Keyboard Kimura Conversations: Edson Barboza reflects on strange finish, featherweight success
The perennial contender discusses his move down a division, his win over Shane Burgos, and ideas for his next fight
“I promised you,” he said, laughing. “I promised you that the next one was going to be much, much better.'“
A few days removed from his third-round stoppage win at UFC 262, Edson Barboza is still riding high, joking about making good on his pre-fight assurance to me that his performance against Shane Burgos in Houston last weekend would be an improvement on the effort he put forth against Makwan Amirkhani.
The win over Amirkhani in October was solid, but unspectacular — a unanimous decision victory over a tough opponent; officially his first in the featherweight division. More importantly, it halted a three-fight slide that was extended in his first foray to the 145-pound ranks in May, when Barboza landed on the wrong side of a split decision verdict in a bout with Dan Ige that many believe he had won.
That result sat with him, gnawed at him, compounding the frustrations he felt after facing a similar outcome in his final lightweight appearance against Paul Felder eight months earlier at UFC 242, and the victory over Amirkhani served as a salve to those frustrations. It also meant there would be no questions about whether the 35-year-old perennial contender was declining, even though many remained unsure about where exactly the American Top Team representative fit in the featherweight hierarchy.
“I don’t know why they’re surprised,” Barboza answered when asked about the pundits and fans that have been pleasantly surprised by what he’s done in his first three fights in the 145-pound weight class. “ I don’t know if people forget about my fights at ’55, but I always do a good job and I always put on a good show.”
While many athletes that shift weight classes in the midst of a skid do so with hopes of starting fresh and gaining a new lease on life, Barboza’s move down a division was motivated by a desire to seek out new challenges.
Yes, he’d dropped consecutive fights prior to decamping from the lightweight ranks and was jut 1-4 in his final five appearances in the 155-pound weight class, but a quick survey of his resume showed that the Brazilian wasn’t your typical “fighter that has lost a couple looking to find what clearly isn’t there any more.”
Those four losses came against Felder, Justin Gaethje, Kevin Lee, and Khabib Nurmagomedov — elite talents in arguably the most talent-rich division in the UFC — and a wider angle look at the list of opponents Barboza has faced over the course of his UFC tenure shows an ultra-competitive fighter who has fought one of the toughest “strength of schedules” of any fighter over the last decade.
“My last couple fights at 155, I was just fighting to fight,” admitted Barboza. “I don’t know exactly what happened at that time of my career, but when I thought about dropping, I felt something new.
“I thought about this drop because I felt I needed some different motivation, some extra motivation; something different at that time of my career. It’s not because I needed to prove anything (to anyone else) — I wanted a new challenge to prove something to myself by doing very well at 145. That made me very motivated to keep going — to get my chance for a title shot, to fight against the best guys in this division.”
For many people, Saturday’s matchup with Burgos was positioned as a litmus test for the Brazilian and a potential coming out party for the talented New Yorker, who entered the bout with a 6-2 record in the UFC, including wins over Amirkhani and Cub Swanson.
Returning for the first time since losing to Josh Emmett in a Fight of the Year candidate 11 months earlier, the bout with Barboza was viewed by many as a chance for Burgos to collect a quality win against a respected, veteran name on a pay-per-view main card. It’s not that Barboza was being counted out, so much as folks still couldn’t shake the idea of the 35-year-old being every bit as competitive — perhaps even more so — at featherweight than he was during his lightweight run, where he failed to crack the Top 5.
But Barboza came out of the gates firing off punishing low kicks that ultimately left him in need of five stitches, getting the better of the early striking exchanges with Burgos, showing once more that the speed and precision that were hallmarks of his time at lightweight accompanied him on this new featherweight adventure.
The duo went shot-for-shot for the opening 10 minutes and seemed poised to carry on in the same manner throughout the third. As the round began, it felt like Barboza and Burgos were destined to trade blows for another five minutes, leaving the decision in the hands of the judges, with one of them assured to walk away disappointed, unhappy with how the tens and nines added up.
Just over a minute into the round, the inevitable ending was re-written as Barboza hit Burgos with a swift one-two, sticking a jab in his face before following with a right hand that landed flush on the temple.
Burgos appeared to take it well, but then suddenly began backing up, his eyes growing wider with each backward step, his momentum sending him crashing into the cage, where he fell to the canvas.
“It’s funny because in the beginning, I thought he was trying to get me to go over to him so he could throw some counter or something like that, but then I started seeing him go down,” said Barboza, recalling his thinking as Burgos retreated and fell. “When he went down, I thought, ‘Okay, I have to go finish him!’
“After the fight, I asked my coach, ‘Parrumpinha’ (Marcos da Matta), ‘What happened?’ because I didn’t know what happened, like everyone there. He just went down. It was crazy and I was a little bit confused by the knockout. I’ve seen this many times with body shots — you hit the body, a couple seconds, and they go down — but a punch in the face, after that long?
“That’s the first time, but it’s one more different knockout for my career,” joked Barboza, who is has ended fights with leg kicks, spinning wheel kicks, flying knees, punches, and kicks to the body during the course of his UFC run.
The unique ending to the contest brought increased attention to the fight, and therefore the veteran’s position in the featherweight division, with Twitter immediately lighting up with fantasy bookings pitting Barboza against several of the division’s elite.
And although he’s currently looking forward to a little downtime at home with his family, the 35-year-old is equally as excited as the MMA Twitter community about the prospects of sharing the cage with any of the standouts stationed ahead of him in the rankings later this summer.
“I’m thinking about getting back at the end of August or beginning of September,” he said when asked for a timeline on when he’d like to return. “I want to fight the top guys, man. That fight made me very motivated because I see all the names in the Top 5 like Kattar, Rodriguez, Holloway — imagine a fight between me and those guys? It’s going to be a crazy fight, like my last fight.
“I know it’s going to be a good fight, a tough fight; I don’t need to talk about it because everybody already knows it,” continued Barboza, excitement permeating his words, quickening his pace. “Imagine me fighting against one of those guys — it’s going to be a great fight and that makes me very, very excited, and I really believe I deserve it. I’m ready to test myself against the Top 5 guys.”
Now a year into his featherweight adventure, riding a two-fight winning streak and fresh off one of the most memorable knockouts of the year, Barboza feels reinvigorated by the changes he’s made and the new challenges that lay ahead of him.
“A couple years ago, I was scared to get older, but I feel better than ever,” he said. “I’m healthy, I’m learning how to train — I should have trained smarter a couple years ago, but now I train smarter, I train faster, and I’m happy with my life, my family; everything is going right in my life.
“And I promise you — the next Edson Barboza is going to be better than the last one.”
I don’t doubt it.