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A new week, a new batch of MMA headlines to warm your heart or make you palm your face. This time around we’ve got more good works from Jared Gordon and a little advocacy from Loma Lookboonmee. But, we’ve also got Max Griffin with MMA judging complaints and Henry Cejudo stealing the spotlight from everyone with a whole bunch of unnecessary drama.
As always, I’m doing my best to sort through it all and try to separate the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the fools.
LOVE TO SEE IT
Jared Gordon stays on message
One of the things that MMA does like few other sports out there is to connect fans to real, honest to god hard luck stories. In a world where more and more athletes find themselves in private schools and top flight programs from an early age, preparing them for potential future stardom, Mixed Martial Arts remains a true home for misfits.
In point of fact, it’s nearly cliche at this juncture to turn on Dana White’s Contender Series and hear multiple tales of child abuse, neglect, crime, and addiction. The people that find their peace in cage fighting often come to it through fire and brimstone.
That said, it’s not every fighter that finds their way from a tragic past to advocacy for a positive future. For many, the mistakes they’ve made—the harm they’ve caused to themselves or others—are things they’d rather put firmly behind them. It’s can feel a lot easier to start a new chapter in life by severing all association to the person someone used to be.
I’d argue it takes a special kind of strength to make past mistakes as big a part of someone’s reformation as their current successes; to not forget who they used to be and what trials bought them here.
It’s great then to see the level of advocacy that Jared Gordon does regularly for drug addiction awareness and recovery. A self-described heroin user starting at age 19, Gordon was left legally dead from a drug overdose in 2015. An incident that pushed him to finally kick the habit and turn his life around.
Now 35 and with a 13-year MMA career under his belt, he’s still doing PSA work and public outreach to try and help others fight addiction.
There are plenty of fighters out there that get involved with charitable causes, but few seem to do so with the level of consistency and self reflection that Gordon shows. The man is setting a great example and his advocacy should be lauded at every turn.
Loma Lookboonmee campaigns for UFC atomweight division
It has to be said—despite Dana White’s past sexism—no promotion has done more to build the public perception of women’s combat sports than the UFC. The conversation around women’s MMA may have started with things like HOOKnSHOOT, JEWELS, EliteXC, and Strikeforce, but the UFC is what really brought it main stream. In a day and age where sports like boxing and kickboxing are still entirely struggling to create any amount of interest in their best and brightest performers, the UFC is an industry leader.
Currently, the Octagon is the only place where combat sports fans can routinely see women headlining not just smaller Fight Night events, but even PPVs. Nothing else out there compares.
That said, the promotion’s dedication to female athletes still often feels slipshod and halfhearted. Having once put all its eggs in the Ronda Rousey basket the UFC has struggled to bring forward a new generation of stars, especially in higher weight divisions.
But, if a venture into women’s featherweight has entirely failed to pay dividends, the women’s strawweight division has maintained a position of relative strength. Fighters like Joanna Jedrzejczyk, Rose Namajunas, and Weili Zhang may have never risen to superstar prominence, but have proven popular commodities capable of bringing high level MMA to the UFC’s biggest stages.
If it’s clear right now that there’s more talent to be found at 115 lbs than there is at 135, then shouldn’t the UFC be setting its sights lower rather than higher? That’s a question Thai UFC talent Loma Lookboonmee would like answered as well.
“The big surprise for me was just how big [Bruna Brasil] was,” Lookboonmee reporters after her latest victory (transcript via MMA Junkie). “She was so much taller than me. I really hope they open 105.”
“I think that if the UFC opens 105, No. 1, I’ll be the first fighter in there. No. 2, I think it would open up a lot of opportunities for Asian women—not just from Thailand, but from all over Asia. So I really hope they do it. People message me from time to time asking me if they’re going to do it, but obviously I don’t know.”
At 5′ 1″, competing in the strawweight division is always going to be a struggle for Lookboonmee. But with talents like Carla Esparza (5′ 1″), Tecia Torres (5′ 1″), Brianna Fortino (4′ 11″), and Tabatha Ricci (5′ 1″), it feels like the promotion already has a collection of athletes under contract to build from.
The UFC has found repeatedly over the years, that fighting is a great opportunity for smaller athletes. Despite their reluctance to open divisions downward, every time they’ve done so, the quality of their product increases.
There are many parts of the world, including those where the UFC would love to see more expansion, where women tend to be much more in line with a potential atomweight division. It’s not hard to think that Lookboonmee would be proven correct in pretty short order. The featherweight division has failed, but that doesn’t need to mean fewer spots on the roster. Time to try something new.
HATE TO SEE IT
Max Griffin picks the exact wrong time to complain about judging
At this point, complaints about MMA scoring feel nearly as old as MMA itself. Whether it’s the idea that a takedown steals the round, or that guard work is underappreciated, or Dominick Cruz insisting that there’s no more decisive sign of damage than a cut on the eyebrow, it feels like no fight card goes by without some level of controversy.
This past weekend was no exception. We had Bolaji Oki experiencing the dread of a mysterious split score for what should have been a reasonably clear victory over Timothy Cuamba and, earlier in the evening, we had Max Griffin’s fight against Jeremiah Wells.
After his bout, Griffin sat down with reporters to lodge a complaint against one judge in particular, noted longtime MMA official Sal D’Amato. Only, given the fact that Griffin won a fight most observers felt he should have lost, it’s very difficult to figure out exactly what is the man’s damage?
“I cannot stand Sal D’Amato,” Griffin told reporters at his post-fight presser (transcript MMA Junkie). “He has me on Neil Magny losing, he has me on numerous fights. … He picks against me every single time. I don’t know if I did something in a past life to him, if I did something to him, but Sal D’Amato hates me.”
Of course, faced with a claim like that, pundits were quick to fact check Griffin, finding that—far from being a victim of systemic abuse—the longtime welterweight has had exactly four fights judged by D’Amato in his career. Of those four, D’Amato scored two for Griffin and two against him.
I get it, it’s MMA—thin skinned-ness is practically a packaged deal for athletes, along with bad knees and staph infection. At some point, though, I have to wonder if it’s all performative. Ever fighter can’t just be picking the weirdest reasons to get mad all the time can they?
I like Max Griffin, he’s a solid, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of talent who has made a lot of consistent small improvements in his game over the years. But he’s also a decision machine who goes nip-tuck with everyone. He has no one to blame but himself for a lack of clear and easy victories. Especially not a judge that happened to get the last one right.
Henry Cejudo pranks himself?
Unexpectedly, one of the biggest topics in MMA news this past week has been around Henry Cejudo. But rather than a focus on his potential future retirement plans—or on the difficulty of facing Merab Dvalishvili at UFC 298 after losing to Serra-Longo teammate Aljamain Sterling—fighters, fans, and pundits have found themselves faced with an odd bit of UFC shoulder programming.
UFC 298 Countdown cameras appeared to capture what should have been a private moment from Cejudo’s fight camp. In it the former Olympic gold medalist and two division champion dismissed his longtime coach Eric Albarracin.
“I’m getting rid of specific coaches, man, and that’s you included, dude,” Cejudo said, clearly playing the moment for the cameras before explaining that he knew he could publicly strip Albarracin of his duties like that because of the man’s natural humility.
The video led to a hilarious exchange between Dvalishvili and the Fight Ready captain just a couple days later, with the Georgian fighter joking that he had swiped Cejudo’s coach for himself. But it also led to a lot of obvious backlash.
Not because getting some new coaches might not be the right move for Cejudo. Fighters, after all, need to be selfish to a pretty high degree. They take the risk, they take the loss. If ‘Triple C’ felt he needed a new camp to win his next fight, he’s well within his rights to make that move. But to make it a public spectacle the way he did just smacked of unnecessary tactlessness—an unfortunate byproduct of a man often called the ‘King of Cringe.’
With blowback from the video seemingly unabating, Cejudo took to Instagram on Tuesday to announce that the initial video of him firing his coach was, in fact, just a prank for the cameras.
If that whole thing really was a joke (and this isn’t just some attempt to save face), then Cejudo has to know that the joke was on him, right?
People don’t care if he’s working with Albarracin or not, that’s his business. Some fighters trade coaches like Dana White changes P4P GOAT proclamations, a new one every week. Nobody cares. All Cejudo did was make himself look like an jackass in public for nobody’s gain. The whole discussion will be forgotten in a couple months time to no result beyond the fact that for a few days people thought, “Wow, that guy’s a jerk.”
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