Who won the ONE-UFC trade?
All three fighters have competed in their new homes, providing a first opportunity to judge who won the trade.
ONE Championship and the UFC made a landmark trade late last year. The UFC got Ben Askren and his Twitter account, while ONE got Eddie Alvarez and Demetrious Johnson. Now all three fighters have competed in their new homes, providing a first opportunity to judge who won the trade.
Askren won his UFC debut, vs. Robber Lawler, but had to come back from a knockdown that some refs would have stopped (albeit erroneously as it turned out). Alvarez, ranked the #4 lightweight in the UFC at the time of his departure, came up short in his ONE debut vs. the relatively unheralded but absolutely nasty Timofey Nastyukhin. UFC and MMA G.O.A.T. contender Demetrious Johnson won in Tokyo at ONE: A New Era, but looked human in Round 1 vs. Yuya Wakamatsu.
So who wins?
The UFC wins, because they get Askren, his gleefully savage online persona which meshes ideally with their fanbase, and the actual possibility that he’s the division GOAT. The default answer at welterweight in Georges St-Pierre, but now Askren and GSP have both fought Lawler, leaving room for an argument that will get better the more Askren fights.
ONE wins, as a top UFC fighter came up short in his debut, putting the two organizations on even footing. ONE also wins as Johnson is a dignified martial artist, and ONE is a dignified martial arts organization, while the UFC is more a throw-a-handtruck-through-the-bus-window and a leap-on-loudmouth-brown-belt-medal-winner-who-needs-it organization. And ONE lost nothing in the trade, as Askren had retired.
Demetrious Johnson wins, see above.
The undefeated Askren wins, as he aims to establish himself as the best welterweight on Earth, maybe ever, and to do that today, he needs to win titles in more than one organization.
Even Eddie Alvarez wins.
‘The UnderGround King’ lost Sunday, but the man knows how to come back. He lost to current ONE lightweight champ Shinya Aoki, and came back to win the Bellator Season One Lightweight Tournament Final, and with it the inaugural Bellator Lightweight World Championship. He lost to Michael Chandler and came back to beat Chandler for the Bellator Lightweight World Championship. He lost his UFC debut to Donald Cerrone, but came back to win the UFC Lightweight Championship. Now he has lost his ONE debut. He’ll be back.
And, curiously, the loss could be his surest route to a title shot. Alvarez had entered the ONE World Lightweight GP, which would require winning three fights vs. monsters to secure a title shot. If he wins spectacularly in his next fight, he could get a shot at the champ Aoki. And it would be a trilogy fight, providing an eminently marketable backstory of a hero’s return from hardships.
That’s how trades are supposed to work – everyone wins.
At the post-fight press conference, ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong had another suggestion.
Genuinely we have the best martial artists on the planet,” he said to Nicolas Atkin for SCMP. “So for me it’s no surprise, even DJ [Johnson] was struggling in the first round against Yuya Wakamatsu. I think what you’re gonna see is a lot of the top athletes who are coming to join One Championship in the future will experience the same thing. It is the highest level – 550 athletes, 130 of them are world champions across different martial arts disciplines. If you combine all the top 10 global organizations you wouldn’t come close to that. The world got to see a little bit of that. My dream would be to pit UFC world champions against One Championship world champions, any day. If Dana wants to do it, let’s do it.”
yah, let’s do it – everyone wins.
