The one thing that’s easy to do right now is to look back at Forrest Griffin’s dismantling at UFC 134 at the hands of Shogun Rua as anything negative on Griffin. Griffin, who famously vaunted from mid-level contender to UFC light heavyweight champion with a finish of Shogun Rua and then a decision victory over Rampage Jackson, has probably perhaps been eliminated from being in the title mix for the near future for some time and probably has his best days behind him but there’s one thing we can’t do right now when it comes to the first “The Ultimate Fighter” winner.
Re-assess his victories over Rua and Jackson as “flukes” or discredit them somehow.
It’s something we like to do with fighters who suffer a handful of setbacks. Fedor went from the terror of Pride to a tomato can crusher relatively quickly with three stoppage losses, amongst others, and now the temptation is to call into question everything about Griffin’s career with this bad stoppage loss to Shogun Rua. You’ll hear the usual suspects discuss how his victory over Rua was a “fluke” because of a knee injury to the Pride champion and how his victory over Rampage should be discounted because of an under-motivated champion.
Griffin’s loss was a bad one, no one can argue otherwise, but up until Rua caught him he was in the fight and Rua wasn’t winning the round in a convincing manner. Everything he was doing was what he needed to do to keep Rua from dominating the fight. He got caught, nothing more, and Rua’s lightning fast hands proved the difference between the two. It’s the one thing multiple knee surgeries haven’t taken away from him: the ability to throw a combination faster than nearly anyone in the UFC.
He got caught and he wasn’t the first to get caught by Shogun Rua in this manner. Rua has made his name on stopping guys with his hands and Griffin is the latest victim. It’s not bad company to keep, considering Rua stopped Lyoto Machida and Chuck Liddell in similar fashions, and if anything it shows that Rua’s main tool (his hands) is still as crisp as ever. Questions about Rua’s conditioning and his explosiveness after three major knee surgeries still abound and whether or not his body can hold up to the rigors of fighting is still in doubt.
Rua didn’t do anything to prove the doubters wrong with a relatively quick and violent KO victory over Griffin. The one thing people will want to use this for is to discredit Griffin’s first victory over Rua and that’s the wrong thing to do. It proved that Rua can still stop guys when he has the opportunity; it didn’t show anything more. And it didn’t show anything out of Griffin other than his chin is good but that it can be cracked by someone with the right combination. The perception shouldn’t suffer, though, because Griffin became another victim to something that would’ve stopped every other fighter in the division.
Was his run to the UFC light heavyweight title improbable? Of course it was.
Griffin is a fighter who has crafted a fighting career by out-working and out-toughing most fighters. When the final epitaph is written on his career it’ll be one where he took a modicum of athletic ability and maximized the intangibles needed to be a champion. But we shouldn’t look negatively upon the two most important victories of his career because one of those was avenged in devastating fashion. Rua famously stopped Machida in the same manner after a controversial decision loss. The fact that he avenged another victory is a bonus to Rua, not a discredit to Griffin.
