The full extent to which the world was ignoring Robbie Lawler and Rory MacDonald didn’t hit home until the top trending topic of UFC 189 became Jose Aldo’s ribs.
That’s saying something, since we had already overlooked Saturday’s UFC Welterweight Championship fight between Lawler and MacDonald for months. From the moment the UFC made the pragmatic but precedent-bucking decision to make Aldo’s featherweight title defense against Conor McGregor this pay-per-view’s main event, we pretty much knew how things were going to go.
McGregor and Aldo got all the headlines. They got the “world tour.” They got the documentary series and the late-night talk show appearances.
Lawler and MacDonald? They got mostly bupkis.
Until the mad scramble that ended with Chad Mendes subbing in for the injured Aldo last Tuesday, you could be forgiven for not knowing a 170-pound title fight was even on this card. This week—perhaps in tacit acknowledgement that McGregor vs. Mendes won’t be the PPV juggernaut that McGregor-Aldo might have been—Lawler and MacDonald have finally received a bit more of the spotlight.
Better late than never? Maybe, though naturally neither guy will publicly cop to being troubled by playing second fiddle to the 145-pounders.
“That does not bother me at all," Lawler said during last week’s conference call, via Sherdog.com’s Mike Sloan. "I don’t care if I’m the first fight or the last fight. ... I just stick to what I do and that’s train hard and concentrate on myself. I let the UFC do the promoting.”
And look, early on it was perfectly understandable that the UFC gave top billing to the biggest featherweight fight in history. McGregor’s brogue’d-out braggadocio juxtaposed against Aldo’s cold-eyed death stare was going to make everybody a lot of money. Matchmakers knew it. UFC accountants knew it.
Lawler and MacDonald probably knew it too.
But then news came down that Aldo had suffered a rib injury—broken, bruised, nobody could quite decide—and the general consensus seemed to be that the sky was falling.
First, we fretted that Aldo might pull out. Then we fretted that even if he didn’t pull out, we’d be cheated out of seeing him fight McGregor at 100 percent. Then he did pull out, and we settled, begrudgingly, on Mendes, though many among us sniffed the air haughtily and noted UFC 189 now wouldn’t be quite the jaw-dropper we were hoping to witness.
At some point amid all this hand-wringing over the little guys, it’s possible Lawler and MacDonald—somewhere deep in the private recesses of their brains—might have felt a little bit left out. After all, neither of them had suffered an injury. They were both still planning on making it to the cage. If the UFC 189 PPV needed saving, the 170-pound championship clash may well have been up to the challenge.
Granted, their first fight at UFC 167 in September 2013 was a decent, back-and-forth scrap, but it didn’t quite set our hair on fire. Lawler won a split decision after largely controlling a slow-paced first round with leg kicks and then turning the third into an all-out blitz, brutalizing MacDonald with heavy punches from all positions.
The 25-year-old Canadian also had his moments, though they lacked the oomph of Lawler’s best sequences. MacDonald did his most compelling work with takedowns, stealing the second round by planting Lawler on his back with less than two minutes on the clock and then saving himself in the third with timely tackles when he appeared to be on the ropes.
MacDonald ended the fight on top, hammering away with punches and elbows, but it was the kind of inconsistent performance that has earned him a mixed reputation with MMA fans. Lawler clearly had him on the verge of a stoppage in the final stanza—including knocking him flat with an uppercut at one point—and had the fight gone five rounds, it’s possible Lawler might have finished.
Last week while reflecting on the fight with MMA Junkie.com, MacDonald made it sound as though he just didn’t want to be in there with Lawler at the time:
I had a couple things in training and my body wasn’t feeling good; I just lost motivation. I couldn’t train as hard as I usually did and the injury kind of made me not focused. It just made me not into it. I think it was just my hunger was not there. I wasn’t really into the fight at that point. Before that fight I was like, ‘Oh, I just kind of want this to be over.’ I wasn’t really interested in fighting. I just wanted to get it over and done with and just relax.
This weekend’s fight will have the benefit of the championship rounds, if not the publicity befitting a championship contest. Both guys come in riding three-fight win streaks. MacDonald last lost to Lawler in the aforementioned bout. Since then, he’s bounced back with wins over Demian Maia, Tyron Woodley and Tarec Saffiedine.
Lawler last lost to Johny Hendricks in their original scrap at UFC 171 for the title vacated by Georges St-Pierre. While Hendricks took the championship in that initial meeting, he also inherited an extended stint on the shelf, owing to a torn bicep he suffered during the fight. Meanwhile, Lawler kept right on trucking, beating Jake Ellenberger and Matt Brown before (barely) trumping Hendricks in their rematch at UFC 181.
And so, here we are: Two of the world’s best welterweights arguably at the height of their powers are about to throw down for UFC gold.
No, they don’t hate each other. In fact, both Lawler and MacDonald have been downright civil since signing on for this bout a few months ago—and maybe that was the problem.
Neither of these guys specializes in running his yap, and this pairing wasn’t going to spawn any epic drama the way Aldo vs. McGregor did. They’re just two consummate professionals who are going to go out on Saturday night and vie to be the best in the world.
For a complete afterthought in the UFC 189 circus and a fight that for a while there was running second to a guy’s injured ribs, it’s hard to complain about that.
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