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A Star is Born

Everybody should love Bobby Knuckles.

As a person, Bobby is perhaps the single classiest, most affable guy in MMA. He shows everyone he fights with an exceeding amount of respect, a classic “touch gloves before the round” kind of guy. In interviews, Whittaker is heartfelt. He’s spoken openly about his mental heath, and in his spare time, he’s an avid gamer and family man. When it’s time for business, Whittaker is a consummate professional, never causing any drama or starting feuds. Similar to the great Jose Aldo, fighting is his job and when the day of work is over, it’s over.

In the cage, Robert Whittaker might be the single most underappreciated technician in MMA. He has an argument as one of the very best strikers in the sport, with a defensively savvy blitz woven into more fundamental boxing techniques. Specific tactical inferences are a central part of his game (cutting the cage with a whipping right high kick against Jacare, colliding Romero’s level changes with a lead hand uppercut). As a defensive wrestler, Whittaker is bulletproof, shrugging off the grip of an Olympian in Yoel Romero for the better part of 25 minutes. More than almost any other fighter ranked in the P4P Top 5, Whittaker is the complete package while also being an absolute joy to watch.

So, why does Bobby still feel so painfully underplayed? Why has his shine been dampened? Injuries and layoffs seem to be the popular narrative, which is not unfounded. However, it’s important to remember exactly why these injuries have been so pervasive for Whittaker and how prominent damage accumulation seems to be at 185. Middleweight has become a very different division over the last half-decade, and it’s important to examine just how much this is costing those caught in the machine.

Welcome to the Middleweight Meat Grinder. Leave 3-5 years or your athletic prime at the door.

Great Fights & What They Cost

Since Anderson Silva’s shin was unceremoniously snapped in half, the middleweight division gradually underwent a metamorphosis into the most chaotic landscape in the sport. Unlike lightweight being gridlocked with the McGregor/Khabib/Ferguson triumvirate, and unlike welterweight losing all momentum the moment Woodley became champion, the unpredictability in middleweight has largely been a product of the in-cage results.

Anyone who stopped watching MMA after Silva’s reign would be stunned to learn just how brutal middleweight has become in the last several years. It is filled to the brim with superathletes and bangers, workhorses and lethal opposition up and down the top 15. The closer to the top you get, the more these clashes end up costing fighter’s years of their longevity in a win or a loss.

In the last four years, we’ve seen Romero/Jacare, Rockhold/Weidman, Romero/Weidman, Whittaker/Romero I, Weidman/Gastelum, Romero/Rockhold, Gastelum/Jacare, Whittaker/Romero II, Jacare/Weidman, Adesanya/Gastelum, and Costa/Romero. Many (in fact, most) of these are undeniably great fights. Both Whittaker/Romero fights, Adesanya/Gastelum, and Costa/Romero would be on my short list of favorite MMA fights ever, and most of the others are at the very least exciting and compelling. (The lone outlier is Rockhold/Weidman, which seemed to mark a strange downturn in the careers of both men.) What connects these fights is the brutality. Lots of powerful punchers, aggressive wrestlers, and durable athletes competing in incredibly violent fights that require a threshold of physicality to even survive in, let alone win.

Every division has a prerequisite of sorts; an attribute needed to succeed at the highest levels for a significant amount of time. Flyweight requires spring and speed, because nearly everyone is small enough to scramble their way through grappling exchanges with very few grapplers capable of locking down position. Lightweight requires fight-ending dynamism. It’s an enormously dangerous division, so to succeed, you need serious offensive potency whether that’s on the feet (Gaethje, Poirier) or on the mat (Ferguson, Khabib). Welterweights defining trait increasingly looks to be pace, and light heavyweight mostly requires chin.

Middleweight requires a massive degree of athleticism. Eric Spicely and Dan Kelly are crafty fighters who know what they’re good at, but they were never bred to be top 15 material. They’re terrible athletes (or, in the case of Dan Kelly, just insanely old and fragile). 185 is a unique division, because it’s on the cusp of the “big man” divisions (i.e. the bad ones), but it remains the last division in which skill and structure seems to count for much. As a result, some truly great middleweights (Whittaker, Romero) are a frightening blend of insane athleticism and technical skill.

While the fights middleweight tends to produce nowadays are generally quite compelling and evenly matched, it costs the fighters involved a lot to keep producing these kinds of battles. Superhuman athletes like Yoel Romero appear to possess absurd amounts of longevity, as he’s still collecting scalps well into his 40s, but this is the exception to the rule. Jacare Souza has gritted his way to the top 5 of middleweight, but over time, the muscles on his titanic frame began to sag and the serpentine grappler just couldn’t quite lock up submissions with the same speed and fervor. Jack Hermansson looked like a dangerous all-around threat when he cracked the top 5, only to get blown out of the water by the powerhouse puncher, Jared Cannonier.

Halting Momentum

As a result of the brutal fights that middleweight seems magnetized to, fighters have a very difficult time building any sort of momentum. Once a fighter grits their way to the top 5, a pact is made that they will almost never take a step back as long as they’re living and breathing. Middleweight fighters end up ground out in a few short years because the top of the division is so heterogeneous.

Nowhere is this trend more startling than in the former champion Chris Weidman. After finishing Anderson Silva twice and defending his belt two more times, much of the MMA world seemed to believe Weidman was destined for greatness similar to that of his predecessor. Instead, he is now 1-4 in his last 5, with every loss coming by way of TKO or KO, and he’s running to light heavyweight with his tail between his legs and his chin compromised.

Luke Rockhold dethroned Weidman, and being the superior athlete of the two, his ceiling appeared to be higher. As it turned out, Rockhold proved to be a comically fragile glass cannon, who himself is now 1-3 in his last 4 with every loss coming by way of knockout. Rockhold made the move to light heavyweight before Weidman did, and was welcomed with the crushing left hook of Jan Blachowicz. The last word Dana White had to say about the part-time model was “retirement.”

These two cases are similar not only for their tendency to accrue hellacious amounts of damage, but also for their inescapable injuries outside of the cage. Weidman and Rockhold were notoriously hard workers in the gym, which led to them both picking up tons of surgeries and layoffs from fight to fight. This is the other side of the story with middleweight. The fights grinding, violent wars with lots of grappling and strength leveraging, but the preparation and aftereffects are just as deteriorating. By the time Rockhold was laid out for the third time in four fights, his body looked slower and his reaction time was completely absent.

This patterns hurts the champion of the division most of all. Whittaker has been an injury magnet; breaking his hand against Raphael Natal and Yoel Romero and having his knee explode against the Cuban in their first fight. A staph infection kept him out of the scheduled Rockhold fight, and a life-threatening hernia took him out of his scheduled fight with Gastelum. This is a lot of wear-and-tear on the body of a fairly fresh champion, and it doesn’t spell good things for his longevity if he cannot even make it to the cage half the time.

The exception to this rule seems to be Kelvin Gastelum. Strangely, Gastelum has turned into something of a foil to Robert Whittaker. A former welterweight like the champion, Gastelum has become the much more active, yet far less polished slugger at middleweight. I’ve discussed before how none of Gastelum’s difficulties at 185 have seemed to hinder his upward trajectory toward the title, but after taking a potentially career-altering beating against Adesanya, this theory might be proven wrong.

Through a purely critical lens, there isn’t much keeping Gastelum afloat as a top 5 fighter. Weidman mostly dominated and finished him (a loss that is likely to look even worse as time goes on, given how far Weidman continues to fall). His last decisive win was a KO over the retired Michael Bisping, and his fight with Jacare remains nip and tuck. After taking a hellacious beating at the hands of the interim champion, serious doubts about his longevity remain in question. (This hasn’t impeded his activity, however, as he’s scheduled to welcome Darren Till to 185 in November.)

Does all this mean that Israel Adesanya is poised to nab the title and hold onto it, something Dana White very obviously hopes will happen? Again, I’m less certain. Adesanya has already had a fairly long kickboxing career with over 80 bouts, plus he’s already 17 fights into his MMA career. Similar to the rise of Conor McGregor, the UFC brass has been exceedingly deliberate with their matchmaking for Adesanya. He hasn’t faced one of the powerhouse wrestlers in the division, Romero has been kept far away from Adesanya, his title shot was granted to him after a decision win over a decrepit Anderson Silva.

For Whittaker or Adesanya, a win over the other will mean a lot, but it’s important to approach this contest with tempered expectations for the winner. These men have been fighting a long time, and this division doesn’t seem to allow much in the way of longevity. It might be an unpopular opinion to say so, but I don’t necessarily think either man is particularly long for the sport.

Nothing Is Promised

Everybody should love Bobby Knuckles, but unfortunately, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that the sensational New Zealander champion is closer to a career-diverting roadblock than he deserves to be. Robert Whittaker is the very best fighter to ever compete in the middleweight division, but things have changed dramatically since Silva pecked away at Thales Leites with disinterest for five rounds. The division has become an athletic meat grinder, chewing fighters up and spitting them out with every high-level clash they find themselves in. Is it plausible that anybody defends the title ten times with the state of the division being what it is?

Adesanya has his own set of technical issues, but he is a tremendously difficult striker to handle and his pace will at least be able to match Bobby’s, meaning we’re likely in for another war for the championship. Striking analysts (such as the Fight Site’s very own Ryan Wagner, Callan Gallacher, and myself) have been clamoring for a striking battle of this caliber for a long time, so the prospect of perhaps the sport’s current best kickboxer against the sport’s current best defensive fighter is an absolute sight to behold. Great for us! Not so great for the men involved.

In a perfect world, Whittaker will box Adesanya’s life away for five rounds or clatter the undefeated kickboxer in a span of minutes. From there, he will put himself on a more consistent title defense schedule and be the great, active champ that he was meant to be. Or, conversely, Adesanya will win cleanly and become the superstar the UFC selfishly wants him to be.

Do either of these scenarios sound particularly likely? Probably not.