What these other fighters take me fo? A joke?
Ah y’all must’ve forgot!
And they got the nerve to say I ain’t fight nobody
I just make ‘em look like nobody
Y’all must’ve forgot!”
BEFORE WE TAKE this any further, please accept our apologies for reminding you of Roy Jones Jr’s dreadful ditty from 2002.
However, in the post-UFC 196 world we’re living in, that particular track has unfortunately been stuck in our heads since Nate Diaz choked Conor McGregor into submission on Saturday night in Las Vegas.
This time last year, it seemed that the Diaz brothers — Nate and his older sibling, Nick — had been left behind by the modern mixed martial arts scene. Passed by, forgotten, as commanding champions and a lengthy queue of hungry challengers emerged in their respective divisions, from lightweight to middleweight.
Nate, following a comprehensive loss to Rafael dos Anjos in December 2014, disappeared from the radar. After a unanimous-decision defeat to Anderson Silva a month later, Nick failed another drug test due to marijuana use, which was punished with a five-year ban by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
The past few months have been much kinder to the Diaz duo, however. Nate, against the odds, defeated a resurgent Michael Johnson in December. There was a seldom-seen sense of purpose about him throughout that week in Orlando too. The 30-year-old was in the best shape of his career for the lightweight bout and the performance was arguably as good as any we’ve witnessed from the former Ultimate Fighter winner.
Then in January, Nick’s ban was reduced to 18 months, allowing him to return to competition this August. But the climax of this period of changed fortunes for the Diaz brothers came over the weekend at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, when Nate pulled the rug out from beneath Conor McGregor and his impulsive ambitions to spread his reign of dominance across multiple weight classes.
Making their mandatory McGregor-induced foray into MMA last week, some Irish sportswriters billed Nate Diaz as a journeyman. When they asked Google for a breakdown of the Irish fighter’s next opponent, they were introduced to a man with a mixed record of 18-10, who had fought just once in 15 months and was afforded less than a fortnight’s preparation, having stepped in on short notice to deputise for injured lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos. That was sufficient data to dismiss Diaz as a lamb to the slaughter in the McGregor extravaganza.
Diaz is an accomplished boxer and elite Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner — attributes which combine to make for a troublesome opponent for a fighter like McGregor. He has been competing on his sport’s biggest stage since before McGregor first walked into an MMA gym, emerging victorious against several of its top fighters. He’s been around the block, but Nate Diaz is still several outings shy of being relegated to journeyman status.
That’s what the internet search engines didn’t tell them. And if it did, they failed to recognise its significance. The sudden rise in popularity of MMA in Ireland forces sections of the mainstream media to take crash-courses in the sport in an attempt to bring themselves up to speed, but the absence of an authentic interest in it prevents them from scratching beneath the surface to discover the substance behind the statistics.
An upset victory certainly wasn’t part of the UFC’s blueprint for Saturday night’s main event. However, a bout between McGregor and Diaz has been in the pipeline for quite some time and with just 12 days to salvage a pay-per-view card, enough sparks would fly in the brief build-up to justify it as a risk worth taking on the organisation’s part.
If the landscape of combat sports was determined only by records, win-streaks and staying active, boxing may never have been treated to the enthralling Micky Ward-Arturo Gatti trilogy of 2002/3. In boxing, a contest is often more complicated than the records of the combatants might suggest, but that’s even more relevant to MMA, where the presence of various disciplines also increases the number of avenues for a potential defeat — regardless of how unlikely the odds-makers and the media deem it to be.
The Diaz brothers are not cut from the same cloth as the vast majority of professional fighters, so applying conventional wisdom to their situation is particularly flawed logic. Indifferent to rankings, belts and other generally-accepted barometers of achievement, they’re an enigma in MMA.
Especially so in recent years, they’ve competed infrequently, only rearing their heads when an attractive opening appears in the form of a big-money fight. Their popularity, much of which can be attributed to their renegade approach, allied to their ability to forge rivalries and sell fights, has earned them lucrative opportunities that their place in the pecking order may not merit – Saturday’s high-profile clash with McGregor a case in point.
Nate Diaz’s last six victims now include a current UFC champion, a former PRIDE champion and two former UFC title challengers. He has always been capable of picking up big wins, but doing so consistently has been his problem. Sometimes it’s been down to application and on other occasions his main weakness — wrestling — has been responsible for his downfall, as opponents have targeted Diaz in that area to grind out wins over the distance. Only once in 22 UFC fights has he been stopped.
Wrestling was never going to be his undoing against Conor McGregor, and although our tip was a McGregor victory via TKO in the second round, we did warn in Saturday’s preview that the Irish fighter’s undefeated record in the UFC would be under serious threat if he ended up on the ground with a BJJ black belt like Diaz.
With the biggest victory of his career, Diaz showed that when it comes to mixing boxing with BJJ, few are quite as adept. If the result is a catalyst for him to keep his head in the game in 2016, it could be a recipe for Nate Diaz to go one step further than he did in his 2012 lightweight title bout against Benson Henderson — not that the belt will mean very much to him.
A 155lbs title shot in the form of a rematch with Rafael dos Anjos may be next for Diaz, while there’s also been speculation about a meeting with welterweight champion Robbie Lawler over the last 36 hours. Diaz would enter both fights as a betting outsider, but in terms of selling the spectacle, he’s now as valuable a commodity as any in both divisions thanks to his status as the man who beat the man.
The elder Diaz brother may not have been directly impacted by Nate’s win on Saturday, but the result did remind MMA fans that long before Conor McGregor arrived on the scene, the Diaz brothers were the notorious ones. That will only serve to heighten the anticipation surrounding Nick’s imminent return. Interesting times ahead in Stockton.
Sorry, lads. We all must’ve forgot.
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