Why Urijah Faber's legacy will be about more than just wins and losses

Picture yourself trying to explain Urijah Faber to a visitor from another planet. More realistically, imagine trying to explain him to a new fan who didn’t even start following the sport of MMA until the WEC was dead and buried.

To such a person, Faber (33-10 MMA, 9-6 UFC) might be something of a mystery. He’s the guy with good taste in walkout music, the guy who keeps getting UFC title shots even though he never wins them, the guy who everyone seems to love, but why? What’s the big deal about Faber?

Now that he’s announced his plan to retire following his bout with Brad Pickett at UFC on FOX 22 in December – and now that the MMA world has proceeded to make a very big deal about it two months in advance – you know there must be at least a few fans feeling confused.

On paper, his UFC run seems unremarkable: 15 fights in five-and-a-half years, a 9-6 record heading into what he says will be the last one, 0-4 in UFC title fights.

It’s not a bad record, and certainly we’ve seen worse, but how different is it from a guy like Alexander Gustafsson, who’s gone 9-4 in the UFC and is merely 0-2 in title fights? Why aren’t people talking about him as an all-time great?

To fully understand the situation, you have to go back to the WEC days. You also have to understand what the WEC really was, and how big a part Faber played in it.

You look at the UFC roster these days, and you see plenty of proof that the WEC had some great fighters in its ranks. It was at one time the home Dominick Cruz, Demetrious Johnson, Donald Cerrone, Anthony Pettis, Benson Henderson, and of course Faber himself.

But at the time it was regarded, in more ways than one, as Zuffa’s little brother organization. After purchasing what was then essentially a regional fight promotion in 2006, Zuffa stripped it of its higher weight fighters (this is how Brian Stann made his way into the UFC), and kept the WEC around as a home for the little guys.

The problem was that the UFC wasn’t convinced of the drawing power in those lighter weight classes. It had gone back and forth on whether to include the lightweight division as a regular staple, and company executives seemed convinced that 155 pounds was the lowest you could go on the scale and still get people interested in the fights.

It was Faber who proved them wrong.

To become an even marginally famous person as a result of MMA was hard enough circa 2007. To do it outside the UFC – unless your name happened to be Kimbo Slice – was almost impossible.

But Faber was one of the rare non-UFC fighters who your non-fight-fan friends would ask about. He was charming. He was exciting. He was the one who made the idea of a WEC pay-per-view the least bit thinkable. He was a reason to find out if your cable package included Versus.

That he became a somebody on a nowhere network like that, it tells you something.

Faber was WEC featherweight champion at a time when, if you wanted to explain what that meant to an outsider, you had start by asking: “So, do you know what the UFC is?”

If you were lucky they’d say yes and then you could tell them fine, it’s just like that, only the initials are different but at least for these couple weight classes it’s the same thing. And it was.

Being the WEC 145-pound champ back then meant being essentially the baddest featherweight on the planet. But as Mike Brown, who wound up taking the title from Faber, once told me: “At some point, you get sick of having to explain that.”

That all stopped at the end of 2010, when the WEC held its last show and the bulk of its roster migrated to the UFC. Faber was 31 at the time. Not exactly an old man, but not a young one either. At least, not for a pro fighter.

He still fought several times a year and beat all but the very best in his division over the course of the next five years. It wasn’t until his unanimous decision loss to Jimmie Rivera at UFC 203 in September that he even looked the least bit mortal in a non-title fight.

But his legacy, if we tell it right, will be more than wins and losses. It will be as one of the people who showed us what was possible for lighter weight fighters, both in his own career and with the Alpha Male team he created that wound up sculpting the careers of many more talented fighters.

It’ll be as the guy who helped make the current success of the UFC’s robust featherweight and bantamweight divisions possible, even if he doesn’t end up getting the credit. But then, he never got a belt with the initials “UFC” on it either. Doesn’t mean you can call his time in this sport anything but a success.

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