UFC champ 'Mighty Mouse' can't sell, but at least he can do the next best thing

Demetrious Johnson

I’ve never felt more of a kinship with UFC flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson than when I read his comments to Sherdog recently, where he inevitably found himself discussing the question of what he needs to do to sell both himself and his upcoming title defense this weekend at UFC 186 to MMA fans, and he leaned on an analogy from his own work history.

“I used to work at Journeys shoe store,” Johnson (21-2-1 MMA, 9-1-1 UFC) said. “I was assistant manager. And my manager was always like, ‘Hey man, make sure you push these socks.’ And I was like, ‘Dude, if somebody comes in this shoe store and they want to buy f-cking shoes, they’ll buy a pair of shoes. If they need a pair of socks, they’ll buy a pair of socks. I’m not gonna try to push a pair of socks on some dude with a drawer full of socks.”

Yes, I thought right away. I know that feeling. I’ve felt that feeling. Like most people who have spent at least part of their adult lives floundering around in search of, if not a career, then at least a temporary paycheck, I’ve tried my hand at sales-oriented retails jobs. I had exactly the same attitude about it that Johnson did. And I was a terrible salesman. As in, maybe the worst salesman you’ve ever seen.

At best, I could resist my natural impulse to talk you out of buying something (“But, when you think about it, do you really need more socks?”), but almost never could I succeed in convincing you to buy something you weren’t going to buy anyway. To do that takes skill. Maybe it even takes a certain gene. Whatever it is, I don’t have it. Neither does “Mighty Mouse.”

And the people who don’t have it? Usually they don’t even really want to have it. They might want the rewards it brings, but not badly enough to fake their way through it and hate themselves the entire time.

Demetrious Johnson

So those people stay away from sales jobs. You know, ideally. They go into other career fields. They make things that other people can’t make or do things that other people can’t do. In Johnson’s case, they become the best 125-pound mixed martial artist in the world, which sounds like the best-case scenario for someone in his situation.

Then he gets to the top and realizes, wait, this is just another sales job.

At least, that’s what it must feel like on weeks like this. Here he is, one of the most dominant champions in the UFC, one of the few fighters where, when they throw around phrases like “pound-for-pound best” during the commercials, it feels pretty legit, and when he makes the media rounds what we want to know is, So why should we pay for this?

For people with the sales gene, it’s the question their skills are designed to answer, sometimes even before it’s been asked. For people like Johnson, it presents two unappealing options: 1) Stumble and fake and guess your way through an answer, probably poorly, or 2) Refuse to acknowledge the validity of the question.

More and more these days, it seems like Johnson is going with the second option. As he later told Sherdog in that same interview, if people decide that UFC 186 isn’t worth their money, “That’s their f-cking bad.”

In other words, why did you come into this shoe store if you didn’t want to buy some shoes?

I support this strategy by Johnson. I also know where it usually leads, and it’s not a handsome living in the field of retail sales. As much fun as the “buy this or go to hell” approach might be for the disgruntled salesman, it is not likely to result in many sales. Then again, let’s be honest: Neither is UFC 186, and that’s true no matter what Johnson says in the interviews leading up to it.

Some of that is Saturday’s pay-per-view fight card at Montreal Bell Centre, which has been torn to shreds by the combined force of injuries and drug tests and court injunctions – basically the triple crown of bummers, as far as UFC event lineups go. Some of that is the fact that, as a stand-alone headliner, Johnson has never been the guy who fight fans feel like they absolutely must see.

And his challenger here, Kyoji Horiguchi? He’s a nightmare combination of tough and mostly unknown. Johnson could vow to turn Horiguchi (15-1 MMA, 4-0 UFC) into a frog on live TV, and still a great many fans would opt to keep their credit cards in their wallets and wait for a GIF of the transformation to find its way onto the Internet the next morning.

That’s the reality of the situation. Maybe a gifted salesman could make something else out of it. Maybe that salesman would get to go home after the fight and roll around in cash like Scrooge McDuck, too.

But Johnson isn’t a salesman – he’s just a fighter. He won’t have as much money to show for that when this is over, but at least he’ll have the dignity reserved for those who refuse to pretend to be something they’re not. That, and probably also the UFC flyweight belt.

For more on UFC 186, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.