Robbie Lawler Defends Daniel Cormier’s UFC 200 Win Over Anderson Silva
Faced with fighting a legend from a smaller weight class after his arch rival Jon Jones was flagged for a USADA violation only days before their scheduled UFC 200 main event, light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier did what most expected him to do against late replacement Anderson Silva, routinely taking the dangerous ‘Spider’ down and laying on him en route to a unanimous decision victory and a long-awaited payday.
Cormier was in a sort of lose-lose proposition, as the entire week’s events had certainly drained him mentally, while looking to put on an exciting fight with Silva in his area of expertise could have potentially been devastating to his standing. While the fans at T-Mobile Arena obviously weren’t pleased by the results, there’s another side of the tale that begs some understanding beyond a surface desire for an all-out war in the octagon.
Cormier’s fellow fighters understood where he was coming from and what he had to go through. Speaking during a media luncheon in Los Angeles (via MMA Fighting) yesterday (July 12, 2016) to promote his UFC 201 showdown with Tyron Woodley, welterweight champ Robbie Lawler defended the 205-pound champ by noting that standing with Silva, who rocked Cormier with a vicious body kick in the bout’s final minute, was not the best course of action:
“Daniel did what he needed to do. It wasn’t a crowd favorite-type fight, but Anderson Silva is a crafty individual. You talk about a guy who studied martial arts for the longest time, he’s a standup fighter who even at his age is very crafty, still has one-punch power, one-kick power. He did what he had to do to get the victory.”
“Ruthless” also noted that despite it not being a crowd favorite type of fight, Cormier needed to play it safe to get a paycheck after two proposed bouts with Jones had fallen through this year. At the end of the day, Lawler reminded fans they weren’t being punched and kicked:
“The fans wanted to see something different. They’re not the ones going in there getting punched and kicked. I can see why they weren’t very excited about it. But Daniel needs to put food on his family’s table as long as possible and he got the victory.”
Many have jumped all over Cormier to criticize his performance – namely Donald Cerrone, who used a homophobic slur to describe his wrestling-focused victory – but Lawler obviously brings a fresh perspective from the viewpoint of a fighter who’s been there before and knows the grind of having to put food on the table through fighting.
One of the fight game’s most entertaining fighters, Lawler obviously also knows what it takes to put on a memorable war, and he can understand why fans didn’t exactly see Cormier’s win over Silva as entertaining.
But he also understands why he did what he did from a human point of view; something that may get all too lost in the shuffle of wanting a bloody, entertaining war from a purely selfish perspective. Do you agree with Lawler?
