The regrets of Robbie Lawler: Five ways of looking at UFC 171

Who knows what goes on inside the mind of Robbie Lawler? I imagine it is a dreary place at times, like an unfurnished apartment that the tenant hasn’t bothered to outfit with anything but the bare essentials, though for all I know it’s a lavish room covered in rich red velvet. You know, to hide the bloodstains.

Whatever it’s like, I suspect that the walls of that room will flicker with images of that third round against Johny Hendricks for years to come. I suspect he’ll replay that scene from this past Saturday’s UFC 171 pay-per-view event of Hendricks staggering loosely backward, about as solid on his feet as a newborn colt, trying to tuck his chin and fake it long enough to let his wits and legs return. I suspect Lawler will see that scene from his own memory and wish he’d done more about it.

That was the best chance for Lawler to not only finish that fight, but validate everything that had come before it. Maybe one more good barrage of punches and he’s the feel-good story of the year, the fighter who clawed his way out of the middle of the pack to become the best in the world at age 31.

Instead he will have to settle for being merely very good, and for being one half of the best welterweight title fight in years. That’s not bad, as consolation prizes go. But in those locked rooms of Lawler’s mind late at night, I wonder if it will be enough.

A few more thoughts on UFC 171 in Dallas…

1. Hendricks is champ, but not quite a star

It’s funny how quickly we went from congratulating Hendricks for his unanimous-decision victory to desperately searching for someone interesting enough to fight him next. Nick Diaz was kind enough to help us along with his antics at the weigh-in and his comments backstage, since apparently retirement has made him strangely media friendly. But if we rule him out due to the two-fight losing streak that ushered him into that leave of absence to begin with, we’re left with a crew of potential contender who all carry some baggage.

The fact that we’re all so fixated on booking the next fight immediately after the last one could tell us something about where Hendricks is in his ascendancy. Or maybe it just tells us something about the nature of MMA fans and media. It feels like we’re looking for some perfect counterpart who will help us care about Hendricks just a little bit more, which is weird, since he just had a great fight with Lawler that we should probably all still be riding pretty high on.

What does it all mean? I don’t know, maybe Hendricks just isn’t superstar material. Maybe that’s the downside of that “aw, shucks” demeanor that also makes him so relatable. Or maybe we’re all just waiting for Georges St-Pierre to come back.

2. You can’t blame Woodley for Condit’s knee, but don’t give him credit either

It feels unfair to use the unsatisfying ending of a fight that Tyron Woodley seemed to be winning as a barrier to keep him from career advancement. It would probably feel even more unfair if he hadn’t been so quick to portray Carlos Condit’s knee injury as something he did consciously, and with malice of forethought.

“I think if you break somebody’s arm in an armbar, or you put them in a choke and they don’t tap, it wasn’t like it came from a pre-existing injury,” Woodley said after the fight. “It came from a double-leg takedown. I saw that he was hurt and I went for the finish.”

That’s technically true, but injuring a guy’s knee during a takedown is like winning a lottery you didn’t know you were playing. The point of a takedown isn’t to wrench knees – it’s to put the other guy on the mat. Woodley might have done a fine job of seizing the moment (though, in fairness, he finished Condit off by kicking his healthy leg, so it’s not like he knew exactly what area of the body to target), but it’s still more of a happy accident for him than anything else.

Should that keep him out of a title shot? Not necessarily. He did look good in the fight, and his particular set of skills provide an interesting challenge for Hendricks. He just might be better off shrugging his shoulders at the injury rather than jumping up to take credit for it.

3. Lombard is still hell on wheels in a sprint, but he’ll never run marathons

What Hector Lombard did to Jake Shields in the first round was, for lack of a better word, shocking. I have more trouble taking off a sweatshirt than he had tossing Shields to the mat. After feeling Lombard’s power on the feet in the opening moments, the look on Shields’ face as he lay on his back looking up at the ball of muscle standing over him could best be described as, “Can we talk about this?”

But as has been his habit at times, Lombard became noticeably less ferocious as the fight stretched on. It feels like some of the criticism he’s taking for his decision win over Shields is a little unfair, but some of it is definitely the result of the fact that he initially looked like he could do anything he wanted in that fight. It was just that, in Rounds 2 and 3, what we wanted to do was chill.

4. So… steak tartare, huh?

Diego Sanchez took a beating at the hands of Myles Jury, and he’s bound to take another one from fans after blaming his poor performance on a meal of steak tartare with a raw quail egg. This criticism is not unjustified, because 1) who thinks raw beef is a good thing to eat before a strenuous physical activity? and 2) even the best excuse still comes out sounding like an excuse.

On some level, that’s fine. We should allow fighters their post-fight excuses, even if we don’t buy them for one single second. To be a fighter is to occupy such a strange mental space that it’s probably necessary to find some comforting fiction after a loss. Otherwise, what are you left with? It’s not like you can tell yourself that the other guy was just better than you, even though, in this case, that’s exactly how it seemed. Jury is a good fighter, even better than he seemed heading into this. Chances are he’d beat Sanchez over and over, whether he had steak tartare or a meatball sub in his stomach. We know that now. We’ve seen the evidence. We just shouldn’t be too shocked if Sanchez can’t (or won’t) admit it.

5. So that’s what a solid pay-per-view card looks like

Three months into 2014, we got our first real must-see event from the UFC, a PPV that truly felt worthy of the $55 price tag (or a night spent in the company of obnoxious strangers at your local participating sports bar). We saw a spectacular fight for the vacant welterweight title, plus a preview of would-be contenders, and the main card started with a guy nicknamed “Al Capone” getting put to sleep with a rarely seen choke, so what else do you want?

But as good as this fight card was, seems like the UFC had trouble reaching outside the bubble to tap those elusive “casual fans” on the shoulder and let them know it was happening. This was one of those events where the non-hardcores I know seemed completely uninterested, right up until I told them who was fighting. Once they heard the names all at once, sure, they were all about it. It’s just that there’s a UFC event almost every weekend, which produces such a constant, low-level static that it becomes difficult to hear the messages worth paying attention to.

That’s the price of the UFC’s aggressive expansion, and maybe, in the eyes of company execs, it’s worth it. But as we head into a stretch of highly missable UFC Fight Night events in places like Natal, Brazil and Abu Dhabi, I wonder if fans all feel the same.

For complete coverage of UFC 171, stay tuned to the UFC Events section of the site.

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