It is mid-afternoon Wednesday, and by any measure of the word, Dominick Cruz should be exhausted. Instead, he is annoyed. The reigning UFC bantamweight champion touched down in Brasilia six hours ago for the first of what could be many busy weeks to come in his new role as UFC color commentator, but already he has encountered a problem: the internet in his hotel room drags like a heavyweight in high altitude. With a schedule as swamped as his, any time spent waiting is as good as time wasted. There is work to be done.

"I have to study all these UFC Fight Pass prelim guys who there's no film on," Cruz says, flipping through the UFC Fight Night 95 undercard. "The only way to get film on them is to look them up on YouTube. And if you don't have internet, you can't watch YouTube. So how am I supposed to study these guys if I have no internet?"

While the UFC card on Saturday is but a small footnote in the 14-event marathon that closes out 2016, it is an opportunity that has been years in the making for Cruz. Earlier this week, the UFC revealed that Cruz, alongside fellow FOX analyst Daniel Cormier, will begin a transition into the broadcast booth as the promotion continues to prepare for the eventual departure of longtime color commentator Joe Rogan. The announcement felt like an inevitability.

Cruz's emergence has long been one of the bright spots of the UFC's relationship with FOX Sports, his deft and articulate mind capable of nimbly breaking down the nuances of a complicated game and laying things out for the layman. With a sharp tongue, innate charisma and credentials of being possibly the greatest 135-pound fighter to ever compete, he is a natural fit for television. And though his usual routine would drive most grown men to drink -- a six-day-a-week training schedule combined with the running of his own gym, a captaincy role at Alliance MMA, and a full-time gig on FOX -- Cruz jumped at the chance to heap one more giant helping of responsibility onto his plate.

It is how he ended up in the federal capital of Brazil on a warm afternoon of another busy UFC fight week, stuck in a hotel room without Wi-Fi, pouring over notes from the morning's work.

This is not the first time Cruz has done color commentary -- he made a cameo in the broadcast booth at UFC on FOX 17 and has also worked several Shooto shows -- but this is certainly his biggest stage. And he wants to make it count.

***

Cruz says the first thing he did after arriving in the city early this morning was arrange sit-down interviews with six of the athletes competing on UFC Fight Night 95's preliminary card. He compares each fight card to a college research report, and just like the ring craft which has befuddled his opponents for the past decade, Cruz says he hopes to help usher in a new level of preparation and sophistication required of color commentators at the highest levels of the sport.

"I've been fighting for 10 years and I've never once had any color commentator in my entire career sit down and ask me one question about me, personally, to my face," Cruz says. "I just feel like this is a position that, I'm not perfect, I'm not going to do it right every time probably. I'm going to have my mistakes, because I'm not a perfect individual. But I'm trying to do the best job I can, to get the most information I can from these athletes, because I felt that I was very misunderstood coming up in my career, with people trying to break down my style. Even the color commentators would just say weird and awkward, instead of asking me what I was doing face-to-face. They never even thought of that. They would just give their opinion on what they saw and that's it.

"But how are you supposed to break down what I'm doing if you have no clue what I'm doing? That mindset kind of carried over to where I said, I want to be able to break down what fighters are doing and see it from a different light, because I didn't get that."

"The color commentators would just say ‘weird' and ‘awkward,' instead of asking me what I was doing face-to-face. They never even thought of that. They would just give their opinion on what they saw and that's it."

Cruz has always carried something of a chip on his shoulder. And truthfully, he never had much of a choice. For years, "The Dominator" reigned as one of the most underappreciated champions in the sport, a whirling dervish of herky-jerky technique who at times appeared more breakdancer than kickboxer. His movement was, and still is, eternities ahead of its time, a baffling web of feints and slips that gradually cemented Cruz as the greatest defensive fighter of his generation.

But just as the time came for Cruz to cash in, his livelihood slipped through his fingers. One injury on The Ultimate Fighter turned into a near five-year torrent of bad news that seemed almost too cruel to be real. Yet through the darkness, a door opened that Cruz never could have anticipated.

"Once I lost my belt, I really started aggressively doing the FOX thing, because my sponsors dropped off," Cruz says. "I wasn't flying first-class anymore. I wasn't doing any of that. It's little things you start to realize when they all get taken away. When you lose that belt, you hit a panic state and you go, holy cow, I could be out of this sport for the rest of my life. I don't know if my body is going to perform for me again. I need to work. I need to make money. I can't just rely on fighting for the rest of my life. I need a Plan B.

"Early in my career, I was under the mindset that focus is the key to being champion. Focusing on one thing, like a magnifying glass. When you use a magnifying glass and you're trying to burn an ant on the ground, you don't keep moving it to different objects. You keep it on that ant until the ant sets on fire, and when the ant sets on fire, you've won. You caught that thing on fire, right? Well I did that with my MMA career. I lit my MMA career on fire with a magnifying glass. Nothing else existed. I never moved the magnifying glass.

"But then my knees blew out, so I needed a new focus. I couldn't just keep burning that ant that was burnt to a crisp, so I had to move it. And when I moved that magnifying glass to something different, it broadened my horizons. It forced me to open my mind. It forced me to mature, not just as a fighter, but as an individual. As a man. Because I had to really challenge myself in situations that I just was not comfortable in at all, and I forced myself to do it anyway."

The paths life leads us down are rarely what we expect. In retrospect, Cruz doubts he would ever have found this line of work had he been healthy for the last half-decade, caught in a spin cycle of training camps and UFC title defenses. He certainly wouldn't have the sense of understanding that he does now, about how fleeting the fight game is and how important those few minutes inside the cage really are.

That very understanding is one of the biggest reasons Cruz is approaching his newest endeavor so seriously.

With the first six fighter interviews out of the way, Cruz tells me he plans to meet with the remaining 20 fighters on the card over the next 24 hours. Then comes the real preparation, he says: combining the personal information from his interviews with the analytical information gathered from film study to paint a more complex portrait of each competitor ahead of Saturday night.

"My biggest goal in this process is to let fighters be able to release themselves and put a real understanding as to what their style is and what they're doing, because that's what this is. This is art," Cruz says. "This is a brand new sport.

"These new styles that are coming up need to be able to be read and understood from a fighter's perspective, and not just assumed according to what has been seen in the past. Because as this sport evolves, things are going to change, and those fundamentals, being ‘fundamentally sharp,' will no longer exist over time. As the sport evolves, new fundamentals will come into play because it's a new sport. That is very important to me, to be able to project that to the general public, the fans, and for the fighters, because I didn't get that. So I'd like to be able to give that to the fighters."

"As the sport evolves, new fundamentals will come into play because it's a new sport. That is very important to me, to be able to project that to the general public, the fans, and for the fighters, because I didn't get that. So I'd like to be able to give that to the fighters."

Commentary is an inherently personal endeavor, much more so than a quick fight pick on FS1. While it may seem benign, what is said over the course of a seven-hour broadcast lasts forever. Every time a fighter watches and re-watches his own performance, from now until the end of time, Cruz's voice will be there. The same goes for that fighter's children, their children's children, and so on down the line. And with that responsibility comes an obligation to respect the space.

"I truly believe that a lot of times people forget the position they're actually in when they're doing this job," Cruz says. "You're not there for anything except to make this fighter known and understood. They get 15 to 25 minutes to go out there and show the world who they are, and we're a piece of showing the world who they are -- me, Joe Rogan, whoever is in that color commentary position. What information you decide to research and understand about that person, not just their fighting style, but their personality and why they do things, it matters. It matters, because our whole career is lived through 15 minutes sometimes. You expect people to be our fans if all you did was talk about nonsense for 15 minutes because you didn't actually do the research on the guy? Or said this guy is horribly weird, so now everybody is going to say he moves horribly weird? It's just not fair.

"So my thing is, give these guys what they deserve. You can't always be perfect, somebody is always going to be upset with you. Everybody has a voice these days, especially with social media, so it is going to be a challenge for me and I am going to have to have some thick skin, I already know. I already have a huge target on my back from being champion for so long, and now let's add another target onto my head for being a color commentator. People are going to have their judgments about me and there's nothing I can do about it. So it's going to take a lot of focus, a lot of strength, a lot of respect and humility.

"Even those who I don't get along with, I have to separate myself from that as a mature individual and realize that regardless of what I feel about this person, this is their time in that Octagon. They're building their life and their career, just the same as I am. So regardless, how I feel about them is irrelevant."

***

Ultimately, Cruz knows this is only a first step. A trial run. He and Cormier are both active UFC champions with straps to defend, so Cruz doesn't expect either of them to get the call-up to the commentary booth more than a few times a year. He isn't sure if he would want that right now either; between the preparation and travel, each Fight Night claims several weeks of their lives -- time that could be spent training to remain the world's best.

But the irony of the situation is apparent. The man who for so long had too little to look towards suddenly has too much. It is a turnaround that only gets more incredible with time.

The man who for so long had too little suddenly has too much. It is a turnaround that only gets more incredible with time.

So as Cruz shifts back to his studies, there is one last thing I wonder. Knowing what he knows now, the many surgeries, the endless setbacks and the sleepless nights, but also the knowledge that it would all lead back to this, coach, analyst, commentator, champion once more; if Cruz could do it over from the beginning of TUF 15, is there anything he would change?

"Well, if you told me before I had to do it, I don't know if I would've been able to do it," he admits. "But with the things that I learned about putting one foot in front of the other and dropping everything else, I had to do that more than ever during that stint with injuries. I had to not think about the nine months of [rehab] that I had ahead of me. I had to just think about the day, that I had to do 10 squats. And being happy with the 10 squats and moving forward with the rest of my day.

"What I learned through that, I didn't have that gift before. And now I can cater that to other parts of my life, like this analyst job and all of the other responsibilities I have. It really taught me how to juggle, how to deal with all of this stuff that I have on my plate and just kind of take a deep breath, put it in God's hands, put it in the hands of the people who I have faith in on my team, and just give it everything I have. As long as I give my heart and soul into something, I usually do a pretty good job. It doesn't mean I'm always going to be perfect, but all I can do is hope for the best, cross my fingers, and do all of the research and all of the work I can so I don't mess up, and hopefully people aren't too harsh on me when I get out there for the first time."

The man with the many roles pauses for a moment.

"But I wouldn't take it back," he finally says. "That was your No. 1 question, right? I would not take it back. Not for a second. I learned a lot. It was very hard. But that's what made me."