One of the dozen dramas going into UFC 328’s middleweight title fight between Khamzat Chimaev and Sean Strickland centered on whether we might see a post-event incident, à la the infamous Conor McGregor vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov (vs. Dillon Danis) fracas after UFC 229.
If you’ve followed Strickland’s career at all, you probably knew that, win or lose, such a thing was improbable. Though Strickland has a way of alienating his audience through measures of disrespect in the lead-up to a fight (as he did once again in this one), he turns downright vulnerable after the therapy session of fighting itself. He becomes broadly apologetic to any (and all) offended parties.
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One might even say, he becomes almost gentlemanly.
That’s because nobody unloads his burden quite like Strickland in the cage. Nobody makes you look deeper into the psychology of a fighter like he does, either. Strickland’s fights are as psychiatric as they are physical. When it’s done, it’s as if he’s a changed man. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, as they say.
We saw this play out again on Saturday night in Newark, New Jersey, just as Chimaev was wrapping the belt around Strickland’s waist. All the bad blood between the two had been cleansed through 25 minutes of conflict. Not that it took the full 25, either. They were actively respecting each other through the process. The hatred rolled like credits right out of the Prudential Center, a development that made some people feel like they’d been suckered by a ruse.
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Though I don’t think it was exactly an act of such cunning, to hear Strickland say it he did lay it on a little too thick with all the talk of “goatf***ers” and “whores” and “cowards” and of shooting the full range of Chechens within the tri-state area. If you thought the man was without self-reflection, his post-fight comments proved otherwise. He wanted to sell the fight, and the best way to do that was to tap into his native xenophobic, Islamophobic, bestiality-ophobic self. He didn’t have to tap far, as he keeps those things fairly close to the surface.
But the thing he was saying is that he might’ve reeled it in just a little.
Yet, just like when he beat Israel Adesanya to win the UFC middleweight title the first time in 2023, there’s a sense that Strickland treats the Octagon as a therapist’s couch, and that he sorts through his many misgivings and anxieties through the grim trade of punching. The act of fighting somehow exorcises those demons of his who’ve been out there having themselves a spree.
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Because he shows both sides — and because he keeps winning the belt — he’s emerged as the game’s greatest mindf***. The kind of person you know too well but can’t possibly know at all, and with each fight it feels like he’s under further observation.
The crazy thing is that we were supposed to be well past the Strickland era. Dricus du Plessis had put him in the rearview mirror by beating him twice. Overall Strickland has lost seven times in the UFC, which is enough to doom most competitors. Yet as Dan Hardy once said of Josh Koscheck, he is an “unflushable,” as in we can’t get rid of him.
He won’t allow it.
When Chimaev took out du Plessis, Strickland re-upped his contention by taking out Anthony Hernandez. It was such a good performance that he leapfrogged Nassourdine Imavov in the process. Chimaev was supposed to be the brick wall he was charging toward. He was supposed to shut Strickland down with relative ease.
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Nah, Strickland mocks words like “supposed to.”
And what he accomplished on Saturday night was equally improbable, at least to the betting public. He recaptured the middleweight title by doing to Chimaev what nobody else could. He broke the boogeyman down, little by little, so that by the end it was him getting his hand raised. It wasn’t a loud knockout or a submission, it was an act of defiance. There wasn’t any harmony in the fight, there was just the kind of functioning discord that Strickland specializes in with his chin tucked behind his shoulder. It was the kind of thing that fell between perseverance and survival, with a long, constant jab connecting the ports.
Not that the fight was without its mysteries. Aside from a dominant first round, Chimaev didn’t look quite himself in there. In the second round, he came across a little spooked when Strickland thwarted his takedown attempts to plant some seeds of doubt. Did he choose not to shoot in the third because Strickland had shut him down so thoroughly in the second?
Sean Strickland beat the odds once again Saturday night against Khamzat Chimaev.
(Chris Unger via Getty Images)
Down the stretch Strickland scrapped for every inch. The fight was close heading into the fifth round, yet he wasn’t going to be denied. I thought he won the fifth round, and so did the judges. It was a split decision victory. It’s the seventh split decision of Strickland’s UFC career, and perhaps a thing we should’ve seen coming. He arrived to the UFC from a King of the Cage event called “Split Decision.”
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With the belt back in his possession, Strickland makes the public rethink everything. Winning has a way of doing that. Is he the antihero of the UFC? Depends on which version you want to see. The pre-fight version who makes hate speech a way of life, who offends everyone in his radius. Or a man-child who acts out because he doesn’t know a better way, the undeniable champion who is always fighting himself as much as any opponent.
As far as neat tricks go, we’ve never had a fighter who abuses so much humanity that, when he tells you he didn’t mean it, you begin to see his own.
But that’s Sean Strickland.
