The Diamond, Forever
A Fond Farewell to one of the UFC's Greatest Entertainers
Dustin “The Diamond” Poirier is leaving us and I do not see how his departure can leave the UFC, let alone the whole of the combat sports world, as anything but a smaller, duller, dimmer, colder place. Over a professional career stretching back to 2009, the Louisiana native compiled a record of 30 wins, 9 losses, and one no-contest. Of those 30 wins, he finished 23 of them (15 KO, 8 Submissions) good for an almost 77% finish rate. In the all time UFC record books, he is fifth in wins (22), fourth in finishes (15), third in knockouts (11), fourth in performance bonuses (15), fifth in knockdowns (14), and eighth in significant strikes landed (1752)1. Poirier is a onetime holder of the UFC interim lightweight championship, but will end his remarkable career without ever holding an undisputed world title. He came up empty in three attempts. He lost all three by submission.
The bare statistics, cold and insufficient though they may be, tell the story of a fighter who could only ever have been a fan favorite. An all-action brawler with a granite chin and a seemingly pathological addiction to taking insane risks under pressure most of us can never imagine. You can watch the highlight reel finishes and read the Sherdog page and yet you'll never really know Dustin Poirier as a fighter until you watch the gears turning in his head with a front facelock applied, knowing for a fact that against all logic and in defiance of advice from his coaches he's about to jump for a guillotine choke, even though it'll never work in a million years. It sure as hell didn't work the last five or six times he tried it. He's gonna do it anyway. He can't help himself. We love him for it. They even made a t-shirt to commemorate the habit. Mark Zuckerberg’s stylist bought him that t-shirt.
This is not an obituary and I suppose I have to remind myself of that fact. Athletes do not die when they retire and in a sport such as mixed martial arts, whose physical toll is obvious and apparent on all men and women who compete at any level, a retirement is almost cause for celebration. Take the money, take the brain cells, and run. Ignore the cheers, the chants, the pleading for one more match. Get while the getting is good. Retirements in combat sports are about as everlasting as the average Las Vegas drive-thru-chapel wedding. For Dustin Poirier’s sake, I hope his proves permanent. I’d like to treat it as though it will be. I’d like to reflect on a fighter whose work and persona I grew to admire over years spent watching him suffer. I’d like to appreciate him while he’s here, and wish him well.
Last Tango in New Orleans
I am aware that I do not cultivate much of a sporting audience on this blog, let alone a combat sports audience. This leaves me in the unenviable position of selling a fight that sells itself to anyone with even a passing familiarity with either competitor. Still, I aim to try, let’s start from the roots and build up.
First, the location. Dana White has never been mistaken for Mother Theresa, but the UFC’s perpetually-red-assed head honcho does have one quality as a human being I cannot help but admire: he is loyal to his guys, often to a fault. Perhaps it’s more for his benefit than theirs, in a business that depends so much on the disposability of talent, a billion dollar industry running on the blood, bones, ligaments, and brain cells of legions of anonymous dreamers pumped and dumped on prelim fights nobody watches, it must help Dana’s conscience to show some loyalty, respect, trust, even a distant, cold sort of love to the truly exceptional. The so-callled “Dana White Privilege” is an often ethereal thing but it is being extended to Dustin Poirier for UFC 318. On July 19th the Lafayette, LA native will have his chance to say goodbye in front of a sure-to-be-raucous hometown crowd at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans. This is certainly a win for the fans. Like many global sports, UFC has acquired a bad habit of putting on their biggest events in front of stateless nouveau-riche audiences. Too many fully-loaded events languish in front of crowds in the Persian Gulf that spend most of the event on Instagram in seats they paid like $5000+ for. Regional crowds are often hot and hot crowds mean hot fights.
I’m gonna breeze past the undercard. You don’t care. I struggle to care. It’s fine. It’s alright. A smattering of fun journeymen and respected veterans. Hopefully they bring their A game. Most notable to my eye is the presence of Michael “The Menace” Johnson (23-19, 10 KO) who actually owns a knockout win over Poirier. 2016 really was a long time ago.
No, the meat and potatoes of selling this fight comes in analyzing Poirier’s opponent, and this is hazardous for me because he’s probably my favorite fighter in the sport. Max “Blessed” Holloway2 (26-8, 12 KO) spent most of the late 2010s as UFC’s smiling assassin. The skinny, gawky, vaguely-stoned-seeming Hawaiian amassed a 13 fight win streak from 2014 through the end of 2018, drowning opponents with hand speed and cardio. Then, seeking an interim championship at lightweight and a superfight with Khabib Nurmagomedov, he ran into Dustin Poirier, and the streak was over. The funny thing is that Max had already lost to Dustin once before that 2019 interim title fight, back when they were both cub contenders at featherweight. This, it seems, is Dana’s last gift to Dustin. Regardless of the result at UFC 318, Dustin Poirier will bow out reminding everyone that he owns a winning record against one of the greatest champions of UFC’s modern era.
Before I conclude this section I suspect some of you will want me to mention the “BMF Title” that Max and Dustin will be fighting over. For people who like that sort of thing, that is, I suppose, the sort of thing they like. Me? I find it a bit silly. It’s a promotional gimmick with no clear purpose beyond the promotion of fan favorites with bad luck against divisional champs. Look, it’s a great fight, they’re great fighters, one will be gone after this, they get to fight in the main event and both get points on the PPV sales. S’all good. Let’s move on.
Highlighting The Highlight
If I have any bone to pick with the big occasion here, it’s the matchmaking. I would have preferred a rubber match against (in my opinion) Poirier’s greatest rival: Justin “The Highlight” Gaethje (26-5, 20 KO). The two men have tremendous history (a split series at 1-1, both ending in dramatic knockouts) and are a natural stylistic match as almost suicidally aggressive strikers. However, this is secondary, in my view. The funny thing about combat sports is that, for all the blood and thunder of a big fight night, the majority of our actual engagement with the sport comes through the persona of the great fighter. The fight can last seconds, at most it lasts twenty-five minutes of actual action. The promotional cycle can last years. Muhammad Ali wrote the book on this. Fighting at an elite level takes inhuman discipline. Selling a fight at an elite level takes an all too human kind of personal expression. The fight nerds obsess over strategy and style, the public at large is drawn to persona.
In this respect the two men are almost bizarro mirror images. Poirier swaps jerseys and organizes joint charitable donations with his opponents. Gaethje backflips off the cage while the ringside doctor attempts to resuscitate his opponents. They could be Cormac McCarthy characters. The sportsman and the savage.
After molting from his larval “douchebag MMA bro” persona, shaving off that awful chinstrap beard, and gaining some street cred at lightweight, Poirier came of age as the southern gentleman of UFC. Well-groomed, well-spoken, and media friendly. Known for his charity work in his home state and a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. In a sport packed with hyperbolic hypebeasts and cartoon bullies, Poirier always seemed content to just be himself. He was cocky, but never excessive. When Max Holloway rewrote the UFC single-fight striking record book with a five round dismantling of Calvin Kattar3 (23-9, 11 KO) on live TV, stopping in the middle of the fifth to yell “I’m the best boxer in the UFC” at the commentary team, Poirier reminded fans, almost bashfully, that he had two wins over “the kid.”
Gaethje, on the other hand, represents something base and primal at the heart of all combat sports. A sort of thanatoid sadomasochism. The sneering embodiment of “fuck you and die.” His absurdly high knockout rate tells the story, but if you want a more direct anecdote, consider the case of “The Texecutioner” James Vick (13-6, 3 KO), who Gaethje fought in the wake of his loss to Poirier. The lightweight contender labeled Gaethje “the Homer Simpson of MMA” for his tendency to simply bite down on the mouthpiece, absorb the strikes, and ignore the pain. Gaethje laughed the insults off and then knocked Vick out cold, precipitating a five-fight losing streak, and Vick’s retirement from the sport.
Their divide, the ideological tension between men comitted to a certain way of life, can perhaps best be summarized in Gaethje’s own interim lightweight championship win. After a genuinely uncomfortable 5-round shellacking of Tony “El Cucuy” Ferguson (25-11 12 KO, 8 SUB), Gaethje took the belt he’d won off his waist and threw it on the mat. He said he was waiting for the real one. Poirier admonished his rival to the press, saying he should treat the belt with more respect. It may be the only one he’d ever wear. Poirier ended up being right.
Da Mystery of Thugjitsu
Yes, Dustin Poirier does in fact make Bruce Buffer introduce him as a “thugjitsu fighter.” No, I do not know what that means.
Let’s loop back around to that second Holloway fight for a moment. It was the beginning of a trend in my relationship to Dustin as a fighter. I kept betting against him (usually not with actual money) and he just kept winning. I figured Max’s hand speed would overwhelm him. I was wrong. I figured he’d lose his rematch with Conor McGregor (22-6, 19 KO), I was very wrong4. I figured “Iron” Michael Chandler’s (23-10, 11 KO, 7 SUB) heavy wrestling would give him trouble. Wrong again. I even worried he might be in trouble, coming off that bad KO in the second Gaethje fight, when he was matched up against the streaking contender Benoit St. Denis (14-3, 4 KO, 10 SUB). I should have known better.
I like Dustin Poirier for a lot of reasons. I’ve always enjoyed his fights. I appreciate his persona. I would like to try that hot sauce he sells sometime. But the reason I felt compelled to write this whole essay has nothing to do with any of that. Dustin Poirier taught me something about watching fights, about understanding why some guys win in defiance of the observable reality of a physical contest. As a neophyte fight fan, I found myself most often picking fights based on perceived “X factor.” Hand speed, knockout power, inhuman toughness, infinite stamina, technical wizardry on the mat. The observable, the physical. Dustin puzzled me as a guy who didn’t seem to have any particular X-factor, but made a career out of beating guys who did. His hands were great, but not truly elite. He was tough, but had been finished before. He could grapple, but wasn’t any kind of natural at it. All-rounder skill is its own kind of X-factor, but he was far too aggressive to win that label. The all-rounder plays percentages. Dustin Poirier likes long odds, otherwise why jump for all those stupid chokes?
I think it dawned on me in the midst of that second McGregor fight, Dustin looking cool, loose, unbothered, advancing on the big-punching Irishman without any apparent fear, winning striking exchanges at will, making the former double-champ look, I’ll say it, like a fraud. This had always been his X factor, his superpower. It was his presence, the bravery to stand in the pocket with men trained to kill, one twitch away from annihilation, and just ignore it. Ignore the danger, ignore the pressure.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious. No pressure means no diamonds, after all.
A decent chunk of these are ties, but still, impressive.
I will go to my grave believing Max won that second fight against Volkanovski. Argue wit ya mama. DA BEST IS BLESSED BAYBEEEEEEE
I’m not calling him “The Boston Finisher” that shit is dumb as hell
In my defense, this was before we realized how much arthritic joints, cocaine, bad behavior, and easy living had diminished the one time megastar.
Really enjoyed this article dude, a particularly fantastic closer
I'll miss him. In another life I wrote a technical breakdown article about his win over Max at UFC 236 that I'm still quite proud of. He's an ATG despite not having the long title reign.