George W. Bush was president. Joe Rogan was the host of “Fear Factor”. YouTube didn’t exist and neither did any UFC division under 170 pounds. This was the world in which Cub Swanson debuted in MMA.
So imagine still being here, fighting in the UFC 20 years later, and some guy who made his UFC debut in the empty days of the Apex at the height of the pandemic tries to come and pick up his legacy. You’ve probably heard about this. Joaquin Buckley, a UFC welterweight with fewer total fights than Swanson has wins, used the robust power of the modern internet to pick a fight with Swanson after the latter expressed skepticism that Buckley could, as he claimed, knock out Georges St. -Pierre at his peak.
Swanson did not think his statement was in any way controversial. He’s never been the type of fighter to go around fighting people on the internet – especially people outside his weight class. But as someone who sometimes shared the training room with St-Pierre and watched the former two-division UFC champion work, he also felt a reality check was needed.
“I trained side by side with GSP,” Swanson told Yahoo Sports this week. “I saw him preparing for fights. I was in the room when people actually tried to beat him – guys who were much better fighters, in my opinion – and I saw what it was like. So for a guy to say he could do that, it seemed stupid to me.”
Buckley’s response to this was to produce an entire video attacking Swanson’s career and legacy. He stated that Swanson had never been ranked in the UFC. (Swanson has been ranked at featherweight since the release of the UFC rankings and remained ranked for another six years.) He criticized Swanson for never “even sniffing” a UFC title. (Debatable, although Swanson was among the top prospects at various points in his UFC and WEC career.)
The truth part is that Swanson has never won or fought for a title.
“Not once in my entire career,” Swanson himself is quick to point out. “I’ve never fought for a title at any level.”
But is this the only way we know of to judge a career in this sport? Are they just title fights and title wins, both always subject to a mixture of timing, luck and opportunities that are not entirely within one’s reach?
As will happen after two decades in any job, Swanson’s perspective on her career has changed over time. It’s not just the fights he won that make him proud now.
“I never turned down a fight in the UFC,” he said. “I fought everyone they asked me to fight. They would literally tell me sometimes, ‘we think this guy is going to fight for the title, are you going to fight him?’ I always said yes. And besides, I don’t think my career should be brought down, because look at my performances.”
Between his WEC and UFC days, Swanson received 10 Fight of the Night bonuses. This does not include his other performance bonuses, such as the Knockout of the Night award for his 2012 victory over future UFC lightweight champion Charles Oliveira, or the many Fight of the Year lists he has appeared on for his 2016 victory over Doo -ho Choi. .
But that night against “The Korean Superboy” is also special for other reasons. It’s also the night Swanson found out he was going to be a father. Now he can’t think about that fight without remembering how, around 4 a.m., when his teammates and coaches finally left and the celebrations died down, his wife told him she was pregnant.
“That was a very special night,” Swanson said. “I will always remember that.”
For those who experience it, this is what a career in combat sports really looks like. It’s not just the wins and losses or the titles they did or didn’t claim. It’s all the other things about who you are as a person and an athlete that people remember.
Julie Kedzie, Swanson’s former teammate at Jackson Wink MMA in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will never forget the day he took her to the hospital and waited with her after a particularly frustrating injury in training. As she seethed with anger and anxiety, he sat next to her and offered his calm, reassuring perspective, like a sports veteran even then.
“I doubt he remembers this, but it was clear to me that he was someone I could trust in the gym and in sport,” Kedzie said. “He was and has been, in every interaction I’ve had with him, incredibly kind, caring and funny, without ever being a creep or making me feel less than a fighter. It was one of those moments where I realized how amazing Cub was.”
Another teammate, Isaac Vallie-Flagg, called Swanson “a great fighter and a better man.” In addition to the performances in the cage, there were all the little moments in the gym that no one but his teammates see. In those cases, Vallie-Flagg said, “he always behaved in a way that I could constantly admire.”
These are the kinds of things you can’t always expect fans to know or consider in a legacy conversation. But all of Swanson’s years in the sport must mean something, right? Or at least it would be if MMA wasn’t a “what have you been up to lately” sport. Among the criticisms that someone could level against us here is that we are not always good at remembering our own history. For veterans – and Swanson counts himself among them – this can be frustrating.
“I’ve always kept quiet and tried to let my work speak for itself,” Swanson said. “But right now I feel like a real OG in the game. I have always respected the sport. I have always appreciated the people who came before me.
“When I started, I watched the ‘Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in Action’ videos. I watched ‘The Smashing Machine’. I watched everything I could see and felt bad for not knowing enough about the first UFCs or Pride (Fighting Championships). So I educated myself on the history of MMA, and now these younger guys don’t know. I seem to know a lot about the story. Sometimes this bothers me. I feel like you should know and respect the people who paved the way for you.
At 40, Swanson is nearing the end of his career. He knows this. These days he focuses most of his time and energy on the UFC gym in Costa Mesa, Calif., which he co-owns with former UFC champion Michael Bisping. He coaches an active fight team outside of the gym and co-owns a management group—Bloodline Combat Sports Agency—that helps him share the knowledge he’s gained from a lifetime spent with four-ounce gloves.
His upcoming fight against Andre Fili at UFC 303 on June 29 has as much to do with that as it does with any career goals he’s still trying to achieve.
“It’s important for my fighters that I coach, to be able to switch roles with them and have them use some of the things I’ve taught them,” Swanson said. “Each fight and each opponent is a problem to solve. Basically, I’m giving them homework to say, how should I approach this fight? How should I train? I’m tired today, so should I rest or move on? It’s not enough for me to just tell them these things. They need to see how to apply it themselves so they have that knowledge in their own careers.”
It’s a day? Maybe these fighters will make it to the UFC. Maybe they’ll have long careers of their own, like Swanson did. If they are extremely lucky, resilient and able to continually learn and grow, perhaps they will last in this sport and at this level as long as he did. Perhaps. A few did.
But if they get there and one day someone asks who taught them how to do all this? Most likely, they will not respond, oh, just a guy who never won a UFC title. A career and a legacy like Swanson’s, in the end it all adds up to much more than the sum of its parts.
