When Dominick Cruz returned after 16 months to fight T.J. Dillashaw in Boston back in early 2016, it was as if he was confronting an imposter. Dillashaw had set up shop as the UFC’s bantamweight champion using a combination of footwork and jaggedy speed, hallmarks of Cruz’s own game. It was like Cruz had been coming home after a long war only to discover that life had tried to get on without him.
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Somebody — in this case, Dillashaw — was masquerading around in his clothes, and people weren’t as suspicious about that as Cruz thought they should be.
Yet what distinguished Cruz as he came back into media orbit wasn’t just the co*cksure declarations that cage rust was a “sign of mental weakness,” as he said repeatedly in the lead-up. It was that he was wiser than he could convey; he had experiences he couldn’t quite share, or simply didn’t want to dwell on. He hadn’t lost the title so much as watched it recede into some foreign backdrop, as injuries ravished his career.
His war was a lonely affair in rehabilitation and recovery on a seemingly endless loop.
Through the course of knee reconstruction(s), a groin tear and an ongoing battle with plantar fasciitis, his heart had undergone many revolutions. He was returning to regain his title as a man who’d seen too much to celebrate a champion’s simpler joys. This was all evident during that fight week in cold Boston back in January 2016, when the media searched for more accessible narratives. Regaining the title was the simplest version available, an angle deepened by the idea that the man he was facing was a blurry blond facsimile.
Dillashaw was the new Cruz.
To use a Goldie-ism, he had assumed the role as the most “flustrating” fighter, both in the octagon — where his evasive movement was at times mesmerizing — and as a mite-sized Benedict Arnold, for having bolted Team Alpha Male with his coach Duane Ludwig. Cruz was taking on a guy who could move just like him, could punch and kick just like him, who could lord over a division just like him.
Yet when Dillashaw called Cruz the “boringest fighter in history” in the promo, you could see that he didn’t think much of the comparisons.
Anyway, Cruz reminded everyone of who he was and what he was capable of. It was a beautiful fight, a flickering back-and-forth battle with loaded action for 25 minutes, the kind of fight that had the cageside stenographers typing out single word summaries, like “wow” and “damn.” Cruz was at times leaning so far to his side while throwing shots that he looked like he was navigating his way through a blizzard. He had no center. His body was abstract.
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And Dillashaw was flickering, too. If you just let your eye train on something beyond the cage — on Dana White’s cageside head for instance, so as to let the action become the periphery — it was like watching the wind blow around a pair of dueling candy wrappers. It was a blur of directional changes, level changes, bopping, weaving, sudden fits of verticality and then just as sudden drops.
There wasn’t a finish, but it was a true aficionado’s delight. Cruz won a super-close split decision and got his title back. It was improbable, but you could see he’d believed this would be the outcome the entire time. He had visualized having that title again. He had internalized that moment many times through his private hell of rehabilitations, and he had now carried it through to reality. He draped the belt over his shoulder like it was the most familiar thing in his life. It was far more than a title fight. It was Cruz answering whatever questions he’d had about himself.
“The only thing surprising was I had to show something of myself, that’s what this was,” he told Joe Rogan afterward, restored to smugness. Wait, was it smugness?
Not really.
I watched his demeanor at the post-fight press conference. There was relief, yes, and perhaps a little of that devilish smirk that was meant for his critics. But there was a subtler something going on between his ears, the difference between this older Cruz and the one that last defended the bantamweight title in 2011 against Demetrious Johnson at just 26. As a television analyst, Cruz had gotten used to breaking down fights and explaining the certain intentions and tells for an audience.
He did that for his own fight, too, insisting he had seen fighters move like Dillashaw before. He talked about him like he was solving a not particularly sophisticated human puzzle.
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And if he had it in him to describe what it meant to regain the title after overcoming so many personal mental and physical hurdles, he waited until the wee hours of that Sunday to put things into perspective.
Talking to my colleague from MMA Fighting at the time, Ariel Helwani, Cruz was asked if that night — having recaptured the title after all the injuries and doubts — was the greatest moment of his life.
I happened to be standing right there as Cruz looked past Helwani for a moment, dragging one of those revolutions out into the public.
“No,” he said. “The greatest moment of my life was realizing I didn’t need a belt to be happy.”
It was a simple statement. It wasn’t meant to be deep. But with him holding the belt that late night in Boston, he had communicated everything he left unsaid during his time away. And what he said was that life hadn’t gone on without him at all, and no time had been wasted.
(Top photo: Jeff Bottari / Zuffa)
