Demetrious Johnson wants to make it clear: There’s no chance his MMA retirement is short-lived.
In general, retirements are only temporary hiatuses in combat sports. It’s one of the most common reccurring themes in the fight world. Although Johnson hasn’t competed since May 2023, his official farewell came this past September after giving himself time to realize he was truly done.
“I’m black and white,” Johnson said Monday on Uncrowned’s “The Ariel Helwani Show.” “It’s either I’m in or I’m out. And when I said my Black ass is retired — I don’t sell false dreams. I don’t sell wolf tickets. I don’t sell none of that bulls***. My Black ass is not coming back.”
Everybody has a price, which has always been one of the key factors for MMA’s elder statesmen who refuse to hang up their the gloves for good. It doesn’t help if they get called out or enticed by their peers either. That was the case for Johnson at UFC 310 this past Saturday night in Las Vegas.
In the evening’s main event, reigning UFC flyweight champion Alexandre Pantoja continued to stake his claim as an all-time great, notching his third consecutive title defense — still far away from Johnson’s vaunted record of 11 — with a second-round submission of Kai Asakura. Pantoja, 34, has already arguably cleaned out UFC’s current 125-pound division, having overcome much of the top 10 on his path to gold.
By the time Pantoja emerged as an elite-level competitor around 2021, former champion Johnson had already been traded to ONE Championship and captured the promotion’s flyweight title.
Johnson was still as great as ever in recent years — at the time of his retirement, he was still widely hailed as a top talent in the world. A fight with Pantoja at this stage would be a highly compelling dream fight for the flyweight division, which is why Pantoja covets it and made the callout at UFC 310.
Unfortunately for Brazil’s finest, Johnson won’t be swayed — no matter the offer presented.
“There is no number,” Johnson said when asked about a price he’d need to fight again. “That’s the beautiful thing about it, right? When I look at my position, a lot of people in mixed martial arts, they let the sport retire them, right? You look at the long list of athletes who’ve been in mixed martial arts, not just in the UFC. You look at PRIDE, you look at Bellator, you look at all the landscape of everything. Look at Fedor Emelianenko. He didn’t have to do those last fights on his career, but maybe he still loved it. I think for me, in my position, when I retired, I was like, ‘I don’t miss it, I’m not having fun anymore.’
“A lot of people don’t realize [Alexandre] Pantoja wasn’t the only person who called me out this weekend. Reece McLaren, he called me out [after beating Jarred Brooks at ONE Fight Night 26]. He probably doesn’t remember this, but when I was about to fight Adriano [Moraes in 2023] for the third time in Denver, he was like, ‘Mate, I know you’ve kind of hinted around you retiring from mixed martial arts, but man, maybe you could stay around one more time to fight me.’ I looked him in the face and I was like, ‘Dog, this is my last fight. I am done. My Black ass is tired of working hard.’
“There’s no amount of money that could bring me back out of retirement,” Johnson concluded.
Johnson, 38, teased an offer he received post-retirement during his previous appearance on “The Ariel Helwani Show” in October, and did so again after UFC 310. Johnson said he declined an offer for $2 million to fight again. Johnson remains under contract with ONE but noted the fight offer wasn’t from ONE or UFC. After an excellent 30-fight career, there’s simply nothing left for him to prove, he said.
Then there’s the weight factor.
“I’m sure if I really wanted to and I talked to [ONE president] Chatri [Sityodtong] and then me and Chatri are like, ‘Hey man, let me go do this thing,'” Johnson said. “But the beautiful thing about that phone call when [the offer] came in, they’re like, ‘DJ, hey, we got a huge opportunity for you — $2 million guaranteed for you to fight. What do you say? I know you’re still young. You can still fight.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t care to fight anymore.’ And he goes, ‘Are you serious?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, dude. I’m done. I’m enjoying my life. I’m enjoying my journey in Brazilian jiu-jitsu in the gi, and I’m good.’
“I made a goal in 2023. My New Year’s resolution for 2024 was: I’m not going to fight. I’m not going to use my body to make money. I’m not going to do it. And I gave myself a year, and that’s when I was like, ‘OK, I don’t miss it.’ I don’t miss competing. I don’t miss training. I don’t miss sparring. I don’t miss X, Y and Z — what comes with the territory of fighting. S***, I don’t miss cutting weight. When he was like, ‘Oh, 125 [pounds]?’ Huh? F*** outta here. Me making 125? Never again in my life, not in my lifetime.”
In his new jiu-jitsu career, Johnson has competed in 154-pound competitions, weighing in around the 147 mark and submitting his way to black belt status. For now, that’s where the future challenges lie for the former champion, and it doesn’t matter how good the new guys on the block in MMA get.
Regardless of weight class, Johnson is unanimously viewed as one of the greatest MMA fighters ever. Beating Pantoja wouldn’t change that.
“No, not at all,” Johnson said of having a pure competitive interest in a Pantoja fight. “I’ve never been a person to try to prove somebody wrong. It’s not my place to. And when it comes to calling yourself the GOAT, you can’t call yourself the GOAT. I never called myself the GOAT, right? In my life, working on different businesses, I’ve worked on different things and I said, ‘Man, this is going to be the greatest thing ever.’ And [people tell me], ‘We can’t say that. We do not have the right to say that. The community, the media, the public needs to perceive this.’
“I was working in the eSports area, [someone told me] the community and the public and the media need to deem this game worthy enough to be on that GOAT status. We work on this product, and we cannot say this is GOAT status. So what I’m getting at is that, Alex Pantoja, he can call himself the GOAT, but does the public see him as the GOAT? Do the media see him as the GOAT? Do his peers see him as a GOAT? For me, my peers, the media, the public see me as the GOAT.”
