It was the end of the fourth round. That’s when you knew you were bearing witness to something truly spectacular. Both men, now having spent twenty minutes brutalizing each other with every limb, refusing to give a single inch. Of course, it would all end minutes later, and Robbie Lawler would mark the first successful defense of his welterweight title against Rory MacDonald by forcing the young Canadian to quit in the fifth and final round.
But we didn’t know that then, and neither did they. They were too busy maintaining some level of consciousness and struggling to breath out of shattered noses and Chelsea Smiles. In that moment, there was no one else in the world except these two men, staring into one another’s soul through blood shot eyes.
No one will ever know MacDonald to the degree Lawler does. The same goes for Lawler. Over the course of those nearly 23 minutes of suffering, each won a small piece of the other’s heart and soul. No heartfelt conversation with your father, no late-night liaison with a former lover, nothing can compare to the level of intimacy Lawler and MacDonald experienced that night.
That’s a weird thing to conceptualize, that you only truly know a person after they spend nearly a half hour trying to incapacitate you physically. It’s something that, for the vast majority of human beings on earth, we will never experience.
That’s why their clash at UFC 189 was the clear-cut winner for Last Word on Sports’ Fight of the Year. There was no other option. Out of the literally hundreds of rounds, the back and forth wars, the title fights, there was only one fight in 2015 that elevated the sport of mixed martial arts from spectacle to existential experience.
We watch sports and look up to athletes because they do what we cannot. Whether through sheer physical talent, or the insane amount of hours they spend perfecting their craft, we can’t do what they do. So we live vicariously through our favorites, cheering them on through adversity and celebrating their victories as they come.
Fighting is different. We’ve all been in a scuffle at some point in our lives, but compared to sports like basketball and football, we never experience the level of sheer human violence that two trained fighters are capable of delivering to one another. To that end, the UFC has done a tremendous job at allowing fans unprecedented access to its athletes.
The moment between the fourth and fifth round of their title fight, the opportunity that fighters have to sit down and attempt to catch their breath and receive advice from their trainers, was instead used to further assert their dominance. Not through words, nor physical action, but instead in a look.
Lawler sprays blood from his mouth as he spits to the canvas before meeting eyes with MacDonald, who, barely standing at this point, doesn’t hesitate or divert his glare for a second. They were in that moment. Something that lasted less than five seconds, yet will stand the test of time as one of the defining moments of modern MMA. Courage, will, tenacity, violence, strength, bravery; any number of words could be used to describe their fight, but none manage to encompass the sheer power of that moment.
Had referee John McCarthy not separated them, it’s possible the fight would have just carried over into the fifth round, with neither fighter complaining about the lack of a round-break. They wanted to end each other, by any means necessary.
That we were there to witness it in some capacity is something truly special, and not likely to be replicated soon.
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