How did UFC champ Dominick Cruz roar back from injuries? First, he had to admit he might be done

UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz had been sidelined with injuries for nearly three years when I sat down with him to ask, just before his comeback at UFC 178, whether his long injury layoff had ever forced him to consider the possibility that his career might be over.

His answer was firm, unequivocal, almost defiant. Of course he hadn’t considered that, Cruz told me back in 2014. Not even a little bit. What good would it do him to allow that thought to enter his mind, even for a second?

Well, yeah, about that. The new Cruz would like to revise that answer, if only because he was forced to revise his whole way of thinking.

“You know,” Cruz told MMAjunkie, “you interviewed me at a different time. I’m going to re-answer that question today, and tell you that I didn’t really heal and hit the next evolution of what I’m capable of until I realized that, yes, I may not ever come back again. When I finally said to myself, ‘Dom, let that feeling in, don’t fight it, admit it’s a possibility,’ that’s when it happened.”

By it, what he means is not just a shift in the way he thought about his own injuries, but also how he thought about the fight game itself. And, according to Cruz, it’s that mental shift, as much as anything else, that’s helped him to once again become the sport’s dominant 135-pounder.

It’s also a mentality that Cruz (22-1 MMA, 5-0 UFC) says is lacking in much of his competition, which might be why he doesn’t worry too much when he hears someone like challenger Cody Garbrandt (10-0 MMA, 5-0 UFC) talking about how he’s going to break his face in UFC 207’s pay-per-view co-headliner in Las Vegas on Friday night.

For Cruz, it started with the injuries, one right after another. His knee ligaments failed him. His quadriceps tore right off the bone. The UFC gave him time to heal, then eventually stripped him of his title. The sport had to move on, even if Cruz couldn’t move with it.

For a long time, he told himself that a triumphant return was the only possibility. He didn’t even want to think about other options.

“After I blew my quad out, that’s when I felt like, maybe you’re not supposed to come back,” Cruz said. “Maybe you’re supposed to be done. Maybe you’ll never be a professional athlete again. And the day that I figured that out and let myself admit that I might be done fighting, that’s when I started to enjoy my life possibly being retired. When I figured that out, my body started to heal. That gave me peace.”

When he tells this to people now, Cruz feels the need to point out that this was about acceptance – not about giving up. It was, if anything, about reaching a certain level of maturity that he’d lacked earlier in his career. He had to admit that there were certain things no one could control.

“That allowed me to let go and stop fighting myself, and I came back and came back better,” Cruz said. “That’s what proved to me that you don’t need to lie to yourself. Sometimes you need to accept the things that are, and come up with answers.”

This realization has informed everything from Cruz’s fighting style to his trash-talking strategy. You see him in those split-screen interviews now, torching guys like Garbrandt as he forces him to explain how, exactly, he thinks he’s going to win, and at first it seems like arrogant bluster.

But really, according to Cruz, what he’s doing is forcing his opponent to confront the questions he’s been avoiding. He’s testing the other man’s willingness to be honest with himself, and in the process he’s exposing the gaps in his opponent’s thinking to the public.

“Really, all you have to do is talk about the stuff that they don’t want to talk about, and that’s honesty,” Cruz said. “Truth is like poetry, and most people don’t want to hear a whole lot of poetry. These guys especially, they don’t want to listen to poetry. They call people who read poetry nerds. So all I do is hit them with the truth, and then they have a panic attack because these guys are so used to hitting everything they do head-on with ferocity and strength and power. And you have to tell yourself a lot of lies to think you’ll always be the more powerful one. I’m the guy on the other end of the spectrum who doesn’t lie to himself.”

That, Cruz said, is why he fights the way he does, why he’s built his style around hitting without being hit. It’s because he knows that there will always be someone faster and stronger, someone who can hit you with something you can’t handle. It might feel good to tell yourself otherwise, but it’s a lie. The only real solution is not to get hit at all.

The fact that Garbrandt doesn’t seem to realize that yet, Cruz said, only makes him more confident heading into the fight.

“You can hear it in everything Cody says,” Cruz said. “Everything he says is about breaking my jaw and taking my punches and hitting me harder than I hit him. It’s like, how is that even an answer to any problems, to get hit at all? My thing is, if you’re getting hit with four-ounce gloves, you’re making a mistake somewhere. These guys don’t think that way. They think, ‘I’ll take what you have and hit you harder.’ I don’t want to take anything these guys have. I just want to hit them, and that’s it.”

If there’s a downside to that strategy, it’s likely reflected at the box office. For all Cruz’s technical brilliance, he doesn’t have the highlight reel full of dazzling finishes. Garbrandt is the one with the neck tattoos and the violent knockouts. Cruz is the one beloved by hardcores and virtually unknown outside the MMA bubble.

But what he’s doing, he insisted, is something that is bound to be appreciated by those with the knowledge to see it for what it is, and maybe that’s enough.

“I truly believe I’m ahead of this game, the way I fight with intelligence,” Cruz said. “You’re right, maybe the edge-of-their-seats fans don’t appreciate it if it doesn’t come with highlight-reel knockouts, but if you look deeper at what I’m doing in these fights, I think you see that the things I’m doing haven’t been done in this sport. I’m doing it with precision and smarts, and I’ll still have my brain at the end of it. That’s a highlight in itself.”

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