I’ve thought it over and come to the conclusion that the most important thing to know about Sunday’s UFC Fight Night 103 headliner is that the last time B.J. Penn won a fight, Ke$ha had the country’s No. 1 song.
It was the year 2010. It doesn’t seem so long ago – I very clearly remember Penn (16-10-2 MMA, 12-9-2 UFC) muttering to himself like a madman at a bus stop before starching Matt Hughes in the opening minute of the fight – but in combat sports terms, it’s practically ancient history.
Which leads us to the other thing you should know about this fight. Yair Rodriguez (8-1 MMA, 5-0 UFC), the guy Penn will face in the FS1-televised main event at Talking Stick Resort Arena in Phoenix this Sunday night? He was about a month past his 18th birthday when that fight happened. He was still a year away from his first professional fight.
To put it another way, the entirety of Rodriguez’s career has taken place while Penn was either winless or temporarily retired. Now the two of them are a few days away from stepping into a cage together to determine the shape of their respective futures.
It’s difficult to know what to expect from Penn these days, and by difficult I mean borderline impossible. He seems to have been more patient and diligent in his preparation for this bout than for previous comeback efforts, but a 38-year-old man who hasn’t fought in more than two years and wasn’t exactly known as a gym rat even in his prime is bound to be something of a wild card.
With Rodriguez, on the other hand, you pretty much know what you’re getting. Chances are that at some point he will voluntarily leave his feet in an attempt to land a strike. Odds are pretty good that he’ll complete at least one full spin, probably in the first few minutes. He’ll try some moves that are either ambitious or straight-up crazy, depending on your perspective, and at least some of them will probably work.
And even if they don’t, it’s not the end of the world. Even if Rodriguez goes out there, tries one spin too many, and gets himself knocked out by Penn, he’s still an up-and-comer who lost to an MMA legend. Lesser talents have recovered from worse fates.
It’s Penn who’s facing the really high stakes. We know because we’ve seen it before. Remember when he came out of retirement in 2014, only to get throttled by Frankie Edgar? Once it was over, even Penn had to wonder out loud why he’d done a fool thing like that.
The answer he came up with in the immediate aftermath seemed simple, even final: He had to know for sure that it was over. But once he had some time to think about it, seems like he decided that this explanation was still not complete enough for his liking.
That’s why it’s hard to know what we’re supposed to expect from him now. It’s not just a question of whether or not his skills have diminished with age. It’s also a question of what, exactly, he’s trying to accomplish.
The chances of Penn winning another UFC title are slim, and that’s being extremely generous. The chances of him making a little more money are pretty good, but not enough to significantly alter his already comfortable standard of living. I can’t say there’s no chance that he could add to his storied legacy with a late-career surge, but I have to admit that there’s just as good a chance that he could damage it with more uninspired performances that are almost as painful for his fans as they are for him.
That leaves two good explanations for Penn’s return. The first is that he didn’t want to let it end like that, and who could blame him? Three losses in a row, each one uglier than the one before it, that’s bound to leave a bad taste in the mouth, maybe even one that lingers for years. If you’re struggling to find a way to feel good about your retirement, maybe you can talk yourself into thinking that one or two more wins could make all the difference.
The second possibility is that Penn doesn’t know what his life after fighting is going to look like, and he’s trying to find a way to put that discovery off for as long as possible. He wouldn’t be the first.
The life of a fighter can be an existence bitten off in small chunks. You sign to fight, you train for the fight, then you fight the fight. It takes two or three months, and it dominates your world during that time, and at the end there’s a pass/fail test that tells you what comes next.
It’s not a lifestyle that encourages long-term planning, and there might be times in a man’s life when that’s exactly what he wants, just a little something to distract him from the inevitable.
Is that a good reason to get in the cage with a 24-year-old dynamo? Maybe not, but we’ve definitely seen worse ideas pass through this sport.
Still, whatever Penn is searching for, it’s hard to think at this point that it’s anything you can find in the cage. Definitely it’s not anything you can find there on the floor, where the blood pools around your head on those bad nights. We know, because Penn has looked there already.
For more on UFC Fight Night 103, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.
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