It’s fairly common in combat sports for people to say they don’t believe in luck.
Perhaps we have Dan Gable to thank for this. The legendary amateur wrestler and coach is fond of imploring people to “make their own luck” during autograph signings and speaking events. There is an even older adage, often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, which insists, “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
It’s easy to see why such notions appeal to MMA types. Nobody wants to pour his guts into a grueling life as a professional fighter, one filled with the drudgery of training camps, the pain of injury and worries over long-term health risks, only to think the end result depends largely on chance.
The truth is, however, you just can’t control a lot about this sport.
How else to explain the curious cases of Demetrious Johnson and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, whose divergent paths cross when they serve as the marquee attractions of Saturday’s UFC 186?
One of them is recognized among the sport’s legitimate good guys—not to mention a champion, one of the best pound-for-pound fighters on the planet—but he can’t seem to catch a break.
The other? Well, let’s just say he’s having the exact opposite experience.
Regarded as perhaps the sport’s most complete fighter, Johnson is the only flyweight titlist the Octagon has ever known. He’s undefeated at 125 pounds (21-2-1 overall), has won seven in a row and has beaten most of the best competition in his weight class without ever appearing truly vulnerable.
He is a fighting champion who defended his title three times during 2013 and twice last year. Three of his five most recent fights ended in stoppages. He’s been so good that he’s essentially cleaned out the division, and this weekend matchmakers have resorted to putting him opposite Kyoji Horiguchi, a 24-year-old unknown who is going off as a 6-1 underdog, according to Odds Shark.
Johnson is a joy to watch—quick as a blink and technically flawless—and he has never backed down from a challenge. Despite garnering little respect as one of the smallest and newest UFC champions, he seldom complains and seems hungry for the best competition that company executives can bring him.
Outside the cage he’s smart, easygoing and likable. In short, he’s everything we say we want in a fighter.
Yet nobody gives a damn about him.
Leading up to the Horiguchi fight, cracks have finally started to show in the champion’s usually calm exterior. Most of the pre-fight press concerned why Johnson hasn’t connected with UFC fans, and he appears a little bit frustrated by the discussion. He’s dropped a few F-bombs here and there, telling fans if they don’t appreciate his work in the cage, that’s their problem.
“Honestly, I’ve seen a lot more positive (responses) from people when I was straight up and said ‘Dude, if you don’t want to watch me, that’s your f—king bad,” Johnson told MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani this week. “Go watch soap operas. Go watch WWE. If you want to watch the purest mixed martial arts and two great athletes mixing it up, you need to tune in.”
Despite this new approach, a UFC 186 pay-per-view helmed only by Johnson was largely considered lost property. His two previous headlining efforts at UFCs 174 and 178 garnered an estimated 115,000 and 205,000 buys, respectively. As Yahoo Sports’ Kevin Iole wrote on Tuesday about UFC 186, the biggest challenge facing the UFC was just getting people to care about it:
Nobody, apparently, wanted to talk to Demetrious Johnson … That meant the UFC’s estimable PR staff led by Dave Sholler had a massive challenge ahead of it.
It had to A) convince reporters to write about Johnson; B) try to find a way to get Johnson to be more compelling without compromising who he is as a man; C) sell a bout in which Johnson is roughly a 10-1 favorite as a competitive, must-see match and D) drum up interest in a fight that is in one of the UFC’s least-popular weight classes.
There are easier jobs.
On the polar opposite side of the equation is Jackson.
Here is a man who tumbles through life perpetually disgruntled—a guy who seems willfully unconscious of the fact he’s one of the luckiest men on earth, considering how many transgressions his career has already survived.
In July 2008, Jackson led California police on a high-speed chase while driving a Ford F-350 with his own image emblazoned on the side. He later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless driving, and a civil suit filed by a woman who said she miscarried after Jackson’s truck struck her car during the chase was either dropped or settled.
For most guys, in most jobs—including pro athletes—it would be tough to come back from an incident like that, but Jackson’s fighting life continued more or less without impediment.
In 2010, he briefly left MMA for a career in movies, appearing as B.A. Baracus in The A-Team movie. His performance was fine, but in the aftermath at least one story emerged about Jackson clashing with crew members. He hasn’t had much success with acting since.
Reports of Jackson’s bad behavior shouldn’t surprise anyone in our sport. We’ve seen him bully reporters and sexually harass reporters, and once he made a video making light of rape.
In more recent years, his skills in the cage have receded too. His interest level has faded from mild to nearly non-existent. Once regarded as an exciting fighter, Jackson’s last few appearances have been tepid, listless.
This weekend he returns to the Octagon after a two-year run in Bellator MMA. He left the UFC at the beginning of 2013, saying he was woefully unhappy, but after just three fights in the smaller organization he decided he was woefully unhappy there, too, and announced he wanted to come back.
He’s made a point over the years to say he doesn’t really care about MMA fans, that he only likes Rampage Jackson fans. In other words, he only cares about what you can offer him.
Yet, somehow, we’re told Jackson remains as popular as ever.
He enters 2015 as not just a viable personality in MMA’s charisma-starved landscape but a desirable one. There is a court battle currently ongoing over his services, with both the UFC and Bellator eager to get him back.
Jackson wasn’t even supposed to make it to UFC 186. Many folks scoffed when he claimed in December that Bellator was in breach of contract. Things got even more hilarious when we actually got a look at the particulars of his deal with that organization, which included a free Tesla sports car and a screenwriter kept on retainer to work with Jackson on reviving his acting career.
Again, riches beyond anything he deserved, yet Jackson didn’t even seem to realize it.
When a judge barred him from appearing at UFC 186 last week, it appeared to be confirmation of what we’d suspected—that the courts weren’t going to let Jackson walk out of his contract just because he felt like it. Then came Judge John C. Kennedy’s halfway inscrutable ruling on Tuesday, which suddenly put Jackson back into his bout against Fabio Maldonado.
“I stayed training, because I always felt like I was going to be here,” Jackson told reporters during a media scrum on Thursday, per MMAFighting.com. “I felt like everything happens for a reason. … It was very stressful, but I just kept training, stayed in the gym.”
Just another lucky break in a professional lifetime full of them.
His return to the card wasn’t necessarily celebrated as the second coming, but there was a generalized sense that UFC 186 was way better off with Jackson on the card. Better, anyway, than simply leaving it to Johnson.
The question is, why?
What is it about the 2015 version of Jackson that a large group of MMA fans still seem excited about watching? He lost three straight fights from 2011 to 2013, just prior to his move to Bellator. We’ve certainly already seen his best performances at 36 years old, and the low-rent stand-up comedy routine that makes up most of Jackson’s work with the media hasn’t had an update in at least a decade.
Why do so many fans continue to prefer him over the UFC’s 28-year-old flyweight champion?
Johnson is on the cutting edge of the sport’s athletic future. Jackson isn’t.
Johnson is still relevant, consumed with shaping his legacy at the highest level. Jackson isn’t.
Johnson seems like a good guy. Does Jackson?
Critics would likely say Johnson doesn’t bring much to the table, promotion-wise, but neither did some of the UFC’s most celebrated champions—Chuck Liddell or Anderson Silva, for example. Saying Johnson’s soft-spoken, nice-guy demeanor doesn’t sell with MMA fans is admitting we have a narrow definition of what it means to “sell the fight.”
Johnson works hard at his craft, but because he’s small and doesn’t pretend to be Conor McGregor, he can’t make people like him. Jackson barely tries, and the world continues to wait at his beck and call.
This weekend, one of them will excel on every level. He’ll likely handle Horiguchi with ease. He’ll maintain his place at the top of the sport and be rewarded only by a slew of think pieces about what a shame it is more people don’t give him a chance.
The other won’t even be required to make weight. He’ll probably defeat Maldonado at their 215-pound catchweight, in a slow-paced and ugly exchange of punches and then drive off in his free sports car, with money blowing out the windows.
The world’s two largest MMA promotions will continue to chase after him, waving lucrative contract extensions.
The only way to adequately describe this juxtaposition is with sheer dumb luck.
Or maybe just really bad taste.
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