As rivals clash at UFC 165, champ Dominick Cruz fights power of suggestion

So I’m doing a phone interview with UFC bantamweight champ Dominick Cruz on Tuesday afternoon, just the usual routine in the usual circumstances, and I ask him what seems to me like a pretty obvious, innocuous question.

This is after I’ve already asked the other obvious, innocuous questions, like how his recovery from ACL surgery is coming (“I’m getting stronger and faster and I’m very optimistic,” he recited automatically), what his timeline for a return is (“According to [UFC president] Dana [White], I have until February, so that’s the goal”), and whom he likes in Saturday’s bantamweight interim title fight between Renan Barao (30-1 MMA, 5-0 UFC) and Eddie Wineland (20-8-1 MMA, 2-2 UFC) at UFC 165 (Barao, basically).

Where things take a turn is when I ask Cruz (19-1 MMA, 2-0 UFC), when he finally comes back to the cage after more than two years away, will he be the exact same person that he was when he left?

“If I thought like that,” Cruz replied, “what would be the point of me competing?”

OK, so there was a misunderstanding here. What I meant was, didn’t an experience like this have to have some effect on him? Maybe even a positive one? Maybe even just one of those near-career-ending deals that makes you appreciate each day as the precious freaking snowflake that it is?

“So your thought is that, because it’s been a long time and I haven’t fought in a long time, the worry of that would benefit me?” Cruz said.

Well, now I feel like a jerk.

In retrospect, the problem was the question, which is to say that the problem was me. What I was really asking was whether these tumultuous and difficult past two years had taught him anything, thus changing him in some way. It was more or less a setup for him to say something awesome and quotable about how much he’d learned from adversity and blah, blah, blah. When it failed, I would eventually resort to asking him what I should have asked in the first place: “So, um, do you think you’ve learned anything from this experience?” To which he would eagerly respond, “Oh, definitely.”

But first, we had to sort through my bad question. The more I tried to explain it, the worse it got. And the more we went back and forth on it, the more it became clear that while I was trying to ask if his injury and fraught attempts at recovery might have been some easily digestible hero’s journey, what he heard was, aren’t you worried that you won’t be as good as you used to be?

“The only way I can answer this question is that, if you’re fighting at this level and you have any doubt that you’re the best in the world, then you will be beat,” Cruz said eventually. “Because the person you’re fighting, he doesn’t have any doubt. If you ask Renan Barao right now if he thinks that he’s the best bantamweight on the planet and nobody can beat him, he’s going to say yes. So if I say, ‘Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be as good as I once was,’ I’m already putting doubt in my mind. I’m already copping out. And the truth is, I don’t think that. I don’t think that I won’t be as strong as I once was, because if I did, that’s negative thought that I don’t need in my head. I’m always thinking positive and looking to the future, and the future has me fighting one of the better guys on the planet, so I need to be at that level. I will be at that level.”

This is as good a place as any to tell you something you probably already know: Pro fighters aren’t like the rest of us. The above quote illustrates just one of the reasons why. So does the following one.

“To me, when people ask me, ‘Dominick, aren’t you scared that you aren’t going to come back as good as you were?’ I can’t even entertain it,” Cruz said. “I can’t entertain it because it makes no sense. What if you broke your hand and you were trying to write a story? Are you worried that you won’t be as good when you come back?”

First of all, that’s a bad analogy, but I don’t blame Cruz for that. It happens a lot when fighters try to compare their jobs to, well, anyone else’s, really. Their jobs are not like anyone else’s, which is one of the things that makes their jobs worth paying to watch. The truth is that if I broke my hand, I’d probably just type with one hand. If I broke both hands, I’d get that crazy computer software that magically turns my speech into words on the screen. I’ve seen the commercials.

The better analogy would be, if I was unable to write for two years – pick your hypothetical reason, maybe I’m in a coma or stuck on a deserted island or just really, really lazy – would I be worried that I wouldn’t be able to write as well when I came back to it? And the answer is yes, I would totally be worried about that. Really worried. But I have the luxury of working in a medium in which my failures can stay in the drawer (or, in the modern world, in a folder on my desktop). Cruz doesn’t.

The fact is that, knee injury or no, unless he wants to relinquish his title and retire, Cruz is going to have to come back to the UFC after one of the longest layoffs in recent memory, and he’s probably going to have to fight the second-best guy in the weight class right away. That’s a tough situation, and it would be enough to have most of us questioning ourselves in a major way. Cruz is not like that, at least part because he is making a conscious decision not to be.

The question we have to ask is, is that because he’s truly built differently, or is he just better at fooling himself than most people?

For instance, take this response from Cruz on the subject of self-doubt, and why he gets a little touchy when reporters ask him about it.

“I can’t let those negative thoughts creep in,” Cruz said. “So when I get questions like that from the media in every single interview, it’s frustrating because I don’t entertain those thoughts. People can’t understand. It comes off like I’m arrogant, but you can’t let negative thoughts creep into your mind when you’re in the situation I’m in, and that includes when you’re doing interviews. To me, I will be back the exact same as I was when I left. It’s just been a while.”

Cruz is not the first pro fighter to espouse this theory. If anything, he’s just a little more eloquent and direct about it than most. I’ve heard several pro fighters say that the reason they’ve avoided interviews in the past is not because they don’t have the time or don’t see the point, but because they don’t want to take the risk that we’ll put something in their heads that they don’t want there. It’s the power of suggestion that they’re worried about, and not without reason.

Imagine you’re going to start a new job in a couple weeks. Imagine you’re excited about it. Then say I come along and start asking you, aren’t you nervous? Aren’t you worried that your boss won’t like you? What if something terrible happens on your first day? I might not know anything more about this job than you do – I might, in fact, know far less – but after enough of these questions, you’re probably going to start to internalize the hypothetical anxieties that I’m feeding you. How could you not?

The difference is, unless things go bad in a major way, you’re probably not going to get fired on the first day of a new job. Cruz, on the other hand, stands a very good chance of losing his title upon his return. Just don’t tell him that. He doesn’t want to hear it, even if (maybe especially if) it might be true. He wants to preserve the purity of his own positive thoughts, which is maybe not such a bad idea since thoughts can easily become feelings, and feelings can influence actions.

In Cruz’s mind, he’s lost nothing these past two years. It has to be that way, even if that’s what just about every fighter says before he comes back from injury, only to reverse his stance after the fight, when he’s finally free to admit that, yeah, layoffs matter.

But that’s after the fight, when your thoughts can go where they want once again. It’s before the fight that they must be protected, watched over, corralled only into the most useful zones of your mind. If you’re a fighter who can’t do that, you probably don’t make it as far in this sport as Cruz has. You probably don’t even try, maybe because you can think of so many reasons not to.

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