The Cult of the Present: Or Why Every UFC Champion Is Apparently the Greatest UFC Champion
Substack superstar Freddie deBoer had an interesting piece yesterday about the way sports pundits use the term “GOAT.” Despite purportedly identifying the greatest of “all time”, in truth the title changes hands more often than the old WWE Hardcore championship, essentially little more than empty, provisional praise.
DeBoer highlighted a recent edition of The Bill Simmons Podcast where the former “Sports Guy” of ESPN fame was swift to raise the possibility that Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was the best to ever do it. Simmons, of course, wasn’t alone. Even I was guilty, during a rare tweet storm, of falling under the sway of Mahomes’ not inconsiderable powers, declaring him the best I’ve ever seen in 40 years of fandom.
How quick we are, deBoer points out, to forget. Just three years ago, Tom Brady won his seventh Super Bowl championship, seemingly cementing his claim to GOAT status, if not forever, at least for a generation. Despite falling short statistically to contemporaries like Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers, Brady had unprecedented staying power and a knack for winning the games that mattered most. Sports, more than almost any other form of entertainment, is binary. You win or you lose. Brady won—at a level no one else has ever matched. No one, frankly, has even come close.
That didn’t stop even an inveterate homer like Boston Superfan Simmons from considering pushing Brady down his imaginary list. Just one year into retirement, Brady, like so many before, has become a hazy memory, victim of the Cult of the Present. In football, the greatest is presumed to be whoever is currently operating at the highest level. Brady is the past, joining other former greats like Joe Montana and Dan Marino, one of those Star Wars ghosts, sepia tinted and bathed in an indistinct light, little more than a sentient memory, all power and glory ceded to the right now.
At one point Bret Favre represented the height of achievement, winning three MVPs in a row in the mid-90s. That might as well have been a hundred years ago. Favre is never mentioned in GOAT conversations anymore. And forget about legitimate legends of the before times like Johnny Unitas or Otto Graham. They don’t even exist to a modern fan or media member. In time, Mahomes too will be forgotten, replaced in the discourse by the next new flavor than tempts the palate of pigskin fans.
The Cult of the Present is strong indeed—and nowhere does it pack more punch than inside the hallowed steel cage surrounding the UFC Octagon where every new champion seems to be marketed as the greatest, most potent fighter to ever don a pair of four-ounce gloves.
Part of that comes down to pure capitalism. While football only sells itself every few years to television and ad executives, UFC and its partners at ESPN are forced to sell its events directly to the public on a monthly basis. That means, for even an incremental boost in the bottom line, UFC President Dana White will happily toss the legacies of every former champion into a dumpster and light them on fire.
In some ways this inclination is a positive. Sports that are still vibrant and current have fanbases convinced that the current crop of stars are the best, the sport itself never healthier or better. Boxing and baseball, by contrast, focus heavily on a nostalgic past, glorifying Muhammad Ali and Mickey Mantle, contemporary athletes widely viewed as less than. In time, what was once mainstream collapses into the niche.
Not for nothing, the NBA should be very concerned that no one has eclipsed the legend of Michael Jordan in the 30 years since his playing prime. While television networks are still getting suckered into paying the big bucks for games people are mostly not watching, fans with one eye on the past are a clear sign of decline. (See also, NASCAR and WWE, still worshipping at the altars of Earnhardt and the Attitude Era respectively).
The UFC, at the turn of the century, suffered from its own curse of nostalgia, something vaguely amusing considering the entire sport was less than a decade old at the time. New stars like Tito Ortiz and Matt Hughes, despite athletic success, failed to capture the imagination quite the way their predecessors had. That problem was solved the old-fashioned way. Former stalwarts like Ken Shamrock, Royce Gracie and Dan Severn were brought back and fed to the hungry new lions. The promotion never looked back.
With all this in mind, I wasn’t surprised at all to hear UFC announcer Jon Anik refer to Alexander Volkanovski as the “consensus” GOAT of the featherweight division ahead of the 36-year-old Australian’s title defense Saturday night in Anaheim.
To be fair to Anik, himself the GOAT MMA play-by-play man, Volkanovski is without a doubt one of the few names on a short list. He beat former champion Max Holloway to win the title back in 2019, then, after a rematch was less decisive, settled all doubts in a third time that was truly the charm. “The Great” proceeded to defend the 145-pound title five times and combined a myriad of skills in a way that makes him an heir to ancient greats like Frank Shamrock and Don Frye, men who were among the first to truly mix the martial arts.
There’s only one problem with the idea of Volkanovski as a “consensus” GOAT—the historical excellence of Jose Aldo, a Brazilian buzzsaw who first sat the throne almost 15 years ago and won ten title fights over the course of six dominant years. Even fellow Hall of Famers like Urijah Faber and Frankie Edgar couldn’t withstand the force of Hurricane Aldo as contender after contender fell before him. Only a Conor McGregor left hand managed to dissipate the storm.
In MMA, a sport with a fanbase that seemingly turns over every five years, Aldo’s glorious 2009 accomplishments might as well have been filmed in black-and-white. Aldo, despite his unparalleled record of achievement, is yesterday. After Saturday, Volkanovski has one foot in the proverbial grave too, an Ilia Topuria right hand adding to the damage wrought by consecutive losses to lightweight kingpin Islam Makhachev, no doubt being declared the 155-pound GOAT far and wide by the amnesiac fanbase.
GOAT should be a title that lasts for all time. It’s right there in the name. But Topuria and Makhachev will, in turn, give way to the next best ever. The minute that isn’t true, the second nostalgia reigns instead? That’s when the UFC will have cause for concern.
Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.
I think you had recently referred to the "Era of Machida" sarcastically, but this has been a problem forever with MMA media. I think part of it is that the UFC itself doesn't care about it's own history or that of the sport's at large given Dana's falling out with virtually every fighter who has come through the promotion. The same will, in turn, be true for Conor McGregor one day, which will lead to some amusing conversations should we live to see them in 25 years.
That said, Mahomes is different. The comparisons I've seen made to Tiger Woods or Jordan in the late 80s seem appropriate: you know what you're seeing is different. You're seeing something better than you've perhaps seen anything before in that realm. Both Jordan and Tiger are put opposite historic legends (Russell, Nickalus) who's greatness in pure titles will remain unmatched, and I think Mahomes will to some degree fall victim to this with Brady as well. Everyone knows with Mahomes that his mechanics are not "proper" but that his insane athleticism is able to more than make up for what were considered deficits. At some point, that athleticism will be dinged up and lead to a Tommy John surgery or ACL repair that separates his career into distinct periods of prime and post-prime. But Prime Mahomes, however long should he reign, is the guy I'd choose to lead my football team should I be given a time machine and need the playcaller to win for the survival of myself/family/mankind.
With a specific sport that involves pure numbers, like marathon running or the 100m dash or powerlifting, I do suppose we have to continuously update "GOAT," unless we're making era adjustments (which could be heavily biased due to a larger % of the population pool not competing in those earlier times). But MMA, boxing, etc. - clearly much harder. Then there's baseball/football/basketball, where the overall and highly visible stats fluctuate depending on playstyle, equipment, and so on, which really seem to break people's brains (but he scored 50 ppg, hit 73 home runs, etc., not to mention new eras might advance new stats which are in turn publicized, such as QBR versus rating, VORP and then WAR, etc.).