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I'm not a huge fan of Usman, but he deserves A LOT of credit over the past couple months. He's had multiple opportunities to ask for something or back out and never has:
- Originally, Usman was supposed to fight Masvidal during IFW. Masvidal then gets in a spat with the UFC where he wants to renegotiate his contract. For the most part, fans were on Masvidal's side through this (at least from what I saw online), and Usman had every right to say "if he wants his contract to be renegotiated, mine should be as well." Whether that works out for him or not is another story. But instead of hopping on Jorge's back, he let Jorge and the UFC do their thing and he stays quiet.
- As Jorge and the UFC continue to argue, a fucking pandemic breaks out, and now Usman doesn't have a location for his next title fight. He is now fighting an unknown fighter on an unknown island with a limited amount of time to prepare. If any fighter either either backed out or at least publicly questioned what the fuck was going on, it would be hard to blame them. He continued to prepare and did not complain.
- His teammate and friend Gilbert Burns then established himself as a rightful title challenger. It's obviously a tough situation for Usman because he'd now be fighting someone who he trains with everyday and most likely knows how he fights extremely well. No one would blame him for at least hesitating to take that fight. Not only does Usman take it immediately, but he is the one that switches camps. You'd figure the contender would more than likely have to deal with that, but the champion decided to uproot his life and go join a new gym right before a title fight before taking on his former team. Feel free to correct me, but I don't remember that ever happening in the history of MMA.
- Then Burns catches COVID, and the UFC has to look for a short notice fight. UFC champions have turned down short notice fights before, it'd be hard to blame Usman for backing out here and waiting for Burns to get healthy so he can fight him with a full camp.
- Now the UFC announces that it's going to be Masvidal, a guy who has been training for Usman the entire time. Masvidal even brought in Bo Nickal to work on his wrestling. It absolutely took balls from Masvidal to take this fight on short notice, but it also took balls from Usman to not say, "hey, can we wait on this for a month or two so I can go back to my home gym and prepare for this guy again?" He's also fighting a guy that is a huge underdog and has a massive fan base, and lord knows he's going to get clowned for YEARS if he get KO'd. Not to mention the fact that if he losses, there is a very slim chance of an immediate rematch. If he losses this fight, he's going to have to climb the ranks again.
- Also, at any point during all of this, he also could've joined the thousands of dumb motherfuckers in America right now, gone outside without a mask on, and caught the disease. He did not do this. I don't know how much credit he deserves for this because it feels like a pretty common sense move, but there are a lot of people not doing it, so good on him I guess.
