On Leon Edwards and the myth of the lucky punch (or kick)
Only combat sports gives you the chance to lose the whole contest and then win it all in less than a second. But that doesn't mean we always know what to make of that.
At the moment he landed the kick that would make him champion, Leon Edwards was about 55 seconds from a career-defining defeat in the biggest fight of his life. He knew it. Of course he did. The fifth round of a UFC welterweight title fight, with the points on the judges’ scorecards undoubtedly stacking up in Kamaru Usman’s favor, Edwards got off that stool for the final frame on the UFC 278 main event wrapped in the knowledge that the math was not on his side.
Then he landed one kick – just one (1) – and none of that mattered anymore. Edwards was champion, despite having lost almost the entire fight right up until the point that he won it.
Most other sports don’t have any equivalent to this. All those stick and ball sports where the goal is to be ahead on the scoreboard when time runs out? There’s no sudden-victory-while-on-the-brink-of-defeat option. You don’t get to lose three quarters of the Super Bowl and then win it all with one Hail Mary touchdown pass in the end. The cold logic of the numbers simply won’t allow it.
But one of the things that makes fight sports different is that this shit can end at any point. That’s also one of the things that has historically made it a challenge for the people who want to make money putting it on TV, since no one can tell you if a title fight will last 25 minutes or 25 seconds. Remember the first fight the UFC put on the FOX network? A huge deal at the time, a broadcast consisting of just one fight, for free, for the goddamn heavyweight championship. But about a minute into it Junior Dos Santos stuck his fist in Cain Velasquez’s ear and it was all over. You had people still trying to find the right channel and get their snack situation sorted and the fight was already done. The Olympics and the NBA Finals do not have this problem.
This aspect of the sport lends itself to other weirdness that we don’t always know how to deal with. The Edwards-Usman situation is a great example. As of this moment, Leon Edwards is the UFC welterweight champion. But does that mean he’s the better fighter? Well, yes, in the sense that he won the fight (after losing three of the preceding four rounds). But also, no, in the sense that oddsmakers immediately slotted him in as a nearly 3-1 underdog in the hypothetical trilogy fight with Usman, which, by the way, happens to be almost the exact same odds he closed at coming into Saturday’s fight. That means oddsmakers watched him land the kick and win the title, saw Usman laid out with his eyes open, and decided, mmmm we remain just as convinced that you’ll lose the next one.
And, if we’re being honest, we can see why they’d think that. Edwards was losing that fight. But the kick he landed to win it, you can’t call it lucky. He set it up well, using the threat of his left hand to move Usman’s head where he wanted it, then kicking him directly in his damn head in almost the exact same instant. That was skill. He had a plan for that sequence and he executed it perfectly. It is that very hope that gets fighters off the stool for the final round of a fight they know they’re losing, and Edwards willed that hope into a reality.
But there’s not much outside of combat sports that allows for this possibility in quite the same way. You can win a basketball game with a half-court shot at the buzzer, but only if you played well enough up to that point to be within a couple points by the end. You don’t get to lose the whole game and then win it midway through the fourth quarter by making one magic shot.
There’s a lot about combat sports that is unique and weird in much the same way. For instance, just look at the average number of competitions. If you have 30 professional fights, that could easily be an entire career. But 30 professional hockey games? That’s basically just preseason. Then there’s also the huge disparity between time spent practicing and time spent competing. Football players practice for a little less than a week and then play the game. Baseball players fuck around with some batting practice, maybe field a few grounders, then stand around gnawing on sunflower seeds until game time. Fighters typically spend six to eight weeks preparing for each fight. We’re talking multiple training sessions a day, especially when you factor in separate strength and conditioning work. Still, they know that ultimately they’ll be judged on just a few minutes – or even a few seconds – on one Saturday night.
That’s why there’s nothing else quite like combat sports. That nervous, excited buzz headed into a big fight night? It’s the weight of the anticipation meeting the promise of a brutal resolution. All that buildup, all that preparation, the fucking hours and hours of talk, and finally we’re going to lock the door and find out. This is something fight sports gives us that is missing in so many other parts of our culture. Here, it’s not a question of if you’ll be put to the test so we can find out if you’re really who you say you are – it’s just a matter of when.
But then we get situations like this one between Edwards and Usman, where we got a clear and final answer with zero ambiguity. Edwards won. The way you can tell is that he was still upright and conscious at the end, while Usman was miles away in a vaguely unsettling dream about being lost in a forest made of shinbones.
It’s reasonable to ask ourselves: but could he do it again? And if the answer ends up being no, how will it change the way we look at this one? Right now it’s a glorious win, the kind that spawns all kinds of memes and touching moments (tell me you don’t get a little choked up watching Leon call his mom with the belt on his shoulder). But if they do it a third time and it’s back to business as usual, only without the one magic shot with the clock winding down at the end? Then it might feel different. This is the rare sport where one perfect moment can make you a champion. But whether people remember it as a fluke or a new beginning depends on something as simple and brief and fickle as the next few minutes on some Saturday night. Or maybe even less than that.