In Defense of Daniel Cormier (or: Why it's OK to cheat – just a little – at UFC weigh-ins)
You want to tell me a guy "tarnished" his legacy all because he touched a towel to make "championship weight"? Respectfully, I'm gonna need you to get outta here with that garbage, b.
Earlier this summer former UFC two-division champion Daniel Cormier committed one of those classic blunders that many of us are all too familiar with. In trying to be funny, trying to get a laugh and be liked, he accidentally stepped in some shit and got a bunch of people mad at him instead. His sin? He admitted what we all already knew, which is that he grabbed the towel at weigh-ins in order to help himself make 205 pounds for a light heavyweight title fight at UFC 210.
Maybe it was the way he said it that got people so riled up. He was sort of flippant, playing it for the yucks in this ‘ain’t I a stinker’ sort of way. Or maybe it was where he said it: on stage while being inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame. Where was his respect for the moment? For the institution?! For the hallway or stairwell of the UFC Performance Institute where the plaques get hung up?!? For shame.
You already know what came next. Outrage. Righteous anger. Vague suggestions that Cormier had tarnished his entire career and legacy. He had, after all, just admitted to cheating. He did not weigh 205 pounds for all of about 30 seconds on that fateful day in 2017, as was his duty. He weighed slightly more than that, then used the tension of an outstretched UFC-branded towel that had been provided to conceal his public nudity in order to take off the rest. How dare he insult this totally normal and important and not at all already bizarre moment by doing something like that! And then, even worse, admitting it later! Even though, again, we already knew he did it, because we have eyes.
Generally, cheating at stuff is bad. Rules, and the collective expectation that we will follow them or face the consequences, are a foundational basis for the very existence of any human society. From ‘thou shalt not kill’ to ‘put your goddamn shopping cart back in the thing when you’re done and don’t just leave it sitting in the parking lot, you asshole,’ rules are important. Thing is, though, they are not all equally important, especially in inherently wacky sports like MMA. And if there’s one rule you ought to be able to break (just a little), it’s the one requiring you to be not a single ounce above the championship weight for a title fight.
The main reason I say this is because the way we think of weigh-ins in MMA is already ridiculous. Cormier was defending the UFC light heavyweight title, which meant he could be no heavier than 205 pounds at the official weigh-in on the day before(!!) the fight. But we all knew that both Cormier and Anthony Johnson would be considerably heavier than 205 pounds when they actually fought each other. And we didn’t even care how much heavier. That part is entirely up to them. One of them could regain 15 pounds between weigh-ins and fight night, while the other could put on 30. Not only would there be no problem with that, most athletic commissions wouldn’t even bother to put them on a scale right before the fight and find out.
All we ask is that they hit this mark on scale – exactly – and stand there while someone from the UFC asks them to flex and hold for the cameras. After that, their weight is nobody’s business.
This is pretty stupid. We all realize that, right? We take two guys who are roughly the same weight, ask them to both deplete their bodies down to an agreed upon lower weight at an arbitrary point, well over 24 hours prior to the fight, all so they can immediately regain the weight and be more or less the same weight again once they actually fight. It’s silly. What makes it even sillier is how seriously we take it. You must be 205 pounds! If you are 205.4 pounds you’re an unprofessional disgrace and we’ll take your title away! The whole thing feels like a Monty Python bit once you step back and gain just the tiniest bit of perspective.
So DC gamed the system. He leaned on that towel just enough to make the scale read, what, a pound and a half different? He was smart enough to do it, and the people around him who were supposed to be minding the store were clueless enough for him to get away with it, so I say he gets full credit.
What’s more, it wasn’t even against the rules at the time! That’s how dumb the rules are. Just as Pop Warner did for football, Cormier showed the New York commission where the rules were weak, and the rule was only changed after the fact. If you want to get technical about it – and you can’t argue some shit like his whole legacy is tainted by being the equivalent of a coffee mug over weight if you aren’t being insanely technical about it – he did not cheat. He effectively explored the dark corners where the light of the rules did not yet reach.
People brought this up again recently when Cormier admitted that he still can’t get over being beaten so soundly in his rematch with Jon Jones, only to have Jones fail a drug test and be stripped of the win later. How can you call this guy a cheater, the MMA Twitterati demanded, when you yourself just admitted to cheating?
But come on, there’s cheating and then there’s cheating. We know this. Plus, think about our dude Charles Oliveira, who had his UFC lightweight title taken away for coming in a half-pound over before submitting Justin Gaethje at UFC 274 in May. Now we’ve got this weird situation where the title is technically “vacant,” even though we all know who the UFC lightweight champ is.
Be honest with yourself for a minute. Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone if Oliveira had found a way to lean on a towel or a shoulder, just a little, to keep things simpler for everyone? What would have been lost by that? We wanted a fight for lightweight supremacy between two dudes who were roughly the same size and that’s what we got. It’s only our own rigid adherence on “championship weight” that complicated it.
When are we going to be able to admit to ourselves that this veneer of precision around weigh-ins is only meant to formalize what is an objectively absurd, not to mention often dangerous and unhealthy practice of forcing fighters to suck all the way down just so they can turn around and blow back up again? It’s a ruse, a trick we play on our own brains. It’s like in pro football when they bring the chains out to measure for a first down, going through the agonizingly slow process of stretching out every last link in the chain, all to obscure the fact that where the ball is placed is really just some dude’s best guess amid a morass of giant, fast-moving bodies.
I mean, I get it. We’re worried that if we let fighters start ballparking the weigh-ins then soon a pound or two will give way to guys who are five or 10 pounds over, standing there grinning like they’re not a whole division away from where they’re supposed to be. It would defeat the purpose of even having weight classes. It cannot be allowed.
And I don’t disagree with that. But to cheat – just a little! – on this thing about which we are already mostly lying to ourselves? It is fine, actually. You don’t have to love it, but it’s too damn silly to spend all that energy hating on it.