Boos poured down on the one male fighter who had done nothing to ruin the top of UFC 200 but what could Daniel Cormier do? He was the loser on a night when he was actually a winner and none of it made any sense. His headline fight with Jon Jones blew up on Wednesday night when his opponent tested positive for a banned substance. Instead of walking out on his employer Cormier accepted a last-second fight against one of the great UFC champions, Anderson Silva, for half the money he was going to make.

And now they were booing him? For saving the event? For winning? Daniel Cormier should have been the hero of the night. Instead he was everybody’s bad guy.

What value is there in doing the right thing? Cormier probably should have left UFC 200’s lineup the moment the organization’s president Dana White told him about Jones’s failed test. But doing so would have damaged the card in the UFC’s signature event. Cormier didn’t want to do that, so he let the UFC stick him with Silva and took everybody’s wrath.

None of this was easy to do. Cormier had spent months preparing to fight Jones, a man he despises and in an instant that work was ruined. The deal with Silva wasn’t finalized until Thursday night, leaving him hours to prepare before Friday’s weigh-in. Then Saturday he walked into the event he saved and got booed.

The fans in Las Vegas’s brand new arena apparently wanted a battle with flying fists and swinging legs, only Cormier doesn’t do flying fists and swinging legs. He’s a wrestler, an Olympian. His best weapon is wrestling. And so on Saturday night, against a star he has never fought, weighing 10 pounds less, he did the smart thing. He wrestled. The more he wrestled the more the arena filled with boos.

“I can’t really pay attention to that anymore,” he said late Saturday night, after he watched Silva’s coaches carrying the onetime middleweight champion around the ring on their shoulders as if it was Silva who had won. “People don’t understand the situation I had this week.”

By agreeing to fight Silva, Cormier was in terrible position. He was taking on a great champion who is immensely popular and also someone who has not officially won a UFC fight in four years, who is two months removed from gallbladder surgery and hasn’t trained since. Silva, he knew, would fight with heart. That fighting would inspire fans who longed for an upset and it would make Cormier a villain. He couldn’t win, even when he did.

Silva never had a hope of victory in the octagon . Cormier essentially pulled him off his feet, pinned him to the mat and sat on him for three rounds while repeatedly punching him about the head. The fans did not enjoy seeing their hero treated this poorly even if it was the right tactic for Cormier to employ. They probably didn’t know that Jones’s positive test forced UFC officials to cut Cormier’s pay for the fight from $1m to $500,000. This while knowing that another former champion, Brock Lesnar, was getting $2.5m despite not having fought in the UFC for five years.

None of this was fair. Cormier knew it wasn’t fair. But what could he say? He had to fight the fight he had been given and accept the money that was offered. He had flown fighters in from all over the world to help him prepare for Jones, he was still over weight, well into his workout plan to cut an extra few pounds before Friday’s weigh-in. He didn’t have a proper plan for Silva. He is a man of habits and routine. He hates disruptions to his routine.

“I went out there and fought, there are a lot of people who wouldn’t do that,” he said. “The risk versus the reward was not in my favor, honestly.”

The “reward” was watching the man he beat soundly being treated like the winner. Silva himself knew he was likely walking into a defeat but he said he wanted to challenge himself, which is why he called the UFC and asked to replace Jones despite his lack of preparation. He said his children told him he was crazy for taking the fight.

Silva seemed to feed off the roaring crowd and the excitement of standing in the octagon, which was the last place he would have imagined being just three days before. He aimed a few kicks at his opponent but it was fruitless; Cormier easily took him down.

“Stand them up!” the fans chanted at the referee. He did so once, to a huge roar, before Cormier pulled Silva back to the canvas and flopped on top of him. Down came the boos. And it didn’t seem fair.

Why boo the one man who saved the day?