Ricardo Lamas: Loyalty, Revolution and Victory
Ricardo Lamas: “Absolutely, the division feels wide open. There’s a lot of possibility at featherweight, and there’s a lot of possibilities for me.”
There is precious little journalism among the MMA media. There is little investigation or even reference to the important issues around fighter health and safety, the distribution of revenue between management and fighters, and other things that matter. But if one fighter throws a water bottle at another, the coverage explodes. There is also precious little long-form journalism – if it’s not who, what, when, where, why about a mean Tweet, editors are apparently not much interested.
Elias Cepeda is one of a few exceptions. He focuses upon things that matter, sometimes at length. In his latest, for FloCombat, Cepeda spent a lot of time with UFC featherweight Ricardo Lamas, prior to his fight Saturday night with Jason Knight, in the critical final fight before the PPV. The article is briefly excerpted below, but do your MMA-loving self a favor and read the whole thing HERE.
Lamas … hasn’t fought since last November, when he scored an impressive submission victory over fellow contender Charles Oliveira at “The Ultimate Fighter: Latin America 3” finale in Mexico City and got back on the winning track.
With Oliveira coming in heavier than their contracted weight limit, among many other prior false starts with the matchup, the fight was one that posed many challenges to Lamas outside of the cage as well as in it. He surmounted all of those hurdles and rebounded after losing a decision in his previous fight to Max Holloway in a competitive and thrilling contest at UFC 199.
That loss to Holloway burns a little more today for Lamas than usual, perhaps. Only three days prior, he watched Holloway become the feathweight world champion by knocking out the greatest featherweight in history — Jose Aldo. In 2014, Lamas went the distance with Aldo but lost by decision.
In about a year’s time, Holloway followed up beating Lamas by becoming the world champion, and so Lamas understandably feels annoyingly close to the situation.
“It was a little hard to watch that fight,” he admits.
Still, Lamas feels that there’s opportunity in the timing.
“Holloway definitely beat me, but it was a good fight, a competitive one,” he correctly opines. “The Aldo fight, that one bothers me because it took me too long to get comfortable and fight like myself. I gave him too much respect at first, and by the time I was on him, in the fifth, there wasn’t enough time left.”
Lamas knows that, even in his mid-30s, he still has the opportunity to once again surge ahead in the wide-open featherweight division. If he beats Knight on Saturday, Lamas will have won three out of his last four fights.
In the UFC, Lamas has only lost to champions and fellow title-contenders Holloway, Aldo, and Chad Mendes. While Lamas may no longer be young for a featherweight, he’s still clearly near the top of the division, with real momentum going his way and no visible decline yet in reflexes or skills.
With a new champion at featherweight, and the old new one — Conor McGregor — out of the picturefor now, there’s no real reason to believe that it has to take many more wins for Lamas to find himself back in the title picture.
“Absolutely, the division feels wide open,” he says. “There’s a lot of possibility at featherweight, and there’s a lot of possibilities for me.”
That drive to reach the mountain summit still moves Lamas. But so does the journey itself.
“I’ve always been in the sport to become the best,” he concludes.
“I’ll always want to be the best and work to be the best as long as I’m fighting. I also just enjoy being a fighter. I enjoy the training. I love it. I love the competition, in and of itself.”
A decade into his MMA career, Ricardo Lamas clearly still has love for it. He loved fighting from the start, he says.
He loved it enough to start fighting right away with just a few months of MMA training, he loved it enough to often fight on short notice, through many cancellations and opponent changes coming up through the ranks.
In that way, not much ever really changes for fighters. Challenges keep popping up in less-than-ideal circumstances, opponents keep changing, and the grind never gets easier.
Some people, however, never seem to mind the hard work. Some people, the ones who stick with fighting, aren’t scared off by any of it — the pressure, injuries, drama, high-stakes — in fact, they relish overcoming it all.
“There’s nothing like getting your hand raised after a fight,” Lamas says.
“I can’t wait to get back in there and have that happen, again.”
Image courtesy of Elias Cepeda.