The dark horse
Just three months after his debut, Cain was back in the Octagon. This time he was matched with a fellow wrestler in Jake O’Brien. Although O’Brien hadn’t really earned the respect of the fans – he was nicknamed the ‘Irish Blanket’ due to his penchant for lay-and-pray – he was definitely a tough test for the young prospect. In 2007 he’d upset former PRIDE star Heath Herring, and in early 2008 he’d given Andrei Arlovski some problems before succumbing to a second-round TKO.
Hardcore fans wondered how Cain would deal with O’Brien’s wrestling game, but they needn’t have worried. Somehow the fight was almost as one-sided as the Morris beatdown; Cain secured a takedown, smashed through O’Brien’s guard and then locked up the favourite position of legendary Welterweight Matt Hughes – the mounted crucifix. From there he began to drop bombs, O’Brien’s head was bounced off the canvas, and Velasquez had another two-minute win.
This time, the message was clear – Cain Velasquez was for real.
It was shortly after this that Cain’s UFC career was almost derailed for good. Signed to fight newcomer Mostapha Al-Turk at December 2008’s Fight for the Troops show, Cain was first sidelined with an injury. And then things went really haywire. The UFC’s first video game was due out in 2009 and Zuffa were asking all of the fighters to sign over their image rights in perpetuity. AKA’s fighters – outside of Mike Swick, who remained loyal to Zuffa – refused, and so Dana White cut all of them, Velasquez included.
Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, the AKA side eventually backed down, and Cain and company were back in the UFC almost as quickly as they’d supposedly left. The incident hasn’t really been touched on since, even when Velasquez was revealed as part of the MMAAA organisation late last year, and it stands as probably the only time the UFC brass weren’t behind him.
Rather than facing Al-Turk, Velasquez was instead booked in February 2009 against debuting Bosnian kickboxer Denis Stojnic. It sounded like an odd fight – Stojnic was 5-1 and hadn’t really fought anyone of note to get into the UFC – but the word going around was that the same issue that plagued Cain outside the UFC was happening inside it, too – nobody wanted to fight him.
As it turned out, Stojnic was tougher than people gave him credit for. A squat fighter who was built like a brick outhouse, Stojnic was the first man to make it out of the first round with Cain despite Velasquez throwing everything but the kitchen sink at him, this time displaying a massively enhanced kickboxing game, putting together some incredibly technical combinations that mixed in knees and leg kicks to go with his punches. Eventually, the Bosnian gave up the ghost in the second round, but he didn’t seem truly hurt when the fight was stopped, and for the first time, Cain was faced with criticism from the fans.
Pillow fists
The theory was that while Velasquez had probably the best cardio in the division and one of the best wrestling games, he just didn’t have the punching power to go along with it. Even Joe Rogan got on the bandwagon, saying that Cain’s punches didn’t make the same thudding, Octagon-shaking impact as Carwin or Lesnar’s. Cain’s 2009 didn’t do much to challenge that theory, to be fair.
First, there was the Cheick Kongo fight. Despite beating a ranked opponent for the first time and doing it in dominant fashion – Cain ragdolled the huge Frenchman, and even broke a record for the amount of strikes landed in a UFC Heavyweight fight – all the detractors could talk about was the fact that he wasn’t able to stop Kongo despite all of the shots he landed. That, and the fact that Kongo dropped him three times – ignoring the fact that Cain casually shrugged off these shots from a decorated kickboxer and came back to smash him to pieces.
Then there was the Ben Rothwell fight. Rothwell was an acquisition from the Affliction crash and had a reputation largely for two things – hitting like a truck and being insanely tough. Cain didn’t take one single clean shot from him and beat the hell out of him in the first round, more than anyone had ever done to Rothwell before. But when the fight was stopped in the second – referee Steve Mazzagatti had even warned Big Ben between rounds that he couldn’t let him take much more punishment – people claimed it was an early stoppage because Rothwell was on his feet at the time and wasn’t cleanly knocked out.
Pillow fists. That’s what they said Cain had. In 2010, that theory would be blown out of the water for good.
