When it comes to Cris “Cyborg” Justino, all of the drama of fight week ends the moment she beats the scale. That’s the real fight; everything that comes afterward is a formality.
When the fighter’s weight cut is more dramatic than the fight, there is a problem. Why are we torturing an athlete for no reason? In the past, there was at least the lure of a superfight with Ronda Rousey.
Rousey is not the bantamweight champion anymore. She’s had zero presence in the Octagon in 2016. Yet this bogus 140-pound catchweight that has been invented solely for Justino persists under the guise of some future fight that is no closer to happening than when it was first broached three years ago.
Enough with the senseless madness.
Either let her fight at her preferred weight of 145 pounds or move on from the Cyborg business. There is no reason to continue the current path. Yes, Cyborg completely decimated another foe—Lina Lansberg—on Saturday, and yes, it was a spectacular sight. But what exactly did it do for her career other than slightly increase her visibility?
Cyborg hasn't lost in 11 years, yet the UFC matched her with someone who was essentially unknown to UFC fans before Saturday. Atop that, it booked the match to essentially favor Lansberg by forcing Justino to shred her body to almost intolerable levels of pain.
It’s easy to look at a number and shrug it off. Five more pounds? Is it that hard? This video of Cyborg reaching the catchweight limit, and then collapsing into tears of relief and exhaustion, does more to humanize that struggle than any words.
“It’s crazy s--t,” her boxing coach Jason Parillo said in the video. “What we do is we all sit in a room, and watch a human being bring themselves close to death.”
You would like to think there is some incredible payday at the end of such a road, but, no, Cyborg is still traveling the rainbow in hopes of the (perhaps mythical) pot of gold.
To be fair, Cyborg missed her chance to push herself further in that direction, declining to request a specific opponent for her next time. When she could have called any star's name, she instead played it cool.
“I already have two belts at home,” she said in her post-fight interview. “I just want to put on superfights for my fans and make them happy.”
A general statement like that isn’t exactly going to get the fight world buzzing, especially when everyone is anticipating the "R" word.
Feels bad that the UFC won't open a division for Cyborg. She's a star and has to be treated as one.
— Guilherme Cruz (@guicruzzz) September 25, 2016
Cyborg-Rousey will probably end up on the same card as Silva-GSP and Fedor-Brock
— John S. Nash (@heynottheface) September 25, 2016
At least later, on the Fox Sports 1 post-fight show, she addressed Rousey when directly asked about her.
“I want Ronda to come back,” she said. “When you lose, you shouldn’t give up, you should come back for your fans. Let’s make this fight for women’s MMA. It’ll be amazing.”
It wasn’t a riveting monologue, but it was something to build on.
There was a time a few years ago when Cyborg was seen as the villain by those who value the theater of the sport, and while Rousey’s popularity has endured even through her long break, Cyborg has certainly won over a large amount of fans, both through her light personality and her good-faith effort at compromise, taking two fights at a lower weight.
That’s something. A laudable something, even if neither of Cyborg’s opponents (the first was Leslie Smith, Justino’s UFC debut opponent) were ranked in the top 15 of the promotion’s 135-pound division. Both are competent fighters, but not among the best in the division, meaning fans that aren’t familiar with Cyborg can't use the matchups as meaningful measuring sticks for her immense talent.
They are fights for the sake of fights, and they’re not building up her equity as much as they are building up her name.
For now, she has settled into the UFC’s “special attraction” role, a position that in the modern era previously (and briefly) belonged to such names as James Toney, Brock Lesnar, CM Punk and the late Kimbo Slice. Cyborg, though, isn’t making the kind of money they made, and she isn’t getting the types of opportunities they had. Sure, she enjoyed the experiences of performing in featured bouts in her home country, but her treatment still leaves something to be desired.
By comparison, Toney was matched with Randy Couture, a much more legitimate opponent than he deserved. Lesnar fought Frank Mir right out of the gate. Punk had camera crews following his every move and was featured on pay-per-view despite lacking any kind of MMA background. Slice was featured on an entire TV season before debuting.
Cyborg? She just shows up and lays waste to whatever body stands in front of her. What does a lady have to do to get a top-10 opponent, anyway?
Despite her relative anonymity, Lansberg was game, making it about midway through the second in pure survival mode before being stopped on ground strikes.
Supposedly, her experience in muay thai—she’s had nearly 50 fights, according to AwakeningFighters.com—would give her a chance to stay even with Cyborg in the standup, but that theory was laid to waste with a quickness, with Cyborg controlling every position, from distance to the clinch.
In total strikes, according to FightMetric, she landed 100 to Lansberg’s 24. She took Lansberg down twice. She passed guard four times. It all came so easy. Which leads us back to everything that came before it. If we learned one thing over the last UFC fight week, it is that Cyborg tortures herself as much as she tortures opponents.
Right now, her most meaningful opponent is the scale. Right now, her out-of-the-cage situation is more interesting than what she does inside it. These are problems, and until something changes, Cyborg's true potential as a gate attraction and as a fighter are being squandered.
