UFC: Daniel Cormier Doesn’t Believe There Is One GOAT In MMA

Daniel Cormier knows greatness. He is the only fighter in UFC history to hold both the light heavyweight and heavyweight championship belts simultaneously. He has also been the friend and close team member of undefeated lightweight phenom Khabib Nurmagomedov for some time. But when MMA Junkie caught up with ‘DC’ recently, he denied that mixed martial arts has a GOAT – or a ‘greatest of all time.’

“Michael Jordan has long been the undisputed greatest of all time in basketball, [but] I don’t think we have that in mixed martial arts,” explained Cormier. “But I think when you start thinking about a guy who just personified ‘champion,’ a guy that just ran the table and did everything he was supposed to do, the right way, I guess I would say …

“I think we forget that Jordan lost in the playoffs, and he lost multiple times. Before the 90s, he lost in the playoffs about every year. So it’s not like he was undefeated, but if I had to pick a guy that just did everything the right way, I’d probably have to say Demetrious Johnson. [He] defended the belt all those times, always was so well prepared, his performances got better as he went on in his title reign. No hiccups, no mistakes, no nothing, and I think he’s one of those guys.”

Cormier explained further that instead of a single GOAT, he sees a list of names at the top and hinted at what many MMA fans sometimes to refer to as their ‘Mount Rushmore.’

“I think when you start thinking about in MMA, I don’t think it’s just about one guy,” he admitted. “I think you’ve got to look at people as a whole, and there’s going to be about five or six guys that are going to sit at the top of this sport for a long time, and I think I’m one of those guys.”

Interestingly, what ‘DC’ said rang true with something Georges St-Pierre told Ariel Helwani earlier this week. Like the heavyweight GOAT contender Cormier, GSP denied that ‘the greatest’ exists in the sport.

“I don’t think there is nobody that is the greatest. Let me explain that to you. There is three guys, right? This guy will beat [that] guy, [that] guy will beat [the other] guy, and [the other] guy will beat this guy. That’s how it is in this game. It’s just a matter of timing. Everybody can beat everybody on any given day. And style makes fights, too. There are guys that have your number – you don’t know why. In the fight game, it’s not a straight line.”

What does your MMA Mount Rushmore look like? And is Daniel Cormier on it?


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