Watching Paddy Pimblett’s destruction of Michael Chandler at UFC 314, and then seeing the aftermath of fans and fighters and pundits alike all trying to come to terms with the possibility that this mouthy Scouser might actually be among the lightweight elite, I couldn’t help but remember the arc of another fighter from the same island nation.
You see, back in about 2008 the fighter known as “Chainsaw” Charles McCarthy was trying anything he could think of to fight his way closer to a UFC title. He reached out to Joe Silva, the UFC’s primary matchmaker at the time, and asked who he could fight in order to gain some meaningful ground on that goal.
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The reply was immediate and direct: Would he accept a fight with Michael Bisping?
Absolutely he would. McCarthy almost couldn’t believe his luck. Bisping? The sneering Brit who’d won season four of “The Ultimate Fighter?” The guy who’d won one close decision over Matt Hamill and then lost the next one to Rashad Evans? Sure, he’d fight that guy no problem.
“A lot of it was his personality,” McCarthy told me some years after the fight. “He just seemed like an annoying prick to me, and I didn’t think he was very good. I was just wrong about him. He was better than I gave him credit for. I let my dislike for his antics take away from my respect for his ability, and it ended up costing me in the fight.”
Michael Bisping would get his revenge on Dan Henderson in a UFC middleweight title defense in 2016. (Action Images / Matthew Childs Livepic)
(REUTERS / Reuters)
McCarthy wasn’t the only one who thought this about Bisping back then. Even years later, well after Bisping had notched a knockout victory over McCarthy at UFC 83, people were still saying a lot of the same things about him.
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“Pillow Hands” Bisping? The guy who got meme-ified by Dan Henderson in one of MMA’s most brutal knockouts? The MMA world felt it had seen all it needed to see on that guy. Final judgment had been rendered.
I remember Chael Sonnen telling me that he accepted a fight with Bisping feeling utterly confident that there was nothing this man could do to hurt him. It was only when he heard a scouting report from Henderson that he started to revise his expectations.
“Dan told me, ‘Don’t believe what people say about him having no power, because everything he hit me with hurt,'” Sonnen later relayed to me.
You probably already know how the Bisping story ends. He went on to win the UFC middleweight title and become a UFC Hall of Famer. He proved a lot of people wrong in the process, over and over again, mostly because so many of us just refused to get the message even as he got better before our eyes.
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It’s hard not to be struck by some parallels to the Paddy Pimblett situation, and not just because of their shared national origins. It’s also that they’re both fighters who many MMA fans and fighters arrived at early snap judgments about, in part for personality reasons, only to then be forced to revise those takes later on.
Pimblett’s mind-changing moment seems to have come this past Saturday at UFC 314 in Miami. Over the course of nearly three rounds in the co-main event, “Paddy the Baddy” beat the Muscle Milk out of former Bellator champion Michael Chandler en route to a TKO stoppage. It was a shocking performance, honestly. Not necessarily because people expected Pimblett to lose, but because almost no one expected him to look that good.
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The Pimblett we saw just a little over two years ago looked like Bambi on ice compared to the one in the cage on Saturday. Other UFC lightweights watched his questionable win over Jared Gordon and saw a meal waiting to be devoured. They were lining up to be the first to pop this hype balloon. Now, after seeing his win over Chandler, a lot of them are probably feeling glad they didn’t get the call.
But we sometimes have a hard time altering our opinions in this sport. Or, more accurately, we have a hard time admitting someone is good after we’ve already decided that they kind of suck. We have a lot less trouble doing it in the other direction. Even if we’ve thrown your name into various GOAT conversations before, one bad night might be all it takes for us to decide you’re washed.
Paddy Pimblett’s one-sided win over Michael Chandler at UFC 314 has forced us to reevaluate his prospects in the UFC’s lightweight division, which isn’t always easy. (Sam Navarro-Imagn Images)
(IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / Reuters)
Revising upwards, though, that’s trickier for us. It’s like we have a hard time with the concept of growth and improvement. We really shouldn’t, since we see it often enough. It’s not just Pimblett, whose striking was worlds better against Chandler than it was against Gordon. Just look at the undercard, where Chase Hooper showed up looking like a grown man against a … well, I’m not going to call Jim Miller old, since he’s four years younger than me, so let’s just say distinguished man.
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Fighters get better all the time. It’s the whole reason they put in all those long, grueling days in the gym. And since fighters necessarily do so much more training than fighting, this might be the sport where we should expect to see the most growth between competitions.
We see these guys in action for, what, maybe 15 minutes every four or five months? In between then, they’re in the gym. You know, ideally. They’re honing the craft, adding some tools and sharpening others. There might be no other sport that has this kind of imbalance between time spent preparing and time spent competing.
But that’s also probably a big part of why we have such a hard time changing our own assessments of fighters. We get this brief glimpse of them in the cage and we tell ourselves that’s who they are. Then they disappear from view for a few more months and that opinion solidifies. After that, especially if we’ve taken a certain malicious glee in accusing someone of being worse than their marketing suggests, it’s tough for us to go back and reopen their file.
The good news is, the right butt-kicking, delivered at the right time, can do wonders. Even if you think Chandler isn’t the fighter he used to be, you have to admit that Pimblett really put it on him. That moment late in the fight, with Chandler looking up through a mask of his own blood with a certain helplessness in his eyes, that’s bound to stick.
That was Paddy Pimblett doing that. That was the new and improved version. Once we allow for the possibility that he’s still getting better at all this, then we have to ask where he might get to before it’s all over. And it might just be far higher up the ladder than we ever thought.
