



Saturday night's Jon Jones vs. Daniel Cormier fight at UFC 182 may not be the most widely anticipated grudge match in UFC history. Yet, if you look at skills and credentials, it has something no other major grudge match in UFC has had.

It's not just two of the best fighters in the sport, both for all real purposes undefeated, and based on their most recent fights, still comfortably in their athletic primes. While the usual rule of thumb is that if you are undefeated in MMA, it means you've never fought anyone of note. But that's not the case with either of these two men, who have two of the most impressive resumes in the sport, and strong resumes outside it as well.









Jones has not only lost no matches, throwing out the Matt Hamill disqualification in a fight he more than dominated, but he's lost only a few rounds in his career, and was only in one fight that could be called competitive. Cormier has never even in trouble in this sport. And he's been tested at a level of competition that Jones has never faced, in three world wrestling championships, one Olympics, and in years of international wrestling competition.

However, Jones has won the big one--in this case, the UFC light heavyweight championship. He can say rightly he's the best in his weight in the sport, and arguably the best in any weight. Cormier has won a lot of big ones, three state titles in high school, six national freestyle titles, the Pan American games and major international meets. But he never won the big one, at least at the NCAA championships, the world championships or the Olympic level.







He's never faced Jon Jones . But he's faced several wrestling equivalents to Jon Jones.





His college contemporary was Cael Sanderson, perhaps the best college wrestler in U.S. history. Cormier wrestled him closer than anyone in the country, six times, but in reality, he never came close to beating him. On the international stage, there was always Khadzhimurat Gatsalov of Russia, a legitimate all-time great in the sport, and Alireza Heidari of Iran, two guys that got the best of him whenever it counted. In his old sport, Cormier can look back and say he was great, but not an all-time great.





Now, for the first time, Cormier is facing a Sanderson or Gatsalov equivalent in MMA.









If Jones loses, it's the hiccup in the road that every great fighter has. George St-Pierre had a few. So did Anderson Silva . Cormier is 35. If he loses, he will have an excellent sports resume--one of the best in the world at two different sports. But in both sports, he was in with all-time greats. But if he doesn't win, he'll never have beaten them, and a loss Saturday may leave that as a cross he will bear for the rest of his life.

One of two things will happen. Cormier will look back at Sanderson, Gatsalov and Heidari, and know they were tests that ended up as learning experiences that culminated in achieving something even bigger. Or he will look back on his career and be able to say he battled the all-time greats on the biggest stages in the world. But he wasn't one of them.





That alone would make for one of the most intense match stories in UFC history. But it's more than that.









Jones has seemed to light a match as if Cormier was kerosene every time he's near him. There was that moment they first met, backstage in Anaheim, when Jones told him, "I bet I can take you down." There was the incident in August that turned into a brawl with real punches thrown, something that never happened with Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock , or Brock Lesnar and Frank Mir , or even Rampage Jackson and Rashad Evans . There was the incident in the hallway and at the fighters meeting, and the words at the press conference on Thursday.

Exchanges of words on television hype shows is nothing new. That's part and parcel of building a fight, but usually those were for the cameras. In this case, the most compelling footage came at a time when both men thought the cameras were off.









At another time or place, this could have been the biggest fight in UFC history. No UFC fight has featured similar level athletes who have been so completely dominant in this sport. Even when B.J. Penn faced Georges St-Pierre the second time, and both were two of the top pound-for-pound fighters, and each were champions, both had losses on their resume. Plus, they are both, in their own way, incredibly compelling rivals.

One is chasing the position of being regarded as the all-time greatest. The other is likely in the latter stages of an athletic journey that started from childhood, whose final verdict on two-plus decades of endless training for little financial rewards will be defined based on whether or not his hand is raised when this fight is over.





One is tall with ridiculous reach. The other is short, and while not looking the part to a layperson, is actually the far better athlete--both stronger and faster. Cormier was a far better football player and a better wrestler.





One is a guy ridiculously easy to like. The other wants people to like him, but seems on a never ending treadmill that starts with wowing people in combat to where they want to get behind him, and then just as quickly, figuratively stepping on his own feet in public because of something he says or does. One, no matter what he does, he will have people dismissing his accomplishments based on his God-given physical dimensions. The other, people can relate to, as if being short and somewhat chunky and overcoming a guy so much taller is a triumph of hard work.





But UFC doesn't have the Spike TV platform, or even the FX platform to have a three-week Countdown show in prime time that will bring in a more casual fan audience, although FX did air the 30 minute "Bad Blood" show this past week.





The content in various commercial packages and other pieces building this fight has been as compelling as any fight in recent memory. But aside from the Dec. 13 show on FOX, it was mostly seen to UFC's regular audience. UFC has fallen from its mainstream peak. The pay-per-view show is bucking the NFL playoffs both head-to-head on Saturday night, and battling for mainstream sports attention during the strongest part of the college and pro football seasons and with basketball in full swing. And the fight has little in the way of undercard support.





Still, the grudge is more real, the story is more gripping, and there seems to be a clear-cut person people are rooting for.









The irony is in the big picture, Cormier can't lose without it hurting him in multiple ways. For Jones, a loss will in some ways humanize him. At 27, if he handles it correctly, it will make him more popular than ever. In hindsight, the greatest thing for St-Pierre's career was the loss to Matt Serra . It took him from being one of the best fighters in the sport, and turned him into a national sports hero as well as made him an even better fighter.

All of this does not guarantee anything close to a classic fight. If you look at UFC's all-time biggest grudge matches, many are memorable more for what happened before the fight than the fights themselves.





TITO ORTIZ VS. KEN SHAMROCK: It can be argued that their three fights were the biggest grudge match series in UFC history, and were likely the most important. Fight no. 1, in 2002, can be said to have saved a sport that was barely showing a pulse with the viewing public. Ortiz and Shamrock went on Fox Sports Net, and talked people back into caring about UFC, which had really been some quick fad that went in and out in the mid-90s.





Shamrock was past his prime when the fights took place, and all were one-sided wins by Oritz. But the second fight, in the summer of 2006, took pay-per-views to 775,000 buys, a level that six months earlier nobody could have expected the biggest UFC fight to do half that. The third in some ways was more important, even though many argued it should have never happened.





Ortiz beat Shamrock in 1:18 in fight no. 2 when referee Herb Dean stopped it after Ortiz pounded Shamrock with elbows on the ground. Much of the public was new to the sport and didn't buy that Shamrock was finished, although in reality, he probably was before the fight even started. Because the fans weren't happy with the outcome, UFC scheduled a third fight, and put it on Spike TV, by far the biggest television fight up to that point in history.





UFC's great success in pay-per-view was a metric few in the sports or television world understood. It was great for the UFC pocket books, and in erasing years of debt, but it didn't mean that much to the decision makers in television and the media.









The television fight was different. In October, 2006, a UFC fight beat out several World Series games in the male 18-34 demographic. That's a language every major decision maker in television understood. No matter what people thought of the UFC, it couldn't be denied that it was all of a sudden a significant part of the sports scene. Mainstream coverage got far stronger, which led to Ortiz's next fight with Chuck Liddell being an even bigger event.

BROCK LESNAR VS. FRANK MIR: There were two battles between the two big heavyweights who clearly despised the other, partially based on background. And for a lot of UFC fans, it represented almost a religious battle.





The original lesson of the UFC is that everything people thought they knew about fighting was wrong. It was technique, not size or power, that made the difference. Of course, that was also wrong, as it was a combination of everything.





For people who worshipped at the altar of the Gracies and UFC teaching, there was never a greater devil incarnate than Lesnar.





Lesnar looked like the biggest and strongest fighter ever to step into a UFC cage. But he had only one MMA fight, and one that only the most ardent fans knew about. He was a superstar who came out of the "fake" world of pro wrestling. In reality, Lesnar was an NCAA champion wrestler who was an athletic freak of nature.





To Lesnar, he came from a school that believed wrestlers were the toughest, and guys like Mir were dojo pretenders. To Mir, Lesnar was a huge man with very little jiu-jitsu, a sport he was an expert in, and was thus a pretender in his world where size and strength were supposed to mean little when faced with far more advanced technique. So this wasn't just a fight between rivals, it was almost an ideological battle of men who convinced themselves that the other was a pretender.





When Lesnar walked into the cage in Las Vegas for the first time, there may have never been a UFC audience that so vociferously hated a fighter. His opponent that night was a down-on-his-luck home town fighter. Mir was a former champion, who looked to be barely hanging onto a spot on the roster after a motorcycle accident destroyed his leg and seemingly robbed him of a promising career. Still, he was a real fighter, emphasis on the word real. But after Lesnar rolled over him like a tank in the opening barrage, Mir caught Lesnar quickly, and tapped him out with a kneebar in just 90 seconds.









Less than a year-and-half later, the stakes were much bigger. Mir followed up on the win over Lesnar by knocking out Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira in a huge upset, and suddenly was the interim world heavyweight champion. A month earlier, Lesnar infuriated fans far worse, as the guy people were going to laugh at when he got schooled by a real UFC legend in Randy Couture , suddenly stood over the sport's only five-time world champion after knocking him out.

To the general public, as the main event of the most successful pay-per-view event in UFC history, the famed UFC 100 show, no UFC bout had the interest of the second Lesnar vs. Mir encounter. Part of that was a three-week Countdown show that did record ratings. As much as Lesnar was hated, he was box office and television gold. The build-up climaxed with Lesnar watching a tape of the first fight. When the spot came where referee Steve Mazzagatti ordered a stand up after blows to the back of the head, breaking momentum that could have led to him finishing the fight, Lesnar, frustrated, punched the wall in his house hard. The reverberation led to a door down the hall suddenly falling off its hinges and collapsing.





UFC 100 was one of the biggest pay-per-view events of any kind in history. Lesnar dominated most of the fight on the ground, and finished Mir early in the second round.





CHUCK LIDDELL VS . TITO ORTIZ: Back in 2000,



Back in 2000, Dana White wasn't the UFC president. He was a fast-talking fight manager, and two of his clients were Tito Ortiz, at the time UFC's biggest star, and Chuck Liddell, a better fighter in the same weight class.





Through that connection, White found out UFC was for sale, and convinced his high school friend, casino magnate Lorenzo Fertitta , to buy the UFC. Liddell became the rising star. Ortiz remained champion. Ortiz clearly didn't want to fight Liddell. At first, he talked about how the two were close friends. Then it was about not getting paid enough. Then he turned down a fight because he was trying to expand his brand to being a movie star, and a movie filming took precedence over scheduling a fight.

It took nearly two years to make the fight, by which point both Ortiz and Liddell had each lost to Couture. Liddell went on to win their first fight.





The second fight, on Dec. 30, 2006, saw Liddell, who had beaten Couture twice in a row, defend the title against Ortiz. Ortiz was on a five-fight winning streak, having just finished Shamrock twice in the first round. Liddell had established himself as UFC's top star, and UFC had exploded onto the sports scene from the two Ortiz wins over Shamrock. The result was UFC having what was its biggest event to date, with Liddell winning via third-round stoppage.





An attempt to put a third fight together in 2010 fell though due to an Ortiz injury after the two were booked as rival coaches on The Ultimate Fighter.





ANDERSON SILVA VS. CHAEL SONNEN: In early 2010, Chael Sonnen was a journeyman middleweight fighter with a 25-10-1 record, who had upset



In early 2010, Chael Sonnen was a journeyman middleweight fighter with a 25-10-1 record, who had upset Yushin Okami and was expected to be the victim as Nate Marquardt was ready for a second title shot at champion Anderson Silva.

Sonnen got the better of the wrestling game early, and survived being bloodied badly in the third round to take a decision over Marquardt, and suddenly he was the logical choice to face Silva.





It was at the press conference after the Marquardt fight that a star was made. Sonnen went into pro wrestler speak as he was told he was getting the next shot at Silva. He called Silva every name in the book, claiming he was a fraud, vastly overrated, and anything else he figured could get people to pay attention to him. Most figured him to be the next sacrificial lamb. But he talked people into caring about a fight few thought would be competitive.





On Aug. 7, 2010, in Oakland, Calif., one of the most memorable UFC fights in history took place. Underdog Sonnen dominated for four-plus rounds, and just when it appeared he had no way to lose, he did, to a triangle with less than two minutes left.





There was a cloud around that match, a drug test failure by Sonnen and a suspension . It wasn't until July 7, 2012, that they were rematched. After the first fight, Sonnen at least figured to have a way to win, as he just had to win three rounds and stay out of trouble.





But the second fight went like the first was expected to, as Silva finished Sonnen early in the second round.





This rivalry showed the value of one fight. In the first fight, Sonnen went from journeyman to major star. Silva went from a fantastic fighter that only the hardcores cared about, to a legend that everybody knew and far more than ever before were now willing to pay to see.





RAMPAGE JACKSON VS. RASHAD EVANS: This rivalry played out weekly on The Ultimate Fighter's tenth and highest-rated season ever. The two were regularly getting on each other's nerves and teased many times that things would explode.





The fight was scheduled to take place in late 2009, but when Jackson got the role of B.A. Baracus, the role originally filled in the 80s by Mr. T, in "The A-Team" movie, the fight fell apart. At one point, Jackson even talked retirement. But the fight took place on May 29, 2010, featuring some of the most intense buildup for any fight in company history.





Jackson vs. Evans ended up as the most successful pay-per-view main event that wasn't a title match in company history. But this was a rivalry far better remembered for the build up than the fight itself. Evans hurt Jackson early, and then was too quick for him for most of the fight. Jackson came back later, but it wasn't enough and the fight was such a disappointment there was no clamor to ever do it again.