What do fighters owe us – and each other?

T.J. Dillashaw probably knew he couldn't put up much of a fight at UFC 280. In going through with it anyway, did he perpetrate a scam or just look out for himself?

It’s funny how a lot of things seem opaque and unknowable before the fights and then become so very clear in retrospect. Of course Islam Makhachev could not be denied. Of course Sean O’Malley was a lot better than people were giving him credit for. And certainly Beneil Dariush wouldn’t let his time on the mic end without asking if people had heard the good news about his lord and savior.

But then you think about T.J. Dillashaw, he of the busted shoulder and the sheepish post-fight smirk, and you realize that at least one thing should have been very, very clear before UFC 280, and probably to more than just one person.

Dillashaw was never going to win that fight against Aljamain Sterling for the UFC bantamweight title. He should have known that, what with his post-fight admission that his shoulder had popped out of the socket roughly 20 times over the course of his training camp. When it popped out again as soon as Sterling took him down in the first round – and then popped out again in the second round, roughly a minute after his team had put in back in place – the fact that we were doing this fight at all began to seem a little silly.

Dillashaw knew it. He even apologized for it afterward, acknowledging that he’d held up the division by going through with this title fight when he knew his shoulder wasn’t up for it. If he’d admitted that sooner, maybe someone who was capable of actually being competitive in the fight could have stepped in. Not only would that have been more fair to the division, it would have been more fair to the fans, too. Instead, we paid upwards of $75 to watch a pay-per-view where one of the title fights was kind of, sort of a sham.

(A classic ‘well that didn’t go so great’ expression here.)

Maybe sham is too strong a word. I believe Dillashaw went in there intent on doing his best. If not, he would have tapped right away when his shoulder came out the first time (and from the way he was wincing and readying his tappin’ hand, he sure seemed to be considering it). Clearly, the guy is tough. He also has that extreme self-belief bordering on delusion that all really good fighters need, so maybe he truly managed to talk himself into thinking he had some kind of chance here, even if he also knew it was an incredibly limited one.

When asked how this sort of injury could have slipped through the pre-fight medical exams, UFC President Dana White responded that it was Dillashaw’s responsibility to report it. That’s essentially admitting that pre-fight medicals are a joke, which they mostly are, but also let’s not pretend like White doesn’t know why a fighter would conceal a serious injury like this. In some ways, his whole business model depends on that.

Can you imagine what would happen if every fighter was completely honest at pre-fight medicals? We’d hardly ever see a card with more than a few fights. We definitely wouldn’t have seen Francis Ngannou defend his heavyweight title against Ciryl Gane on one good knee and one bundle of garbage-ass ligaments. It clearly affected the quality of the fight he was able to give us for our money, too. But because he was still able to win we regard it now as awesomely inspirational rather than as a selfish cash grab.

Dillashaw fought hurt for the same reason everybody does: money. He hadn’t fought since the summer of 2021. Before that he’d been sitting around waiting out a doping suspension. Paychecks have probably been few and far between for the 36-year-old former champ. So when he saw a chance to fight for the 135-pound belt and get paid, he probably did the math and realized that he needed to grab that money while it was still on the table. He probably also realized that if he pulled out injured, the UFC matchmakers would not be staying up nights trying to figure out how to reschedule this one. If we’re saying that Dillashaw showed a disregard for his peers or for the fans by staying in this fight, he could probably argue that it was because MMA’s system of risks and rewards taught him this was the only reasonable way to do it.

When we look at it like that, the answer to the question ‘what do fighters owe us’ starts to seem like ‘very little.’ We expect them to do their best. We expect an honest effort. This is why people got so mad at Bob Sapp for continuing to step through the ropes and collect paychecks for all those years when he knew damn well he had no intention of fighting hard. If you just came here to quit and get paid, we’d rather you not show up at all. So we tell ourselves, anyway.

They don’t owe us the total sacrifice of their health. That’s why the tapout exists. They probably also don’t owe us a series of bad decisions that work against their own self-interest. We generally acknowledge that this sport’s pay structure is hard enough on athletes as it is without them getting in their own way. If you were Dillashaw’s financial advisor, wouldn’t you have told him to go ahead and take the fight just for the show money? (Though you might have also told him to shut up about the pre-existing injury afterward, lest we complicate things on the health insurance side.)

Fighters can rarely afford to forego the money that’s on the table now in the hopes that it’ll come back around at a later point when they’re better prepared for it. That’s only more true when they’re in their mid-thirties and the injuries are more likely to be chronic rather than temporary.

We don’t have to like the end result. That fight was some bullshit, and chances are that a fair number of people knew or should have known that it would be bullshit well before it happened. We can be mad at Dillashaw if we want, but I’m not sure we can really claim that we don’t understand why he made the choices he did. Asking him to do something different would be like asking him to pretend he lives and works in an entirely different sport. And he doesn’t. He, for better or worse, chose MMA.