Miocic won’t let success go to head
On cusp of heavyweight history, champ still gets joy out of work as firefighter
Stipe Miocic is one fight DALLAS — or maybe one more huge, thunderous, bone-jarring punch — away from making history as the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s longest reigning heavyweight champion.
Numerically speaking it is not the toughest marker to beat, with no man having successfully defended the belt more than twice in a row dating to the outset of the organization. Yet that fact merely underlines how difficult it is to be dominant among the big men, the cadre of physical giants where a single strike can turn a fight and twist a career.
In the main event of UFC 211 on Saturday night, Miocic showed he is not just dominant right now. He is pulverizing the division. His crushing knockout of Junior dos Santos at American Airlines Center jarred the jaw of his opponent and brought the UFC’s biggest card of the year to date to an abrupt halt.
It should not have been a surprise. Miocic has stopped his last four opponents in the opening stanza, making him one of mixed martial arts’ must-see attractions and cementing his popularity.
“If I keep winning, I will break history, big deal,” Miocic said. “I am just going to keep winning. I like winning. I like being called champ, especially.”
In some ways he is the best kind of star, the kind who has guy-next-door appeal. That description is so often a cliché — pretty much everybody lives next door to someone — yet the 6-4 Clevelander really does seem like the sort of man you’d see washing his car in a driveway nearby.
There is no front. Miocic refuses to give up his beloved profession as a firefighter, citing the camaraderie and the opportunity to serve his community as the forces that will take him back to the firehouse on Thursday, even when he long since found a more lucrative pastime.
In an age in which fighters so often seek to fuel their brand with boorish antics and feckless insults, Miocic is a heartwarming tale of perseverance and ethic.
“If I am not the champion, I am really glad this guy is,” dos Santos said, in a gesture that says just as much about the genial Brazilian as about the man who beat him. “He is a really nice guy, a great champion. He is on the way to being one of the all-time best. I admire him. It is going to take a lot to beat him. He is the real deal.”
Miocic (17-2 in mixed martial arts, 11-2 UFC) last was defeated by dos Santos in 2014, but you wouldn’t have known it by the way he stalked him here, before putting him away with that brutal straight right hand and a subse- quent flurry of blows.
Since that loss, he has made significant technical strides, but the real change in his fortunes came 364 days before this win, when he traveled to Brazil and ripped the title away from Fabricio Werdum, before successfully defending it against Alistair Overeem in September.
Now the record is in his sights, and the heavyweight division’s freakishly unpredictable nature means he is being spoken about in the most esteemed of circles.
“Stipe is looking like the man,” UFC President Dana White said, when asked about the fighter’s position in heavyweight history. “He is not the same fighter who fought (dos Santos) the first time. He is super-athletic, lightning fast, a complete fighter and a really big athlete.
“The guy has come into his own. He is unbelievable. Everybody in the fight game has a different path. He is right there now.”
White’s interest in fighting sports came about long before he helped vitalize the UFC, and he knows full well how much the heavyweights have the ability to grab attention, primarily because of the likelihood of fireworks.
In Miocic, he has an explosive action hero who is finally making the heavyweights predictable yet anything but boring.