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How will MMA remember Demetrious Johnson, the pound-for-pound great who talked his way out of the UFC?

I keep thinking about what Demetrious Johnson said after completing the exact opposite of the move that so many MMA fighters dream of making. With help from his management, Johnson had talked his way out of the UFC and into ONE Championship.

He did it willingly, and he did it on purpose. Once it was done, he explained his thinking in terms that sounded an awful lot like relief.

“People told me … There’s nothing worse than when I’m at the gym working out and somebody says, ‘Dude, if you want to sell more tickets and get your name on the (next box of) Frosted Flakes, you’ve got to talk more trash.’ That’s not who I am,” Johnson said. “I’m not a confrontational person. I do mixed martial arts because it’s something I love, and it helps me express my feelings. I’m an artist when I get to compete. Artists don’t run their mouth and attack people or cause a big scene. They focus and put their energy on what they love to do, which is being a martial artist.”

Every bit of that statement is entirely believable. The stuff about people telling him to talk more trash, as if he’d never thought of that? You know that happened, probably more times than Johnson cares to remember.

And the stuff about him scorning that approach, in part because it’s just not who he is but also because he’s never bought into that idea that aggressive arrogance has to be part of a pro fighter’s job description? You know that’s true too, because he’s been saying it in one form or another for years.

He also faced the same question – sometimes phrased as a problem, other times as a threat – for more or less the entirety of his UFC title reign.

Why don’t more people buy your fights? Why don’t they care about you? Why aren’t you popular?

For most of his time in the UFC, this was the question surrounding Johnson. More than his standing among the sport’s pound-for-pound greats, more than his record-breaking dominance as UFC champ, what we wanted to know was why the sales figures weren’t keeping up with the win-loss record.

And Johnson? He mostly seemed to want to know why we were so hung up on how many units he was selling instead of how many title fights he was winning.

The answer to that part was pretty simple: This is how we’d been programmed. It wasn’t just the UFC that had taught us to think that way (though the fact that “needle-mover” is even in our lexicon, sure, that’s a sign of something), but really it was the culture as a whole.

How do we know things are good? They’re popular. They make a ton of money. Tastes are subjective, but sales figures don’t lie. End of story.

For his time as UFC champ, Johnson patiently endured this mentality. He went about his business. He kept winning fights. When he finally lost one, he didn’t complain about the very debatable judges’ decision. He took it like a professional. Then he started thinking about making his exit.

He had his reasons, as he explained, and they weren’t bad ones. Johnson didn’t much like the world the UFC had built and that world didn’t much like him back. Ironically, after all those years of stacking one win on top of another it was defeat that helped set him free.

So now he’s headed to the other side of the globe, to an organization that says it prefers humble martial artists over swaggering controversy magnets. The UFC won’t have Demetrious Johnson to shrug its shoulders at anymore. MMA fans will have to set an alarm and open an Internet browser to catch his next fight.

And who knows, maybe that added distance will help us appreciate him more. Maybe he’ll even find a way to add to his greatness, though that comes with challenges in an organization that’s not exactly overflowing with flyweight talent at the moment. Or, more likely still, maybe he’ll be one of those fighters who gets better in retrospect, once he lives mostly in our memories.

One thing we can count on? No matter how it goes, Johnson won’t lose sleep worrying about what we think. He never did. And that, too, is how you know the man is an artist.

For more on the upcoming ONE Championship and UFC schedules, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.

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