Editor’s Note: This article draws from an interview on FloCombat that Elias Cepeda conducted with Luke Rockhold.
What a fascinating, hard to pick, match up Saturday’s UFC 210 main event is, huh? In one corner we’ll have the defending light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier, a man who has only one loss in his professional career (a competitive decision to Jon Jones), who has won three-straight fights and who owns a submission victory over his challenger.
In the other corner, Anthony Johnson, who is somehow the oddsmakers’ betting favorite despite decisively losing to Cormier back in 2015. Simply put, Cormier has given us no reason to doubt him, and is the better all-around fighter, in addition to being the more proven winner.
Cormier has a wrestling advantage, ground grappling edge, superior conditioning, is a better submission fighter, and has much more championship experience than Johnson. Still, Johnson is hard to pick against because of his one-shot striking power.
Predictably, Cormier’s friend and American Kickboxing Academy teammate Luke Rockhold is confident DC will retain his title. Still, Rockhold’s analysis of the rematch during a recent conversation for FloCombat shone light on some nuances I hadn’t previously considered.
In their first fight a wobbled Cormier had to survive early hell to eventually get the fight where he wanted, wear down and submit Johnson.
Conventional wisdom may have it that Cormier could very well once again beat Johnson, but that he’ll likely have to absorb some punishment along the way to do it. Rockhold doesn’t see things that way at all.
“I think it’s easily possible,” he told me of Cormier’s chances of avoiding damage from Johnson on the way to victory.
“Cormier is a wrestler like very few in the world. You could say Yoel Romero, but I think Cormier is technical in so many ways. I think he’s a little bit smarter and uses his wrestling better than Yoel. He’s tactical.”
Rockhold went on to boast of Cormier’s ability to grit and grind through tough spots, but clearly believes that the champion’s mind and grappling ability can allow him to avoid the type of hurting he had to take against Johnson the first time out.
“He can easily go in there and get the takedown and he’s a bitch on top. So, I know that Anthony Johnson doesn’t want to be on the ground with DC on top of him,” he continued.
“He’s proven it before – he took him down and finished him there. Yeah, of course you have to watch out for the bombs but it’s obviously possible.”
To me, the most fascinating part of the conversation with Rockhold regarding UFC 210’s main event had to do with psychology. One of the conventional critiques of Johnson is that, generally speaking, he can be broken, mentally, in a fight once things stop going his way, and that submission losses to the likes of Cormier and Vitor Belfort were more of his looking for ways out of those battles.
Cormier himself has suggested as much, saying that he broke Johnson’s psyche before, and that he knows he can do it, again. Those in the sport certainly know the phenomenon – fighters being dominated and hurt on the ground have even been known to ask their opponents to take a submission hold so that the fight could end honorably.
Rockhold doesn’t think that Johnson looks for ways out of fights, though. To the former middleweight champ, it is simply about work put in and work willing to be put out.
“I think it’s being susceptible to the grind and just being outworked,” he explained.
“It’s not about wanting a way out from a submission, it’s about how much work can you put in? When you have that much power, are you going to put in as much work as the next guy? That’s the question. How much do you want it?”
Fight movies often portray a type of magical, conscious decision-making process fighters supposedly make in fleeting moments during a fight where their lives pass before their eyes and they resolve to fight back and win. In Rockhold’s analysis, what fighters do in those moments is less about in-the-moment reflection, and more about who they were in training camp, and every day in their lives leading up to that moment.
To that end, Rockhold just doesn’t imagine that Anthony Johnson has worked as hard as Cormier has. So, if and when he needs it, Johnson won’t have it in him to work as hard in the fight as Cormier.
“That grind that DC is capable of, not a lot of people are capable of withstanding that pressure,” he concluded.
“The guy has been wrestling his whole life and he’s got that discipline and work ethic [that] is hard to really match.”
Read entire article at FloCombat…
About the author:
Elias Cepeda has served as a writer and editor covering mixed martial arts and combat sports, as well as public and cultural affairs, since 2005. He began as a staff writer for InsideFighting, and not long thereafter became publisher and editor of the page. Cepeda then went to write for Yahoo! Sports’ boxing and MMA pages, and edited their Cagewriter blog. He was hired away by FOX Sports, but after several years departed over philosophical differences with the executive leadership around important issues of journalism ethics. A student of and sometime competitor in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and MMA since 1999, Elias brings a unique and vibrant presence to reporting, and enjoys trying to highlight shared humanity and connect common experiences from seemingly different worlds.
