Eddie Alvarez and Gilbert Melendez both took the scenic route to the UFC.
For better or worse, Alvarez and Melendez each spent the heart of their careers toiling in smaller organizations, where they both became lightweight champions and gained reputations as fearsome, all-action fighters.
Had their UFC 188 co-main event gone down a few years ago—say, anytime from 2009-11, the approximate span when Alvarez’s reign in Bellator MMA and Melendez’s dominance over Strikeforce overlapped—it might have been considered a bona fide dream fight.
As it stands, their scrap will still likely be worth the price of admission and is the odds-on favorite to scoop up Fight of the Night honors.
To hear Melendez tell it, it’s a matchup he’s wanted for a long time.
There appears to be no shortage of healthy competition between these two.
“I had always wanted to fight Eddie because I thought he was one of the toughest guys outside of the UFC,” he told fellow fighter Josh Samman in an interview for Bloody Elbow recently. “Pro Elite and Strikeforce did a co-promotion at one time, and I was hoping they would do another, and I pushed for that fight. I think he took that as an insult because I wanted to challenge him.”
That was then, obviously. By now, both Melendez and Alvarez have crossed over the summit and started the descent into the shaded side of their professional lives.
Melendez is 33 years old and has gone 1-2 since his UFC debut in 2013, though both losses came against standing 155-pound champions. Alvarez is 31 and, owing to a lengthy contract dispute with Bellator and an injury here and there, he’s only fought once since November 2013. That was a loss to Donald Cerrone at UFC 178.
Neither guy is necessarily about to drop off the radar but, despite their respective Top 10 rankings (Melendez is No. 4, Alvarez No. 9) both need this win to stay in the thick of the crowded lightweight contender scene.
Alvarez especially could use a lift. It’s been nothing but bad news for him for a while now.
After losing his Bellator lightweight title to Michael Chandler in a fight-of-the-year-quality brawl in 2011 he rebounded for two straight wins. But Alvarez’s Bellator contract ended after a first-round KO victory over Patricky Freire in October 2012 and the former champ was determined to test the free-agent market. What followed was a lengthy contract dispute that threw the next 10 months of his fighting career into limbo.
In August 2013, Alvarez finally settled with Bellator and recaptured the title from Chandler in another classic battle. A proposed rubber match between the two was scratched when Alvarez suffered a concussion in training. In the meantime, Bellator underwent significant regime change and new CEO Scott Coker elected to let Alvarez chase his dream in the UFC.
What followed didn’t go down exactly as he planned.
It was shocking to see Alvarez show up at UFC 178 looking at least a full weight class smaller than his longer, rangier opponent. Cerrone kept him at the end of his jab—not to mention a series of thudding knees—en route to a unanimous-decision win that spoiled Alvarez’s long-awaited debut and thrust the considerable hype he’d spent 11 years building into serious doubt.
In the wake of that loss, UFC president Dana White said what a lot of fans and analysts were thinking, encouraging Alvarez to consider dropping to the featherweight division. The longtime professional seemed to take that as a borderline insult.
"I can't cut to 145 (pounds),” Alvarez told ESPN’s Brett Okamoto. “I'd have to cut a leg off…I don't want to go that route where I'm going into fights dehydrated. I used to fight at 170 pounds. I was 10-0 at 170 with eight knockouts. I'm not going to listen to somebody from the outside tell me what weight I should be fighting at."
Melendez, meanwhile, has emerged from three up-and-down appearances in the Octagon with his reputation smelling just slightly better.
He engaged in an instant classic brawl against Diego Sanchez at UFC 166. His split decision loss to Ben Henderson in April 2013 was one of those decidedly typical Henderson bouts that could’ve gone either way. Melendez even won a round against then-champ Anthony Pettis at UFC 181 before Pettis stunned him with a punch and choked him out in the second.
The complete package has preserved Melendez’s reasonably high ranking, but prompted close observers to wonder if his time as a legitimate contender for the gold had passed. Luckily for him, the belt has already jumped from Henderson to Pettis and now to Rafael dos Anjos during his short UFC tenure, so nearly all the division’s top challengers remain viable.
Melendez has also been slightly better than Alvarez at navigating the choppy political waters outside the cage.
He came to the UFC along with the rest of the spoils of the Strikeforce purchase at the beginning of 2013. Since then, he’s been through one contract negotiation with the UFC and came away as that rare fighter who was able to turn the situation into a personal victory.
After toying with the idea of signing with Bellator, Melendez was able to score a coaching gig on The Ultimate Fighter and the resulting title shot against Pettis. It is believed he is now one of the highest-paid athletes in the fight company.
Strictly in terms of wins and losses though, Melendez has certainly been less successful than he would have liked since making his way to the UFC. At this point, he’s at that somewhat pivotal point in his career where 2-2 sounds an awful lot better than 1-3.
All of the recent strife experienced by both fighters might turn out to be good news for fans on Saturday night.
Both Melendez and Alvarez are highly regarded technicians who take pride in their exciting, brawling styles. They each head into this fight in slightly precarious, if not out-and-out desperate positions. With these two, it's easy to imagine that desperation turning into determination, and making for a pretty entertaining fight.
Neither guy may ever again soar to the great the heights of their earlier careers, but they are both still fully capable of stealing the show.
That makes their co-main event one you don't want to miss.
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