Daniel Cormier Reacts To His Ever-Changing Fan Perception

Daniel Cormier has been on both sides of the fence.

H’s been the good guy and the bad guy. The babyface and the heel.

When fight fans had their first introduction to the light heavyweight champion, he was the plucky, undersized alternate who won the Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix.

Fans loved him for his thrilling first-round knockout of Antônio ‘Bigfoot’ Silva. Then something changed around the time of the first Jon Jones fight, where fight fans decidedly wanted ‘Bones’ to win. That continued on into his long rivalry with Jones that was extended by Jones’ many outside-the-cage issues and suspensions for performance-enhancing drugs.

Cormier recently spoke on the rollercoaster he’s been on with MMA fans throughout the years (via MMA Fighting):

“When I went out there that first time and they booed me with Jon [Jones], I just played the bad guy. I will say all the stuff you hate me saying. You hate that I make fun of [Jon Jones] for his addictions? I will say every one of those addictions and I’ll list them all out. Before it was like, I don’t think they’ll boo me for it. Okay, you’ll boo me for it? You don’t like that? I’d kind of feel out what people liked and didn’t like. And the things I got the most hate, on Twitter, I would start to say it in public. If you want me to be your bad guy, I’ll be your bad guy. I just kind of gauge it.”

But although he was the ‘bad guy’ prior to his UFC 214 knockout defeat at the hands of “Bones,” Cormier shomehow found himself in the fans good graces once again at January’s UFC 220, when they cheered his name as he finished surging competitor Volkan Oezdemir.

“People just decide what they want to do. Going into the Jones fight, it was all boos. And then going into Boston, it was all cheers. Then when I went to that press conference in Brooklyn, cheers. They put me on the camera and for the first time, people yelled positive stuff. Usually they just boo me. I didn’t care. I just get used to it.”

Cormier recently finished filming his season of The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) against fellow UFC champion Stipe Miocic, and the two will face off in a champion vs. champion superfight in the main event of UFC 226 on July 7.

Will fans be rooting for him there?