
Cormier‘s Strength
DC obviously has great technique. You don’t make it to the Olympics as a wrestler without excellent technique. Beyond that, he is strong as an ox.
Once he locks on, his opponents usually have little choice but to go where he throws them. Throughout Jones’ career, he’s thwarted 97 percent of the takedowns attempted against him.
But he’s never fought a wrestler like Cormier before.
Most Lethal Weapon
Jones’ Elbows
Bones has a plethora of weapons at his disposal, but the most deadly are his sharp and accurate elbows. He has finished Brandon Vera, Vladimir Matyushenko and ChaelSonnen with these strikes.
He’s also punished others such as Rashad Evans with them. Against Cormier, the elbow could be a big key again. Just like Evans, Cormier is a much shorter wrestler who will look to close distance and grapple.
Routinely, Jones bashed Evans’ face with his elbows just as Suga tried to get into range. Without question, Cormier has seen this fight. Will he be able to avoid a similar fate?
Cormier‘s Takedowns
We mentioned Cormier‘s strength earlier, but that’s just part of what makes him so good at securing takedowns. He’s nailed 49 percent of his attempts in his career, mostly because he’s relentless and skilled.
Case in point, against Dan Henderson, the long-time veteran appeared to escape Cormier‘s grasp only to be tripped and dropped as he tried to retreat.
Cormier will use every part of his body to get his opponent to the mat, but that will be easier said than done against Jones.
Boy, this is going to be one heck of a fight.
Follow Brian Mazique on Twitter. I dig boxing and MMA.
Brandon Gibson says the first time he studied film on Daniel Cormier, he was in a truck stop outside Amarillo, Texas.
It was mid-summer, and Gibson was on his way home from visiting family in Ohio. He was nearing the end of the marathon drive back to A…
Brandon Gibson says the first time he studied film on Daniel Cormier, he was in a truck stop outside Amarillo, Texas.
It was mid-summer, and Gibson was on his way home from visiting family in Ohio. He was nearing the end of the marathon drive back to Albuquerque when UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones called with breaking news. Top contender Alexander Gustafsson was out of their UFC 178 bout with a knee injury. Now, Jones would fight Cormier instead.
Gibson was somewhere out on I-40 when he found out all the work they’d put in preparing to rematch the lanky, 6-foot-5 kickboxer would go to waste. The way he tells the story—and certainly he’s paraphrasing—his response to learning Gustafsson would be replaced by the stocky, undefeated former Olympic wrestler was two words.
“All right.”
If anything, maybe that’s Gibson in a nutshell—serene exterior, calculated, a little bit zen—but inside, his trainer’s brain was already spinning. The next time he pulled over for gas and discovered the roadside truck stop had Wi-Fi, he slipped out his phone to see what he could see on the new opponent.
“I started jotting down notes,” Gibson tells Bleacher Report. “I wanted at least to start rehearsing things in my mind. Then, that night when I got back to Albuquerque, we got together and started hitting mitts.”
That was five months ago. After another injury delay—this time owing to Jones’ own knee surgery—the champ will finally meet Cormier on Saturday at UFC 182. It will be the culmination of the eighth fight camp Gibson has worked as Jones’ striking coach at the famed New Mexico gym owned by Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn.
So far, all of them have ended with victories.
The 32-year-old Gibson trains nearly all of the fighters at Jackson-Winkeljohn, but his relationship with Jones is a special one. During the last three-plus years, they’ve grown close enough for Jones to casually call him a brother, even though the fighter has two real biological brothers who both play in the NFL. Earlier in 2014, Jones also playfully referred to Gibson as his “secret weapon” on social media.
It seems as though they are always together—working out, traveling, meeting for private sparring sessions in the evenings. If anyone in MMA truly knows the sport’s most unbeatable, most unknowable champion, it may well be Gibson.
“He makes you feel as if it’s not just about money or fame or accolades with him,” Jones says. “It’s really about him genuinely wanting to see you do better in life. He cares about our families. It’s more than just a coach and his athletes. He really has created a brotherhood, at least for me.”
Appearance-wise, the two have a bit of an Odd Couple vibe going on. In pictures of them together—and there are a lot of them—the top of Gibson’s head comes just to Jones’ chin. Gibson runs about 160 pounds, while Jones walks around at a lithe 220. Spend even a few minutes talking to either one of them, though, and it’s instantly clear why they’ve become such a formidable team.
Here are two thoughtful, unorthodox dudes, both gym rats, who both share a deep love for strategy and the psychological side of the fight game.
Jones is notoriously obsessive. The stories of him learning to fight by watching YouTube videos and taping off the physical dimensions of his opponents on a wall in his apartment are legendary. While Gibson is way too chilled-out to fit that same adjective, single-minded feels like an accurate descriptor for him. People who know him best will tell you this thing about pulling over at a truck stop to start game-planning for an upcoming fight? That’s not an isolated incident. That’s not even unusual.
“Half the times I call him, he’s always studying,” Jones says. “He’s always studying my opponent for me. I study myself, but he’s always studying. (He’ll say) ‘What do you think about trying this?’ or ‘Did you notice that he does this?’ Each opponent is very personal for him. I love that passion that he brings into the fight.”
Perhaps Gibson’s biggest strength is his ability to build relationships with the athletes he trains. That’s what Jones says, anyway, that Gibson just understands fighters. He knows how to motivate from minute to minute, which is a plus when you’re grinding through the drudgery of one long, difficult fight camp after another.
Gibson likes to send around inspirational quotes. He uses music and video clips, is constantly on the lookout for the thing he thinks might help the men and women he trains be at their very best for the next film study session, the next round of sparring, the next morning conditioning drills.
And, sure, the intellectual, quasi-spiritual guy with a penchant for motivational quotes isn’t exactly a new thing. It’s fairly well-worn territory in fight gyms, but Gibson is so open-hearted and impassioned that it’s impossible not to like him for it. When he talks about other fight gyms, he sometimes calls them “schools”—maybe a chip off the block of Greg Jackson, who occasionally refers to his own fighting system as a “curriculum”—and when he discusses drills and sparring, he often uses the word “rehearsal.”
It’s a small thing, this quirky use of language, perhaps insignificant. But are Cormier and the rest of his team at San Jose’s American Kickboxing Academy calling what they do every day “rehearsal”? Probably not. Maybe that hints at the mindset that makes Gibson and the rest of the Jackson-Winkeljohn team so unique and, they would probably argue, uniquely successful.
A conversation might start with Gibson talking about Jones, their relationship and what they’re doing to beat Cormier this weekend, but soon it drifts. He brings up Chuck Close, the contemporary American painter and photographer who is now a quadriplegic and in 2014 got a bunch of top Hollywood celebrities to pose with no makeup for Vanity Fair.
He mentions his admiration for Winkeljohn’s mastery on the mitts and Jackson’s way of using bits of history or the works of great artists to motivate his fighters.
In the end, he digs out this St. Francis of Assisi quote he likes, saying, “I’m more of a Buddhist than anything,” as a sort of half-apology for the religious undertones.
“’He who works with his hands is a laborer,’” Gibson quotes, reading it off his phone to make sure he gets it right. “’He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.’ That’s what I try to instill in my fighters. Let’s go out there and make some art, you know? Let’s put everything into this.”
*****
Gibson grew up in southeast Albuquerque, in the same neighborhood where the Jackson-Winkeljohn gym is today. He went to neighboring high schools with future Jackson fighters Diego Sanchez and Holly Holm. Like Sanchez, he remembers it as a rough place during the mid-to-late 1990s, where gangs and crime were plentiful.
Perhaps as a way to keep his kid out of trouble, Gibson’s dad signed him up at a local karate gym. Every day, he hauled his gi to school with him in his backpack. As soon as class let out for the day, he walked straight to the dojo where, as Gibson puts it, he’d “hit the makiwara boards and practice my kicks” until his dad came to pick him up after work.
“Martial arts was a survival tool,” he says. “It was something that allowed me to keep my self-respect, just because of the environment of that neighborhood.”
As a teenager, he got into boxing, enamored with the history and rhythms of Albuquerque’s thriving fight scene. He found his way to Winkeljohn’s kickboxing gym just as the coach’s partnership with Jackson took hold. Sanchez was there, and other fighters like Keith Jardine and Joey Villasenor were starting to make names for themselves at MMA’s highest levels.
Gibson fancied himself an amateur fighter for a while, taking boxing and kickboxing bouts at anywhere from 145 to 170 pounds, depending on which of his opponents showed up. Before he could really establish any momentum, though, he suffered a double tibia-fibula fracture he compares to the one that felled former UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva at the end of 2013.
“That required a few operations,” Gibson deadpans. It also necessitated some tough choices.
“I never had that super competitive hunger as a fighter,” he says, “but I definitely loved the strategy. I loved the intellectual side of it, the technical side of it. I always had good leadership qualities, and I think that just transitioned more into coaching than fighting on my own. I think that was always the more natural path for me.”
He started at the bottom of the Jackson-Winkeljohn coaching tree, working with amateur fighters and even teaching a few of the youth classes the gym offered for a time. He began studying under what he calls the “very yin-yang coaching dynamic” of the two men whose names are still on the sign out front. Today, Gibson says he’d like to think his own style splits the difference between the high-minded strategy of Jackson and Winkeljohn’s more hard-nosed, technical wizardry.
His mentors seem to concur.
“Brandon is an amazing coach,” says Jackson. “He’s very creative. He’s everything we like about good coaching. He keeps his head level in stressful situations, he’s consistent, and he has a great relationship with all of his fighters. We’re lucky to have him. Really lucky.”
Gibson was still just a fledgling trainer when Jones started showing up in New Mexico to train for his early fights. At the time, Jones was also an up-and-comer, splitting his camps between Albuquerque and his home state of New York. Gibson says one of the first things he remembers about Jones is how young he was, not even old enough to drink. On nights when the rest of the team would head out to blow off steam, Jones would go to the movies.
They became friends before they ever formalized a working relationship. Gibson says he was still working mostly with amateurs, but he and Jones always seemed to wind up at the gym at the same time—maybe because they were both always at the gym. They used to try to out do each other in shadow-boxing competitions, each guy mixing funky, unconventional moves into his punching and kicking combinations, and the other trying to keep up.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2011 that Jones asked Gibson to begin training him. He’d just won the UFC 205-pound title in a blowout over Mauricio “Shogun” Rua and was working his way back from a lingering injury in order to make his first defense against Quinton “Rampage” Jackson in the fall. Jackson was renowned primarily for his boxing, and Jones wanted a little extra help with his own stand-up game.
“My specialty is probably a little bit more boxing,” Gibson says. “I really like to focus on boxing for MMA. So Jon said, ‘Hey man, I see you have great hands, and all your fighters have great defense. I think this is an important fight for me to work that stuff on.’ So we sat down with Greg and Winkeljohn, and I started becoming part of the team.”
The result was another wipeout win. Jones submitted Jackson with a rear-naked choke in the early stages of the fourth round after flummoxing him with his reach on the feet for most of the first 15 minutes. After the fight was over, Jones admitted he’d wanted to prove he could strike with Jackson and beat the veteran fighter at his own game.
Three months later, he fought and defeated another feared striker in LyotoMachida, and the Jones-Gibson partnership was off and running.
*****
They are making a list.
Jones, Gibson and the other coaches at Jackson-Winkeljohn keep a bunch of lists, actually, dating back to the time they first started working together. They are master charts detailing every technique Jones prepped during his previous fight camps. Now, they’re compiling one for Cormier, too, plotting out strategies they’ve identified from copious film study on the 35-year-old No. 1 contender.
Gibson says he and Jones will often dig out the old lists and go over them, looking for similarities and differences, brainstorming what might or might not work for an upcoming fight. Some days, they might rehearse moves from the Machida fight or Jones’ previous fights against ChaelSonnen or VitorBelfort. Even if those opponents appear to have little in common with, say, Cormier, they’re constantly looking for threads from past game plans that they can weave into the new one.
Once they identify something, they drill it and drill it, conditioning Jones’ mind and body through sheer repetition so that he’ll react automatically if an opening presents itself during the actual fight.
“That’s beautiful,” says Winkeljohn, “because that’s how Jon thinks. If he’s willing to get the repetition in, then it becomes second nature to him. Jon comes with so much unpredictable stuff in the cage, but behind the scenes—people don’t understand—there’s a lot of reps of that unpredictable stuff. We know it’s not unpredictable, it just looks unpredictable to everybody else. A lot of that has to do with Brandon working reps with Jon.”
After the first real close call of Jones’ career at UFC 165, there were whispers that the champion had taken Gustafsson lightly, that he didn’t prepare as thoroughly as he should have. Seven months later, he was back to his old, dominating self against Glover Teixeira at UFC 175, and his coaches say Jones will never make the same mistake again. Especially not against a fighter the caliber of Cormier.
Gibson compares the intensity of this camp to the one Jones had before he defeated Rashad Evans in a contentious grudge match at UFC 145. Still, there have been plenty of distractions.
Jones had knee surgery in August and will have been out of the cage a bit more than eight months by Saturday night. In the interim, he and Cormier were both fined by the Nevada State Athletic Commission after they brawled on stage during a media event at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. The pair were also caught in a profanity-laced spat (NSFW language in link) when they thought ESPN cameras weren’t filming. In November, Jones committed another in a long line of media gaffes, with his tone-deaf comments to TMZ.com about rape allegations against Bill Cosby.
None of it has helped endear him to that segment of MMA fans who have always viewed him as arrogant and unlikable. To that end, Gibson seems to acknowledge that part of his job is to pull Jones back from these digressions, to refocus him away from the things that cause fighters to “lose sight of the bigger picture of them being martial artists and living this warrior lifestyle.”
“Sometimes for Jon it’s not about, you know, there’s this big looming fight with Daniel Cormier,” Gibson says. “Sometimes it’s just about, let’s conquer this round on the mitts. Let’s conquer this workout. It doesn’t always have to have this looming picture of ‘here comes the fight.’ Sometimes it’s about being the best we can be in this moment.”
Concerning what will actually happen when Jones and Cormier meet in the cage, predictions are all over the map. As of this writing, Jones is going off as a slight favorite, according to Odds Shark. While some analysts think his size and mobility will easily win the day, the coaches at Jackson-Winkeljohn say Cormier stacks up as the most difficult test of Jones’ career.
“We have to dictate the pace,” Gibson says. “I think that’ll be the biggest thing. DC loves controlling the pace and pressure of the fight. The more we can disrupt that, the more we can impose our own. I think Jon is the king of that in his own right. It’s very hard to impose your will on Jon Jones.”
While nobody is quite sure what will happen during, there is already plenty of talk about after. If Jones gets past Cormier, he’ll likely meet up with the winner of Gustafsson’s January bout against Anthony Johnson. If he gets through that, the champion says he might finally give heavyweight a spin.
There are also reports that Jackson and Winkeljohn will open a sprawling new facility in Albuquerque in 2015, and that Jackson might soon look to spread his MMA curriculum through gyms nationwide. Exactly what that would mean for a homegrown coaching star like Gibson is anybody’s best guess, though he says he’ll be content so long as he can keep working with his fighters.
At this point, the only thing he’s willing to concede is that, with a couple of days remaining before the next big fight of all their lives, the game-planning never stops.
“We’re going to bring this team together like we always do,” Gibson says. “Now we’re at an even higher level than ever before. Our eyes are clear, our voices are loud. Jon’s going to get in there very well rehearsed. I’m not picking a round or a technique or anything like that, but it’s my job to make sure that he has all of these tools that when we create an opportunity or an opening, we will attack and do what we do best.”
Chad Dundas is a Lead Writer for Bleacher Report. All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted. B/R MMA Editor Brian Oswald also contributed reporting to this story.
UFC 182 is just days away, and the UFC Light Heavyweight Championship is up for grabs in one of the most heated matchups in UFC history.
Jon Jones defends the championship gold against No. 2-ranked contender Daniel Cormier.
According to Odds Shark, Jon…
UFC 182 is just days away, and the UFC Light Heavyweight Championship is up for grabs in one of the most heated matchups in UFC history.
Jon Jones defends the championship gold against No. 2-ranked contender Daniel Cormier.
According to Odds Shark, Jones is a 25-52 favorite to win. His status as the favorite is well deserved.
Cormier is an Olympic-caliber wrestler who has defeated each and every one of his 15 opponents in his professional MMA career. He won the Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix with wins over Jeff Monson, Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva and Josh Barnett.
In the UFC, he has dispatched Frank Mir, Roy Nelson and Dan Henderson.
He has a list of talented names on his record, and no one has come close to beating him. But Jones is a different animal.
The reigning champion has a record of 20-1. His lone loss was a controversial disqualification loss to Matt Hamill due to illegal elbows. The fight was stopped, however, because of an injury that was caused during a takedown attempt. It was a fight Jones should have been awarded the victory in.
When Jones won and defended his title in 2011, it was one of the most impressive streaks in MMA history. He battered Ryan Bader, Mauricio “Shogun” Rua, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and LyotoMachida in a single calendar year. All four fights were finished.
Since that day, he has added Rashad Evans, VitorBelfort, ChaelSonnen, Alexander Gustafsson and Glover Teixeira to his list of defeated contenders. He is the greatest 205-pound fighter of all time.
His status as a favorite this weekend at UFC 182 is not just due to his past as a dominant champion. It is also a stylistic matchup that favors the champion.
Cormier has proven his wrestling skills have translated into the cage, but in order to use them, he has to get in close. That is where he will have the most trouble. One of Jones’ greatest attributes as a fighter is his ability to use his length. He keeps his opponents on the outside.
According to Fightnomics author Reed Kuhn (h/t UFC.com’s ThomasGerbasi), the reach differential at UFC 182 will be the third-biggest in UFC history:
Jones is also the more developed mixed martial artist. At 35 years old, Cormier still has a lot of ground to make up. He can hide a lot of his holes with his elite-level skills as a wrestler, but against Jones the talent gap may be more evident.
Cormier has power in his hands and good striking basics, but hitting Jones from a foot away will prove to be difficult.
Cormier‘s path to victory is narrow.
He has to wrestle. That is it. Cormier has to cut off the cage, force Jones into a phone booth and beat him up. The prospect of accomplishing that task on Saturday is why he is an underdog.
Jones has many more outs, and as the fight draws on, the scales tilt even further in his favor.
Jones has beaten a wide array of styles. This is without question the best wrestler he has ever fought inside the cage, but that is only one aspect of MMA. Cormier has never seen a fighter like Jones. Ever. Jones is ever-developing his skill set, and each time we see him inside the cage, he brings out a new tool.
It is surprising that Jones is not a bigger favorite for this championship grudge match.
Why should Jones be favored?
He has established himself as the greatest light heavyweight of all time and has a decided advantage in every aspect of this fight other than wrestling. Even with the disadvantage in that one aspect, it will be hard for the challenger to exploit it from a foot away as he establishes range inside the Octagon.
This should be a fantastic fight, but all signs point to Jones as the one who gets his hand raised high.
The UFC opens up 2015 with fireworks as Daniel Cormier faces off against Jon Jones at UFC 182 on Saturday. Despite his Olympic background and an impressive 15-0 MMA record, a Cormier victory over Jones would be the highlight of…
The UFC opens up 2015 with fireworks as Daniel Cormier faces off against Jon Jones at UFC 182 on Saturday. Despite his Olympic background and an impressive 15-0 MMA record, a Cormier victory over Jones would be the highlight of his career. However, on the grand scheme of things, that victory could bring shock waves felt across the light heavyweight division.
Because of his storied career as an Olympian and Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix champion, it is easy to be a fan of Cormier. But at the age of 35, he is feeling the clock tick toward the end of his career.
“The pressure is on me because I know that this is my last chance to do something really special in regard to my athletic career,” he told Justin Klugh of Philly.com. Cormier has fallen short several times in his career—from placing out of the medal picture in the 2004 Olympics to failing to compete in the 2008 Olympics due to kidney failure from intense weight cutting.
With his future up in the air due to his age, it is understandable why he decided to swing for the fences by going for Jones’ title at this moment.
Jones isn’t just a titleholder. He is the top pound-for-pound fighter in the UFC. Therefore, a Cormier victory would open the floodgates to the division. His triumph would show that Jones is really just a man and not a machine who can’t be stopped in the light heavyweight division.
Could a Cormier victory happen? Bleacher Report’s Levi Nile predicts that Cormier will win by unanimous decision by being the aggressor and negating Jones’ long reach. Cormier understands that this may be the last stand in his career and may actually go into the fight like he has nothing to lose. This intangible may bring Nile’s prediction to fruition.
However, a Cormier victory would also reduce the magnetism in marquee fights in the light heavyweight division.
Someone who would be inadvertently affected is Alexander Gustafsson. He has been craving a rematch against Jones since his defeat at UFC 165. But due to injury and an intense marketing buildup from Cormier, Gustafsson has to sit on the sidelines this go-around.
There is no doubt that a Jones vs. Gustafsson rematch would draw a ton of interest, and Gustafsson makes it no secret he prefers to fight Jones. “If I want to take the belt from anyone, it would be Jones. Not DC,” he told Ariel Helwani on the MMA Hour.
Then again, he has no problem if Cormier were to win.
“Well, I think ‘DC’ is a great athlete and a great person, so, like I said, it would be great to see him win because it would mix things up,” Gustafsson told Helwani.
While a Cormier vs. Gustafsson matchup wouldn’t be a bad draw for UFC fans, Jones vs. Gustafsson would attract more eyeballs. Both Jones and Gustafsson have already established a history, and there would be a lot of anticipation for a rematch.
A Jones loss wouldn’t do anything to hamper his reputation. He still is a polarizing figure and will continue to be a draw for the UFC. Kyle Symes wrote on CombatPress.com that Jones has “more to offer the UFC in terms of economic impact.” A loss on Saturday would reduce the magnetism of a Jones fight in the short term, but his stardom will continue to rise.
On the other hand, a win by Cormier would be more than just a victory that keeps him relevant until his next fight. Defeating the top pound-for-pound fighter in the UFC would earn him the recognition he deserves in this sport. It may not be an Olympic gold medal, but wearing UFC gold would bring redemption to Cormier’s decorated career.
Jon Jones vs. Daniel Cormier. This is the one fight fans have long been waiting for. Jones, the UFC Light Heavyweight champion who has defended his title an astounding seven times, is widely considered as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the bu…
Jon Jones vs. Daniel Cormier. This is the one fight fans have long been waiting for.
Jones, the UFC Light Heavyweight champion who has defended his title an astounding seven times, is widely considered as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the business. Cormier, a former Olympic wrestler, is undefeated and expected to give the champ his most difficult test to date.
It’s a battle that would have undeniable intrigue even if you left it at that. But this is a long-standing rivalry that came to a head at UFC 178 when the two took part in one of the more infamous brawls outside of the Octagon:
Cormier is ready:
Jones is ready:
Taking place just three days into the new year, it’s still easy to say there may not be a more anticipated fight in all of 2015.
UFC 182 Main Card Predictions
The Title Fight
Cormier’s prowess in the wrestling game is well-known, and if he can take this fight to the canvas, he’ll have a good chance of pulling off the upset
There’s only one problem.
Taking Jones down has proved to be nearly impossible. “Bones” has a takedown defense of 97 percent, per FightMetric.com, and his daunting blend of length and athleticism helps him keep opponents at bay in an absolutely clinical fashion.
Fightnomics’ Reed Kuhn pointed out Jones’ massive advantage in reach:
Alexander Gustafsson, one of the only people on the planet who knows what it takes to make the champ uncomfortable, believes that will be the difference in the fight.
“Both are great athletes and it’s going to be a tough fight for sure,” he told UFC.com’s Thomas Gerbasi. “But Jones has his height and reach advantage over DC, so I think that will be the key thing in this fight. I think Jones by decision.”
While Cormier is known for his wrestling and strength, he also boasts the kind of quickness and athletic ability to present plenty of problems for Jones. He’s undeniably dangerous, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see him win a round as he tries to maul Jones.
But ultimately, there’s no one better at keeping their distance than the 27-year-old. He showed some chinks in the armor against Gustafsson, but it’s hard to imagine the 6’4″ physical specimen allowing the 5’11” challenger to get close enough to do enough damage or score a takedown.
Jones will be able to patiently hold off DC with an array of jabs and kicks, slowly wearing him down and leaving MGM Grand with another convincing victory.
SAN JOSE—Daniel Cormier slumps in a metal folding chair. He leans his head back, blood pouring from his nose. A cutman shoves Q-Tips up his left nostril in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
Moments earlier, Cormier was in a cage at American Kickbo…
SAN JOSE—Daniel Cormier slumps in a metal folding chair. He leans his head back, blood pouring from his nose. A cutman shoves Q-Tips up his left nostril in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
Moments earlier, Cormier was in a cage at American Kickboxing Academy. After going three rounds with a near 300-pound super heavyweight, Cormier was sparring with a very small middleweight. He was exhausted but mostly frustrated that he couldn’t catch his speedy sparring partner.
He went one way, the middleweight went the same way, and the end result was Cormier dripping blood all over the floor.
His nose is not broken, which is a relief. He has traveled great distances to get to this point, and an injury would be heart-wrenching. He came from Lafayette, Louisiana, making stops at Oklahoma State and the United States Olympic team. And now, he’s preparing to face Jon Jones for the UFC light heavyweight championship.
It is the culmination of a journey filled with tragedy and heartache.
*****
On June 14, 2003, Cormier and friends Muhammed Lawal and Jamill Kelly were having a barbeque at Cormier’s house. They were grilling chicken. It was a gorgeous day. There was one week before the world wrestling team trials, and life could not be better.
All three were wrestling on the international level by this point, and Cormier had become one of the best wrestlers in the world. He’d just gotten married to his longtime sweetheart Robin. He had a new daughter named Kaedyn, born in March to Cormier and Carolyn Flowers, Daniel’s former flame at Oklahoma State.
During the barbeque, Cormier’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and answered.
It was the Texas Highway Patrol.
There’d been an accident. The air conditioning was not working in Flowers’ car that day, so she’d strapped Kaedyn into her car seat in a friends car and then followed in her own vehicle.
An eighteen wheeler struck the car Kaedyn rode in from behind.
Kaedyn died instantly. His beautiful three month old daughter was gone, stolen from him on a dusty Texas highway.
Cormier hung up the phone and descended into darkness. He hung black curtains on his windows to keep the light out and to turn the day into night. He stayed inside except for wrestling practices, and in practices he turned angry. He bit his teammates. He punched them in the face. He withdrew from the world team trials the week after Kaedyn’s death.
He could barely breathe, much less wrestle.
“How could this happen to such an innocent kid? She never got to experience life. It seemed unfair. But after a point, you have to accept things the way they are. It’s life. Not everything works out the way you want it to,” Cormier says. “I was so terribly heartbroken. It felt like I was never going to come out of that funk.
“It felt like that place I was in was where I was going to stay for the rest of my life.”
Roughly one month after the accident, Coach John Smith—the legendary head of the Oklahoma State wrestling team—called Cormier on the phone.
“I know you don’t want to hear this. But if you want to honor your daughter, you’re going to have to get back to work and get back to wrestling,” Smith told Cormier. “This sport has done everything for you. This sport will help you get through this dark time. But you have to get back to work.”
*****
Kaedyn’s death was not Cormier’s first brush with tragedy. His father, who had separated from his mother when he was young, was murdered when Daniel was just seven years old.
The call came one Thanksgiving Day when Cormier was at his aunt Marjorie’s house. The entire family was gathered around the television watching “The Color Purple.” His mother was called to the phone. When she answered, her face contorted. She began screaming.
The details are murky, much like everything else in Daniel’s memory regarding his father. His dad had gone to a party with his new family. There was an argument and Daniel’s dad ended up dead, made that way by his new father-in-law and the gun he’d pulled as the fight escalated.
It was Daniel’s first real experience with death.
“As a kid, you’re so busy playing around that you don’t really understand what somebody passing away actually means,” he says. “I don’t think that I really, fully understood that I would never see him again.”
His grandmother’s death, roughly one year after his father’s murder, made him cry so much that he came down with brutal migraines that restricted him to his darkened bedroom for days. He remembers those days vividly. But why is he left with just one random memory of the man who fathered him?
“I’m not sure if my memories have just faded away, or if I just didn’t spend much time with him. You know what that one memory is? I was a boy, and I guess my dad drove delivery trucks,” Cormier says. “One day we were at the truckyard, and we were all just sitting around while he was cleaning his truck, getting it ready for a trip. That’s my last memory of my dad.
“I don’t know to explain why I lost those memories.”
****
One day when Daniel was 10 years old, he and his cousin P.J. were kicking a football in the street. P.J. had acquired a football tee, but this created a problem. They only had one tee. Both kids wanted to kick the ball, but they had little desire to go and retrieve it.
As these things go, the kids started fighting, right there in the middle of the street. This was a regular occurrence. But this time, they were stopped mid-tussle by the local high school wrestling coach.
“He told us we were going to get in trouble, fighting on the streets,” Cormier says. And then the coach offered some advice that would change Cormier’s life forever. “He said we should try wrestling.”
The next day, Cormier attended the wrestling practice for the kids team, the Junior Vikings. The only problem? Cormier didn’t realize what kind of wrestling he was getting into.
“We thought we were going to do some pro wrestling,” he says with a laugh. “We went in there, and they just tore the s–t out of us. I thought ‘man, this ain’t for me.'”
But he stuck with it, and he got better. Midway through his first year of wrestling, he made it to the state finals. In his freshman year of high school, he made the varsity team, but his grades were so bad that he couldn’t continue.
“I actually failed off the team,” he says.
It was not the last time he’d be thrown off the team. The second came during his junior year, when Cormier and a friend decided to celebrate a successful wrestling dual by lighting a smoke bomb on the team bus. He was booted from the team, then spent every afternoon staring forlornly into the wrestling room as his teammates practiced. It took several weeks, but the coach finally relented and allowed Cormier back on the team, with two caveats: He had to clean the mats after every practice, and he had to do extra conditioning work.
Perhaps this is simplifying things, but that smoke bomb led Cormier to Oklahoma State and Athens and then the UFC and, if things go according to plan, a world light heavyweight championship belt strapped around his waist on January 3.
*****
Cormier was never supposed to end up in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He’d gone to Colby Community College because his high school grades were terrible and he wasn’t able to get into his first choice, Oklahoma.
But in the end, it was not Stillwater or Oklahoma State that helped make Cormier’s decision. It was Coach Smith.
Smith felt wrestlers should want to come to Oklahoma State, dammit, and should consider it a privilege if he allowed them to do so.
This struck Cormier as different from most recruiters, but it also intrigued him. Here was a man who told him one time that he should come to Oklahoma State, and then went radio silent. He simply told Cormier that he believed he was good enough to be a Cowboy, and then stopped talking to him altogether.
Take it or leave it. That was Smith’s attitude.
Cormier decided to take it, committing to Smith and to Oklahoma State. And once he got to the Cowboy’s wrestling room, he realized he wasn’t as good at wrestling as he thought. And he was out of shape. After practice, the coaches would make the team run three miles. Cormier was often picked up by a trailing vehicle, walking on the side of the road. He couldn’t finish the runs.
But then Cormier began to embrace the grind, to steal one of his future marketing slogans, and he began to improve at a rapid pace. He put in extra work early in the morning. He started winning matches. And before long, he was facing Cael Sanderson—the greatest collegiate wrestler in history—for the NCAA championship.
He did not beat Sanderson, because nobody beat Sanderson. But even placing highly among his collegiate peers did little to dull the pain of not being the best.
*****
On July 5, one month after his daughter’s death, Cormier resumed his life. He began seeing a psychiatrist. Lawal, Kelly, Kevin Jackson and his other friends rallied around him. His new wife Robin was a godsend.
Two months after the accident, he went to Fargo, North Dakota, to wrestle for a spot on the national team. He faced Dean Morrison, one of the toughest opponents throughout his career. Morrison beat him the first of three matches by clinching him and throwing him on his back.
After the match, Coach Smith and Kenny Monday were waiting for him.
“You need to cowboy up and get this done,” Smith told him.
In the second match, Cormier threw Morrison and pinned him. The third and final match would determine who would go on to wrestle at the 2003 Worlds in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
Morrison quickly went up 2-0 on Cormier.
“I told you to cowboy up,” Smith told Cormier between rounds. “Get back out there and don’t come back to this corner until you get your hand raised.”
“And that’s exactly what I did,” Cormier said. He beat Morrison, advancing and becoming a world medalist. “And from then on, I was on every national team from 2003 to 2008. Out of all the wrestlers in the United States, there were only seven guys who got to go and wrestle in the Olympics. And I was one of those guys.”
Cormier went to the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. He soaked in the experience and felt the rush that comes from representing your country at the highest levels of sport. On the wrestling front, he advanced all the way to the semifinals, where he lost to the fearsome Russian Khajimurad Gatsalov. He went into the bronze medal match, but lost to former world champion Ali Reza Heydari.
“Throughout my whole entire wrestling career, I think I lost to guys that were just better than me. I can deal with that. When a guy is better, he’s better. As long as I give myself the best opportunity to win, I’m okay with that,” he says. “Gatsalov was better. Sanderson was better. Heydari was better. These guys were better than me. When I lost to them because they were better, I could deal with that.”
But he was not the best, and it ate at him.
*****
Beginning in 2006, Cormier began having issues with his weight management. He went to the Uzbekistan Independence Cup, but couldn’t make weight and was forced to sit the tournament out. The next year, he opted to forego his usual 96 kg (211.5 pounds) weight class and wrestled at heavyweight.
It was a sign of things to come.
Cormier was a heavy favorite going into the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He was the American team captain and was expected to medal. A gold medal was not out of the question. Wrestling expert and historian Mike Riordan noted how great Cormier’s chances were going into the Games in China:
The saddest part about this was the fact that Cormier could have beaten any of the wrestlers in his weight at those Games. Cormier had a previous win over the silver medalist, Kazakhstan’s Taimuraz Tigiev, and beat bronze medalist Khetag Gazumov at the 2005 Yarygin. Making matters even worse, perennial Russian 96 kg kingpin Gatsalov didn’t even compete in Beijing due to an injury.
But Cormier never got the chance to find out if he’d finally ascended to the top of the wrestling mountain.
On August 20, 2008, he was cutting weight for his match the following day. He managed to hit the targeted weight, but his kidneys shut down hours later. He went to the hospital to have fluids inserted in his body, but it did not help. On the advice of Team USA doctors, Cormier was pulled from the Olympics.
His Olympic dream was over. This time, it was not at the hands of a more talented opponent, but because his own body failed him. If he’d won a gold medal in the Olympics, he would’ve ended his athletic career and found something else to do. Perhaps he would’ve gone out and looked for a real job.
But he didn’t win a gold medal, and the hole inside still existed. He needed to find a new way to quell his competitive drive.
He didn’t have to wait long.
*****
In 2001, former collegiate wrestler Dewayne Zinkin founded a sports management company with Bob Cook, a mixed martial arts veteran who earned the nickname “Crazy” due to his willingness to drive four hours from his home to AKA in order to train. Zinkin Entertainment quickly became a powerhouse firm with deep roots at American Kickboxing Academy, a gym started by Javier Mendez.
Zinkin had followed Cormier’s career at Oklahoma State with great interest. He believed that Cormier’s style of wrestling would make for an easy transition to mixed martial arts.
“When you’re done with your wrestling career, call us,” Zinkin told him during a 2002 phone conversation. But there were Olympic teams to make, medals to win and dreams to fulfill.
Six years after that first conversation with Zinkin, Cormier decided he wanted to fight. His wrestling days were over after the Beijing Olympics. He’d ballooned up to 264 pounds and was ready to get back in shape.
Cormier got on the phone with Zinkin and told him he wanted to fight, and that he wanted to join AKA.
“This is the call I’ve been waiting six years for,” Zinkin told him.
On his second day in the gym, Cormier was tasked with wrestling against super-prospect Cain Velasquez. Cormier had reached higher wrestling levels than Velasquez, but he was also out of shape. Long before he would win a heavyweight title, Velasquez was already famous for his cardiovascular capabilities.
After a long wrestling session followed by jiu-jitsu class, Cormier was dehydrated. His body cramped. He was taken to a local hospital. Zinkin and Cook arrived after Cormier was already settled in a room.
“They stripped him down and put him in on of those gowns. I walked into his hospital room and there’s Daniel, lying on the bed, hooked up to an IV,” Cook says. “His belly was sticking up higher than anything on the table by the bed, and his ass was hanging out of the hospital gown.
“And I thought to myself: ‘boy, we have a lot of work to do on this one.'”
He was in terrible shape, but he showed the same desire that drove him to compete at the highest levels in wrestling.
“You could see his competitive spirit. I already knew that he had that fighter’s mentality,” Cook says.
A day or two after the dehydration incident, Cook called Scott Coker, the owner and promoter of Strikeforce. Coker had an event coming up in Stillwater, and he wanted Cormier on the card.
“A month after he was on that gurney in the hospital, when he’d just started training, we had him fighting in the first fight on television,” Cook says. “So he got a quick fight camp in. And within a month of his first day of training, we had him walking into the cage for his first televised fight for Strikeforce.”
As Cook and Cormier walked to the cage for his first fight, Cormier stopped and turned to his new coach.
“Don’t worry, Bob,” Cormier said. “I’m a gamer.”
He had one month of training, zero amateur fighting experience and was rough around the edges. But on that night, September 25, 2009, Cormier walked in the cage and beat Gary Frazier by TKO in the second round for his first professional win.
*****
Today’s American Kickboxing Academy is far different than the motley crew that once assembled at the original gym, in a glass shop on Pearl Avenue. In fact, if you’d visited AKA five years ago, you would hardly recognize most of the faces floating through the new facility.
Gone are Jon Fitch, Josh Koscheck and the others that once made up AKA’s fearsome roster of fighters. Nowadays, the gym revolves around three highly-polished professionals: Cormier, Cain Velasquez and Luke Rockhold. Their faces adorn giant posters that figuratively smack you in the face when you walk in the door.
“It’s the DC, Cain and Luke show,” Mendez says. “It’s the changing of the guard.”
Everyone knows about AKA’s legacy of churning out great fighters. But at its heart, the gym is catered to families. There are wrestling classes and jiu-jitsu and conditioning classes, all aimed at working mothers and fathers who drop the kids off after school and pick them up after they’ve completed classes of their own. Entire families clad in gis mill about near the front desk, sipping meal replacement smoothies and interacting with some of the professional fighters on the roster.
Cormier trains three times per day. Unlike many professional fighters who sleep until noon or beyond, Cormier is usually walking out his front door between 6 and 7 a.m. He drives in traffic to Santa Clara for his first training session of the day, usually focused on strength and conditioning, then drives back to the house in more traffic. He rests for a few hours, then heads to AKA for his second session of the day, from 12-2 p.m.
Afterwards, he heads home to eat and rest, and to spend time with fiance Salina Deleon and their two children. He met Salina years ago, back when he stayed in Zinkin’s home while starting out at AKA. He was instantly smitten.
“Will you take a photo with me? Please?,” Cormier asked her. Deleon wasn’t quite sure to make of the request.
“I thought it was kinda cheesy and weird. I wanted to know why he wanted a picture with me. But I said yes,” Salina says. “He had one of his friends take a picture of us. So maybe it was love at first sight?”
Cormier and Deleon talked briefly, and then she left. The next morning, he showed up at her work. He asked her out on a date that night. She said yes.
They’ve been together ever since. Last July, he asked her to be his wife. They’ll get married after the Jones fight.
In the meantime, she spends her days managing their family around Cormier’s schedule. She tries to make sure the kids are awake when he gets home each night. During fight week in Las Vegas, she’ll give him space to mentally prepare himself, even staying in a separate hotel room at the MGM Grand. But he knows she’s there if he needs to see her.
It is a role she gladly accepts, even though it is not always easy.
“I used to dread training camps. I would have to brace myself. I would have to be mentally prepared to go in,” Deleon says. “But now I think about how far he’s come, and know this is exactly where we dreamed of being with all these opportunities. So I try to be positive about everything, and grateful.”
*****
By 5:30 p.m., Cormier is back at AKA putting his kid’s wrestling team through its paces.
Coaching the team—made up of local kids ranging from 4 to 11 years old—is Cormier’s way of giving back to the sport that has given him so much.
He has a dedicated wrestling room at AKA. A “Daniel Cormier Wrestling” logo adorns the wall. It is spartan, with nothing but mats on the ground and walls. The room smells terrible in the way a locker room smells terrible, which is to say it smells of hard work and more than a few tears.
On one recent night, Cormier stands in the corner of the room. Packed into the room are thirty kids wearing fight shorts, t-shirts and wrestling boots. They are going through the “Shark Tank,” which is a kinder way of describing hell.
There are two circles of kids on opposite ends of the room. In the center of one circle is a kid who, if you didn’t know he’s only been wrestling for a year, you’d swear is a seasoned professional. He looks like a wrestler should look, with headgear and shoes and bowed legs. It is easy to imagine a time when his cauliflower ears will begin to develop.
He has muscles with definition. He is six years old.
In the middle of the other circle is Cormier’s most veteran team member. He is eleven, and has won state championships.
Here is the Shark Tank: At the beginning, one kid from the outside circle strolls into the middle and begins wrestling with either the six year old version of Dan Gable or the state champion. They try to pin and throw each other, grunting and sweating. After a few minutes, a horn blows. The kid from the outside circle goes back, and his place is taken by another kid from the outside.
The mini-wrestlers in the middle stay put, because that’s the entire point of the Shark Tank. They wrestle multiple opponents in a row, for several minutes at a time, with no rest between rounds.
It is excruciating to watch, especially when you realize these children are doing more athletically in ten minutes than you have perhaps done in your entire life.
Six year old Dan Gable pops up from a takedown and immediately grabs his knee. He is attempting to hold back tears, but as he is six years old, is unsuccessful. Despite his best efforts, the tears fall. Cormier switches from barking directions to a tone of compassion, ensuring that Mini-Gable is okay.
After a few minutes (and a few leaked tears), Mini-Gable returns to the middle of the pack, ready to take on his next opponent. Cormier goes back to yelling.
The horn sounds.
*****
After wrestling class, Cormier heads down the hall to AKA’s locker room to change clothes for his final session of the day. It is a strategy session where Cormier, Mendez and Cook try to figure out how they’ll beat Jon Jones on January 3rd.
Jones is perhaps the greatest mixed martial artist the world has ever seen. Beyond his physical traits—many of which are significant, such as his extensive reach—Jones also possesses the most brilliant mind in the sport. He spends countless hours poring over fight footage. Before each fight, Jones and his coaches make “playbooks” on his opponents: their weaknesses, their strengths, their mental lapses. He looks for holes to exploit, and then uses his endless creativity to beat his opponents at their own game. He has utterly dominated some of the greatest light heavyweight fighters in the history of the sport.
Who can forget the visage of Jones choking out Lyoto Machida, then casually dropping him on his face and strolling away?
It is an incredibly tough fight for Cormier, who is a slight underdog with days remaining before the fight. But Cook believes it is also the toughest test of Jones’ career, and says the world might be in for a surprise.
“We are expecting a tough fight. But I also would not be surprised if Daniel runs away with this fight and makes it look easy,” Cook says. “To this point in time, Daniel has made all of his opponents look easy. He has a knack for doing that. He win and makes it look effortless.”
“It’s being promoted as two undefeated fighters,” Zinkin adds. “The difference between the two is that Daniel has never lost a round.”
Cormier can see both sides.
“The one thing that Jon and I have done is that we’ve made tough guys look like they’re not so good,” he says. “So when you get in there and you have two guys who have done that at every turn, it’ll be interesting to see who can get in their and impose their will on the other. It will be interesting to see who can make the other guy fight in the places they are uncomfortable.
“I’m going to have to push harder, in ways that I haven’t had to yet. Do I think I can go in and shut him out and win every round? Yeah. One hundred percent. If I fight to the best of my abilities, I think I can win and it doesn’t have to be close. It’s still going to be hard. But when it’s done, I don’t think I have to be standing there with my heart beating a hundred miles per minute.”
The fight, more than anything that comes along with it, represents another chance for Cormier to ascend to the top of the mountain.
He has been one of the best wrestlers in the United States. He has represented the country at the highest levels possible in wrestling. But he has always fallen short when given a chance to prove he is the best.
“I’ve never been in the best in the world at anything. And this will probably be my last chance to do something and be the best in the world,” he says. “I’m 35 years old. I probably won’t get many more opportunities to prove that I can be the best at something. I feel like this is my last opportunity, and I’ve trained and worked my tail off to give myself that chance.”
And so Cormier goes about his daily grind, waking up early, going to bed late, teaching wrestling classes, fulfilling television duties for Fox and tending to his family at home. He is often exhausted and sounds tired no matter the time of day.
It is all part of a plan that he hopes will pay off on January 3. But he is also refreshingly honest about the difficulties of facing such a talented opponent.
“I can’t say with 100% certainty that I will beat Jon Jones. I believe I will win. But even after everything I’ve gone through, there are no guarantees in the fight business. And if I can’t beat him, I think that will be okay, because I will have given myself the best chance to win this fight. I cut no corners. I’ve taken no sick days.
“I’ve done everything you need to do in order to fight the best pound for pound fighter in the world. If it doesn’t happen, it won’t be for lack of effort.”
Daniel Cormier faces Jon Jones for the UFC light heavyweight championship in the main event of UFC 182 on Saturday night. All quotes were obtained first-hand.
Jon “Bones” Jones and Daniel “DC” Cormier couldn’t be much more different. That’s part of what makes their bout on Saturday night at UFC 182 so compelling. Their personalities clash—which explains why they hate each other. Also, their fighting styles are different as well.