Have we been thinking about UFC champ Demetrious Johnson all wrong?

Demetrious Johnson

It was, of all things, his comments about his amateur MMA career that made me wonder whether a lot of us might have been missing the point when it came to Demetrious Johnson. Turns out, “Mighty Mouse” loved fighting as an unpaid amateur. You might even say he misses it, in at least one way.

“One of the things I liked about it was, you never knew who you were fighting,” Johnson (22-2-1 MMA, 10-1-1 UFC) told MMAjunkie. “You signed up, put your name on the list, and you showed up and tested yourself. It’s like getting into a bar fight with someone who has a martial arts background, and you had to figure out on the fly what he’s good at and what he’s not.”

The big way this differs from the UFC, other than the whole no money thing, is that in the UFC you get weeks, often months, to think about one opponent. And thinking, Johnson pointed out, leads to game planning. And game planning leads to specialization. And specialization inhibits growth, as a martial artist.

It’s almost inevitable. The moment you realize that, in eight weeks’ time, you’ll be fighting an opponent who relies on jabs and takedowns, you almost can’t help but focus a good portion of your training on avoiding the jab and stuffing the takedown.

This limits you, Johnson said. It keeps you from becoming a complete fighter, a well-rounded martial artist, because you know too much about your opponent. You can no longer get yourself to fully believe, regardless of what you might say in the media, that you need to be ready for anything out there. You know exactly what you need to be ready for, or at least you think you do.

That’s why Johnson, who meets John Dodson (17-6 MMA, 7-1 UFC) in Saturday’s UFC 191 pay-per-view headliner, and coach Matt Hume get along, he said.

Matt Hume (center) and Demetrious Johnson (right)

“I’m the type of guy where, whether I’m on my back, in the clinch, striking or wrestling, I want to have the answer for any situation,” Johnson said. “(Hume) believes in that, in being a complete mixed martial artist.”

And see, the thing about Hume is that, in a lot of ways, he’s the Demetrious Johnson of MMA trainers. The people who know will tell you how he’s been in the game for years, how he fought, refereed, promoted events, trained fighters, judged fights – you name the MMA-related vocation, and Hume has done it.

Still, he’s not Greg Jackson. He’s not the coach who gets stopped for selfies in hotel hallways. He’s the guy a lot of fans don’t know that they know. Which is fine with him, Hume will tell you, for the same reason that it’s fine with him if fans aren’t waiting with cash in hand for the next chance to see Johnson defend his UFC flyweight title.

“I think the fans will get it eventually,” Hume said of Johnson, “but I think it will take time, because he’s on a different journey than a lot of other people in this sport.”

The way Hume sees it, most fighters start out with the goal of making it to the UFC. Whether they admit it to themselves or not, that’s about as far as they dare to think. Then there are those who actually plan on being champion some day.

“Then there are those with the goal of being the greatest champion ever, a two-class champion, a pound-for-pound great,” Hume said. “Fewer and fewer people have those goals, and of those people, even fewer have the goal of becoming a perfect martial artist.”

That’s the journey Johnson is on, Hume said. It’s why the both of them put so much emphasis on technical perfection, which, both of them seem to realize, is a pursuit that’s mostly lost on the masses.

Everyone can appreciate what it means when you kick another man upside the head until he falls down and stops moving. Fewer people appreciate the way your flawless footwork carries you into striking range just long enough to attack, then back out before your opponent can counter.

If that’s your thing – and it most definitely is Johnson’s thing – you almost have to resign yourself to being at least a little unappreciated. It’s either that, or make yourself such a character that people almost don’t care how you fight, which, for reasons Johnson has already laid out, he isn’t about to do.

So here he is. The fighter in pursuit of an unattainable goal that most fight fans wouldn’t necessarily appreciate even if he attained it. The coach who’s there to help him without getting much in the way of fame or attention. Two guys involved in their own pursuit, for their own reasons, which, they say, is good enough for them.

“I think, ultimately, when people see what (Johnson) does in this sport, they’ll get it,” Hume said. “I think they will. But even if they don’t, that’s OK. We’re focused on our families, our friends, our goals. That’s enough.”

For now, maybe it’ll have to be.

For more on UFC 191, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.