Just slightly over 12 years, 17 pro fights and six UFC title fights with two separate reigns as UFC heavyweight champion. That was the MMA career of Cain Velasquez. Then on Monday he was sentenced to five years in prison for a range of charges including attempted murder for his assault aimed at a man who’d been accused of molesting his son at a daycare.
I can’t help but think of a line from Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men,” the one about how in life you might think you have some idea where the ride is headed but you might be wrong. No way Velasquez could have seen this coming for himself. Who could?
There’s probably a parallel universe out there in which we’re sitting around right now talking about Velasquez as the greatest heavyweight champ in UFC history. And it’s not one of those upside-down worlds where ice cream is health food and broccoli causes heart attacks. It’s a world very close to our own but with a few minor tweaks.
Maybe in that world Velasquez’s knees didn’t start to go bad on him right as he snatched the title in 2010. Maybe he didn’t feel pressured to go into that first Junior dos Santos fight injured and get face-planted by a right hand in front of nearly 9 million people on network TV. Maybe he showed up in Mexico City a month or two early for that 2015 fight with Fabricio Werdum rather than getting there the week before and letting the elevation get to him.
Velasquez only lost three fights in his entire career. That’s it. Just three, and all of them to guys who would end up holding the UFC heavyweight title. His win over Brock Lesnar to claim the belt for the first time is still one of my all-time favorite pure butt-whoopings in UFC history, if only because it looked in-person exactly like the kind of David vs. Goliath matchup that martial arts was created to address.
When Velasquez first showed up in the UFC he seemed like exactly the type of heavyweight we’d been waiting for. Here, at last, was an actual athlete. He could strike and he could wrestle. He was hard-nosed but also skilled. He fought at an extremely high pace, especially for that division, but he never seemed to get tired. He went 9-0 in the first half of his career, en route to his first meeting with the UFC title. Then he went 5-3 to close it out.
After that, of course, came a brief stint as a pro wrestler. Then this, where he chased a man through traffic firing a .40 caliber pistol as he went, driven by a mad, though understandable rage.
Of all the paths a retired MMA fighter might take to a prison sentence for attempted murder, Velasquez’s is one of the most sympathetic imaginable. Even the judge who sentenced him on Monday noted that Velasquez was not a threat to public safety, calling his “a tragic case.” Many of us can understand what motivated Velasquez to do what he did, while also understanding that you just can’t go around shooting at people in heavy traffic and not expect to see the inside of a prison cell.
The specifics of Velasquez’s case were part of what made him sympathetic to the MMA community, but it was also the fact that he was so beloved. No one really ever had anything bad to say about him. And that’s almost never true about anyone who’s spent any amount of time in this sport.
His sentencing certainly could have been much worse. At times after his initial arrest in 2022, it seemed that Velasquez might spent decades behind bars. Now, with credit for time served, he could conceivably be out a little over a year from now. Though, with everything his family has been through, you also can’t say he’s getting off easy.
I remember after Velasquez lost that first fight to dos Santos in 2011. It was his first professional loss and it cost him the title he’d taken off Lesnar a year earlier. He’d been dealing with knee issues even then, but since he was the defending champ in the one and only fight the UFC scheduled for that first appearance on FOX following a landmark TV deal, he felt he couldn’t pull out of the bout. About a minute into the fight he took a hard right hand behind the ear and that was that.
A couple days later I was in the AKA gym on an unrelated assignment and Velasquez came walking in. I was surprised to see him so soon after the fight. He wasn’t there to train. He was just hanging out, seeing his friends. As his head coach Javier Mendez told me, Velasquez spent so much of his life in the gym that, in moments like this, he didn’t know where else to go. It was like he just got in the car and ended up there through sheer muscle memory.
What I remember is how mostly unbothered he seemed just a couple days after losing his title. It wasn’t that he didn’t care so much as he wasn’t dwelling on it. I tried, as gently as I could, to ask him why that was. Velasquez sort of shrugged and told me he wasn’t worried. He was sure he’d get the belt back soon.
He did, too. I remember being impressed by that certainty, especially in this uncertain sport. Here was a man who was so confident in his own abilities that he felt he knew what was coming.
But then, a lot of us think at times that we know what’s coming or what life has in store for us. And a lot of us end up being wrong.
