Lost In Menace City: A Michael Johnson Retrospective
Photo by Cooper Neill/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
This article is part of our “long article” requests through Patreon! A huge thank you to Alteroc (@crwate01) for this excellent topic suggestion.
In an effort to learn more about combat sports, Alteroc laid out an article format that covers three athletes from a specific sport:
An all-time great
A specialist
Someone “weird”
This article covers #3 for mixed martial arts: perennial lightweight…something, Michael Johnson.
Alteroc Series: The Weird
One of the more impressive things about longevity in mixed martial arts is that the sport isn’t structured remotely to protect those fighters; unlike boxing, which is a bit kinder to their competitors off losses and layoffs, fighters who hit a certain level in MMA are generally only fighting others in that level until they’re completely ruined in every way. The best example may be Chris Weidman, who went 1-4 over a four-year period at middleweight, and then was set up to be thrashed by the top contender a weight-class up; there’s something to be said about fighters like Rafael dos Anjos taking every challenge and still winning a decent amount of the time (and having a prime of a respectable length), and even something perversely impressive about a fighter like Donald Cerrone getting put through the elite wringer on name value alone and exiting the other side battered but still resembling himself (at least, for now).
One fighter not so lucky after their stint among the elite was Michael Johnson, at one time a deserving top-5 lightweight, whose absurd strength of schedule absolutely destroyed him. There’s quite a bit more to say on Johnson’s downfall, to be sure; overall, Johnson has come to resemble everything both positive and negative about the Hooft school of Hard Knocks. At this point in his career, he fights like he’s been contracted to lose, but is determined to show that he’s the better man for a round before he does.
With a numerical record resembling that of someone like Matt Brown, Michael Johnson occupied a similar spot as one of MMA’s premier dangermen; especially after leaving his prime (mentally moreso than physically or even technically), Johnson has taken more than his share of lumps as a fighter who used to be elite, but possessed the skillset in his glory-days to trouble even the very best that 155 had to offer. This has come together to create perhaps the most inexplicably bizarre career that any man in MMA has ever had; if there’s one thing that Johnson has consistently been able to do, it is to be surprising.
The Summary
On paper, Johnson’s list of wins is as formidable as that of any lightweight currently in the division, despite Johnson having exited relevance in mid-2017 (with the obvious caveat that he caught both of his best names before they developed into the forms that eventually would take them to the top). For both future contenders, their run-in with Missouri’s Menace saw them get taken apart by an opponent whose skills ran deeper than they seemed. The most brutal and swift showing of Johnson’s primary skillset was the fight with Dustin Poirier in late-2016, where Johnson entered an underdog and made it look like a mismatch; Poirier wasn’t in the best shape of his career by a long shot, but he had already been a top-5 featherweight when he moved up to 155 and claimed the #7 spot, and Johnson iced him with ease.
Dustin Poirier is certainly the best name on Johnson’s CV as a win, but it was also one of the easiest wins that Johnson got in the UFC. Without his later development defensively and as a jabber to set his entries up, each of Poirier’s lurches forward had him flirting with disaster. Johnson isn’t a particularly creative fighter on the counter, and this fight hinged entirely on the 3-2 as Poirier entered, but he’s helped tremendously by possessing a massive handspeed edge over everyone he faces. It’s very clear against Poirier, who isn’t slow himself; even in fairly noncommittal entries, Johnson is stinging Poirier before he can bail out, and Poirier simply can’t keep up without backing out.
What made the difference for the TKO was Poirier getting too deep into his combination and completely losing track of his positioning, which is the worst thing to do against a prime Michael Johnson. Poirier could take the combos (at least, for the time being) in a strong stance, but his decision to follow up the 1-2 by winging a massive lead uppercut left the exchange looking like this:
Poirier completely squared up as he committed to the lead-uppercut, and the insane extension left him completely upright; the way Poirier’s standing, there is no sound defensive motion possible, and there is also no way for him to bail out until he’s balanced again. Considering that he could barely track Johnson with all his options open, ceding them all as he entered was extremely unwise of Poirier.
Compare to Johnson’s positioning; low and in his stance, facing Poirier. Johnson’s eagerness as a knockout-chaser often forces him out of position himself, but he’s certainly in a better place here. By the time Poirier could even come close to winding his uppercut back and staggering his feet, Johnson had laced him with two clean punches that sent Dustin crashing down.
Poirier’s bad decisionmaking certainly contributed to this finish, but Johnson did several things right. Aside from just being positionally strong, Johnson’s superlative speed and power were on full display in this fight, as well as his confidence in sitting down on blistering counter-combinations mere seconds into the fight. MJ let Poirier get absolutely nothing for free.
Johnson is a fairly pared-down fighter, in that he does a few things but does them well; as such, his ninety-five second bout with Poirier showed the bulk of the pieces that made “The Menace” such a menace. He’s fast, he’s powerful, he’s accurate, he’s comfortable in the pocket, he’s a committed and strong combination-puncher on the counter; these are enough to make a man a contender. Where Johnson set himself apart early as a prospect was his versatility in how he used the tools he had; MJ didn’t need his opponent to lazily wade into his area of strength, because he could woodshed his man in whatever fashion the situation demanded.
The Spoiler
Speaking of squaring up on entry, we come to Tony Ferguson; shortly after winning the 170 tournament of The Ultimate Fighter, “El Cucuy” embarked on a thrilling and robust 12-win streak that spanned six years and multiple former champions. Right before the beginning of that winstreak was Ferguson’s loss to Michael Johnson, also a prospect at the time, who made the future all-time great look decidedly less than that. As with Poirier, Ferguson developed after the fight massively; his recklessness was covered fairly well by his initiative and pace and problem-solving abilities, and he sharpened his own tool-set until he became one of the most effective attrition-fighters the sport has ever seen. However, like his struggles against Justin Gaethje in 2020, Ferguson couldn’t close down the power-counterpuncher without eating the punishment that came back his way; Ferguson looked to enforce his bizarre brand of pressure-boxing, but Johnson proved a bit too tough to deal with in that sense.
Although he didn’t find a killshot the way he did against Poirier, the Ferguson fight hinged just as hard on Johnson’s counterpunching to keep Ferguson from comfortably pressuring. Again, the difference was positioning; Johnson doesn’t look any more creative as a counterpuncher here, still largely his 3-2, but it works because Ferguson either squares up as he enters — leaping forward or marching through his combinations — or, as in the second instance, exits haphazardly (bringing his feet together as he looks to bail out, completely upright). Johnson’s speed is always dangerous, but especially in a situation where Ferguson was stranded between stances with no sound options.
Johnson has a number of second-tier wins, which are a bit more instructive in terms of looking at his game when it isn’t under stress. Two of them show reasonably interesting components of his game best; the first is Gleison Tibau — a massive lightweight who the speedier Johnson wiped out inside two rounds — and the second is the beloved Joe Lauzon — who entered a -230 favorite in his hometown and got absolutely battered by a Johnson with a chip on his shoulder.
Without retreading Johnson’s counter-selection again (which mostly manifested against Lauzon because of a massive speed edge for “The Menace”), the most noteworthy aspect of the Lauzon fight is Johnson’s quick recognition of Lauzon’s one-note defense, and his principal way of getting around it; after a certain point, Lauzon just shelled up and stood, and Johnson tore that shell to shreds. He hit the body and eventually went mad knowing that there wasn’t a counterpunching threat, but his best tool was the right hook-right uppercut changeup. Funny enough, this is something Dustin Poirier became very good at, at the elite level; those two shots widen and narrow a guard, and create openings for the other in a high-guard that isn’t responsive enough to adjust well. Johnson had lever-punched to cover distance against Ferguson, but here, it was against a static opponent to play havoc with his defense.
Johnson on the lead is mostly just quick left straights (which the plodding Lauzon got walked into over and over), but Johnson’s defense is what hasn’t really been seen in the other fights shown. Granted, it isn’t much, but the biggest consideration Johnson makes defensively is just a commitment to exiting on angles — and this really shines against opponents who aren’t as quick as him, which is most people, but especially the massive Tibau. Johnson doesn’t tend to turn these angles into offensive opportunities, just to keep his opponent turning to face (and that’s most of the clip), but the finish is is one of the times he managed to.
Johnson dips with his jab to win the exchange in closed-stance, and pivots to his right into Tibau’s stance, squaring the Brazilian up. Before Tibau fully resets, Johnson throws a quick 1-2, and Tibau abandons the reset to set his feet and exchange. Johnson’s straight beats Tibau’s right hook not just because of the speed difference, but because Tibau’s positioning doesn’t enable tight form, where Johnson’s clean straight clips the badly-positioned Tibau on the ear.
That said, there’s an argument that Johnson’s best performance wasn’t against Poirier nor Ferguson nor even Lauzon, but against a fighter who (like himself) serves more as a head-to-head nightmare than as an actual contender. Edson Barboza is a murderously-powerful kicker who has certainly been figured out a bit at this point, as being supremely uncomfortable under pressure. At the point at which Johnson faced him, however, Barboza hadn’t really been solved like that; he had losses to Jamie Varner and Donald Cerrone, but those weren’t the consistent demolition-jobs that have been inflicted upon Barboza since. There’s no overstating how Johnson wrote the playbook; he won the Barboza fight with a keen guess as to the sort of fight that would most irk a man who was thought (is still thought) to be a top MMA striker, and also introduced some tactical adjustments to bring that strategic read to fruition. It was a performance that every other Barboza opponent would do well to look to emulate.
Johnson’s strategic read was — as seen later in Barboza’s career — probably enough to drag a messy fight from the Brazilian, but it was the smaller adjustments that gave MJ an extremely commanding win over the striker on the feet, the kind that someone like Paul Felder couldn’t replicate even when he landed on the right big-picture gambit. Johnson feinted Barboza backwards and cut the cage off reasonably well with his feet, but the real coup was his shot-selection, and how that enforced his intentions.
Johnson’s rear hand up to this point looks like nothing but a straight — albeit a solid fast one, that can hit multiple targets and even be doubled on — but straight shots don’t cut the cage, and Johnson knew it. He needed to herd Edson into his punches, and use them to punish exits, so Johnson showed something that he really doesn’t do often: the rear hook. Johnson arcing his left hand meant that he could pinch Barboza between his left hand and his right in exchanges to send him straight back, and use them to stand Barboza still or punish him as he moved laterally. He did some more doubling-up in this fight with both hands, attacking Barboza with double-hooks on exits against the fence. These are reads that actual natural pressure-fighters often don’t make, and the straight-punching outfighter did.
Johnson even outkicked the Brazilian, as pushing Barboza back severely limited his arsenal and kept him making his trademark wide-arcs to leave the cage (upon which Johnson was still on him). Johnson’s always been an active leg-kicker, but here, he used it to push Barboza to a square stance and land as he was out of position. He turned into a Cordeiro-ite for a single fight, because he was facing an opponent who demanded it.
Johnson should’ve been painted in all of the above as versatile, and there’s no denying that in his prime; with a simple arsenal that worked in most contexts, Johnson was dangerous in any terrain, especially when he showed the capacity for some truly rare modification. However, even the best tools are at the mercy of the man holding them, and Michael Johnson’s were owned by one of the most volatile minds that MMA has seen.
The Spoilage
There’s no point in going through all of Johnson’s (uncomfortably many) losses, because they largely hit the same couple notes; only a few of them are particularly instructive. In a sense, Johnson’s late-career losses can be divided into cause and effect; prime Johnson faced the top-two lightweights in the world back-to-back in fights that put the equivalent of multiple highways of mileage on him, and this led to MJ sustaining loss after loss to men he was demonstrably superior to. While the Nurmagomedov fight isn’t particularly instructive on Johnson beyond “the best grappler in MMA grappled one of the worse grapplers to be elite at 155”, the Gaethje fight is the opposite; even as Gaethje holds the interim lightweight belt at the time of writing, Johnson gave Gaethje the most offensive resistance he had faced in the UFC en route to a win. After the two-round barnburner, it felt like the prime of “The Menace” was in danger of slipping away, and that’s exactly what happened.
Seen earlier with Lauzon the danger that Johnson can pose to a high-guard, and that manifested against Gaethje very quickly; MJ punched straight through the guard, up the middle, and to the body, so effectively that only Gaethje’s durability saved him at certain points.
However, Johnson often didn’t get away from these exchanges for free, and Gaethje’s counter-kicking game absolutely hobbled him. Against the southpaw, Gaethje often switch-kicked the outside of Johnson’s lead leg as Johnson left the flurry, and it took a massive toll on MJ as the fight went deeper into the second round.
The fight ended just as a function of attrition, of Gaethje’s relentless work to the legs and to Johnson’s head as he was backed up, until Johnson was too exhausted and broken-down to escape the fence against an absolute destroyer in the clinch. Not a fight where Johnson showed a singular fatal-flaw (perhaps other than conceding exchanges too easily, when he likely would’ve had some more success playing a more diligent outside-straights game), but running into a man who’d eventually look as elite as anyone in MMA certainly runs the risk of looking out of one’s depth.
There’s another way to separate those losses, though, into two principal failings. The first is just that Johnson often couldn’t stay focused for an entire three-round fight; against both Beneil Dariush and Nate Diaz, for instance, he started strong and faded, not as a function of physical limitations but apparently of just mental overload. The discipline he showed in the face of Edson Barboza had absolutely disappeared when he was faced by the nascent jab of a Beneil Dariush who couldn’t hold a candle to him athletically but just wanted to be there more. The most dramatic example of that was Johnson’s loss to Josh Emmett at 145; Johnson settled into a cautious points performance that worked well for a good bit, as he gave the monstrous puncher a boxing lesson for rounds at a time, only to get caught completely bare in the final minute by the same exact attack he was competently dealing with for the whole fight.
The second was sheer panic in the face of grappling, and this is different from Johnson just not being good at grappling; past some initially solid wrestling, Johnson has always been a sitting duck on the bottom, but the difference between losing to Nurmagomedov and shutting down underneath Stevie Ray is as notable as it can be. Even Johnson’s most recent loss shows this; against the talented Thiago Moises, Johnson looked like the most committed body-hitter in MMA, he looked as good as he ever had as a striker, for a single round and no more.
Johnson tearing Moises apart at the end of round 1, picking him apart with straights and cutting him off with right hooks to the body, kicking at will and keeping Moises pinned to the fence….
…only to get instantly ankle-locked at the start of round 2. To be sure, submission-defense is a notable weak-spot for Johnson; however, the silliness of a man failing on every takedown in round 1, only to get a submission 30 seconds into round 2, is only remotely feasible against Johnson’s profound insecurity as a grappler after Nurmagomedov and his uniquely wavering focus in a fight.
Concluding Thoughts
It’s unfortunate that such an incontrovertibly-skilled fighter has turned into a bit of a trivia question in MMA; by win-list and even by head-to-head potential against virtually anyone (in his prime), Michael Johnson stands with the greats, but he’s ended up a slightly-uncomfortable footnote in the careers of fighters who went on to be far more consistent. It speaks to the things that MMA demands of fighters more than skills or athleticism (mental toughness and strong coaching among them), it speaks to the perils of matchmaking to even the most dangerous fighters, and it speaks to a record often being independent of the threat a fighter presents their peers. In his prime, Johnson was a test, an eminently passable one for a man willing to grapple, but an extraordinarily difficult one if they wanted to strike; that’s valuable, even if Johnson didn’t attain the heights that he should have. As a collection of round-1s, Michael Johnson’s career is as impressive as anyone’s, and while his age and mileage has rendered him snakebitten beyond that point, the danger he posed to his foes in his best form is undeniable. Next time Dustin Poirier or Justin Gaethje or Tony Ferguson fights, it’s worth remembering that there was once a blazing-quick menace who proved a worthwhile lesson for each of them.