While Demetrious Johnson admits his MMA career is nearly done, the current ONE Championship titlist and Octagon icon claims a dream fight with UFC bantamweight champion Aljamain Sterling would be an easy reason to get back into a fight camp.
Sterling is set to defend his 135-pound title for the fourth time on Saturday night in the main event of UFC 292 when he takes on fan-favorite bad boy and contender, Sean O’Malley. Heading into the bout, the New Yorker has said on multiple occasions that this could be his final fight at bantamweight.
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The reasons are so he could end the difficult weight cuts and step aside and let teammate Merab Dvalishvili get a well-earned opportunity at the title. However, if it were up to ONE flyweight king Demetrious Johnson, he would love to get a crack at the bantamweight star.
It has been five years since “Mighty Mouse” ended his legendary UFC run with a trade to ONE. During his time in the top MMA promotion in Asia, he has amassed a 5-1 record and twice avenged his lone defeat to former champion Adriano Moraes. Now, at 37 there are few interesting mountains to climb for the most prolific champion in UFC history.
Demetrious Johnson record: 25-4 (5 KO, 8 submissions)
Yet, if there was one thing that would make Johnson excited about a grueling fight camp, it would be a return to the Octagon to battle Sterling, as he explained during an appearance this week on “The MMA Hour.”
“There’s a complexity to his game that I feel like I can solve it, and he’s the big dog over here in America,” Johnson said. “I’m the big dog over in Asia. If that was brought to me as an opportunity, it would be like, ‘OK, that’s a problem I can solve that I would love to solve.’ I would put myself through a training camp for that fight.”
Yet the MMA icon didn’t stop there. He actually went into great detail about the weaknesses in Aljamin Sterling’s game and why he would actually dominate him despite fighting much of his career at a weight class lower than bantamweight.
“I feel his weakness is he has no clinch game,” he said. “Like, I would eat his ass up for breakfast in the clinch game. I feel like rhythm-wise, I move way better than he does in the feet. [In] grappling, he is longer, so I would never let him get my back, because he’ll lock them [expletive] ‘Funk Master’ legs in a body triangle like he did at Peter Yan, and they’ll have to survive him doing that.
“The one thing he does that helps to my advantage is that he crosses a distance for me, right? He, he does this [jabs the air], and a funky-[expletive] kick and I’m like, ‘Perfect. Come here, I wanna show you a thing called Muay Thai clinch.’” he added. “I just feel like I’ll eat him alive in a clinch.”
While it would be a fascinating booking, Demetrious Johnson also admitted he knows the bout is highly unlikely to happen due to his contractual obligations to ONE Championship and the UFC’s longheld disinterest in cross-promotion.