Stepping into the cage for UFC 201 in Atlanta, Tyron Woodley must have felt at least a little bit out of his element. It had been 547 days between fights. In the interim, eight of the 10 UFC title belts had changed hands, the United States Anti-Doping Agency began to randomly drug test the promotion’s athletes and the company had been sold.
There hadn’t just been a few changes: The MMA landscape had been profoundly transformed. Interestingly, the stability atop Woodley’s division had one of the few constants; alongside Demetrious Johnson, welterweight king Robbie Lawler had been one of the two champs to hold on to gold.
While Lawler made war a personal habit to the degree that it became the expectation, his chin couldn’t hold up forever. It was finally compromised Saturday night, with a sledgehammer right ending his exciting reign and installing a new champion.
Let the chaos continue.
That’s the kind of year it’s been in the Octagon—one where the only predictable outcome is unpredictability and champions are vulnerable by nature of their very existence.
Woodley did the deed with a stutter-step right hand that began with a feinted overhand and then ended with the real thing. It landed flush, leading to a sight about as rare as the Leonid meteor storms: Lawler on his back, helpless.
He was already out, the fight was by any meaningful measure decided, but referee Dan Miragliotta offered Lawler the champion’s grace period, meaning he got to eat five more gloved hammers before being rescued. The fight took all of two minutes, 12 seconds.
It marked the first time Lawler had been knocked out since April 2004, when Nick Diaz pulled the trick at UFC 47.
“I wanted to use all my angles, go back-and-forth and side-to-side,” Woodley (16-3) said in the Fox Sports 1 post-fight show. “No one’s had great success standing right in front of him. I was prepared.”
To add to the mayhem that 2016 has brought, Woodley brushed off the idea of a fight with current No. 1 contender Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson, instead suggesting the possibility of facing off with the aforementioned Diaz or with former champion Georges St-Pierre.
“If I’m an athlete in this sport, in this division, and I want to say I’m the best in the world, I feel I should compete against those guys,” Woodley said in the post-fight press conference. “I don’t feel any obligation to go by the rankings. I want to go out there and fight the money fights.”
Prior to UFC 201, the storyline between Woodley and Lawler was their shared lineage at American Top Team, where they were ostensibly “teammates.” But the two only rarely trained together and spent little time together.
In fact, when Woodley joined the team, he was just an amateur, and competing at that level, Lawler actually refereed two of his fights.
“I was getting my butt kicked,” he said. “I was just a bag of bones.”
While Lawler (27-11, 1 no-contest) calls the gym’s Coconut Creek, Florida, world headquarters home, Woodley opened a satellite ATT school in his native Missouri in 2011, making that his home base.
Still, Woodley felt that brief time together meant something Saturday, conditioning Lawler to overreact to his subtle takedown fakes. The first two minutes were slow going on action, but Woodley did fake the level change several times. He used it again in his final feint before landing the championship right.
“I think he realized the level of wrestling I brought to the table,” he said of their time together. “He was fearful of that. I used the level fakes, and I saw the reaction. I knew as long as I did that, it would set up my hands.”
While the knockout was only the sixth of Woodley’s career, he has been something of a late bloomer in developing his power, making it a significant complementary threat to rival his wrestling pedigree in a well-rounded game. But a knockout coming against Lawler still has to be characterized as a surprise.
According to FightMetric, Lawler came into the fight with a 16-1 career knockdown ratio and hadn’t been dropped since the loss to Diaz over a decade ago.
So of course it would be in a wild year like this when it would happen.
We’ve seen Jon Jones and Brock Lesnar test positive for banned substances, media darling Conor McGregor briefly fall out of favor with UFC management, Ronda Rousey disappear without a trace and Michael Bisping knock out Luke Rockhold on two weeks' notice.
And now we’ve seen the iron-chinned Lawler go down, too.
If this were a book, we’d criticize it for having too many plot twists.
Instead, it’s exactly the draw of the sport. At its best, MMA brings an electric unease to the air, and whether you have 10 days to prepare or 547, you can create a magical moment.
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