Robert Whittaker: Return Of The Rapier
Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
UFC 243 seemed to mark the downturn of Robert Whittaker — but the Reaper’s career has cheated death.
Even generally, MMA doesn’t have a great deal of wildly successful former champions; the sport is too violent and matchmade too ruthlessly for many fighters to get the belt, lose it, and still be less than 11 or 12 years into their career where they’re bound to start slowing down anyway. When a fighter is summed up as a former champion by the commentary booth, it’s often the dubious last resort by which they’re meant to express that he may not be doing well now, but he once did, so his fresher opponent should watch out in case he inexplicably reverts to his prime. This is why Jose Aldo’s late-career run meant so much — the King of Rio had spent eight years among his weight’s elites and somehow still had enough in the tank to beat Renato Moicano and give Petr Yan hell, where even his younger teammate who started fighting a year later in Renan Barao was completely done as a UFC-level fighter by that time.
The fact that Robert Whittaker was a middleweight really compounded these concerns, with the three middleweight champions before him having absolutely precipitous falls, and Whittaker’s reign had arguably been harder than all of theirs. The two years that the Australian held the belt aged him by two decades — the career-altering rematch with Yoel Romero, several mid-fight injuries, and two separate sicknesses that forced him out of title fights. By the time Israel Adesanya had made Whittaker’s unyielding fearlessness look like unrelenting recklessness, the young man who tore through the division seemed more like a veteran who hopefully had the skills to decline gracefully and not violently. He’d turned around in under three months to fight Yoel Romero for the interim belt without a hitch, but after losing that belt, Whittaker getting ruled out of his fight in March 2020 felt depressingly predictable.
So Whittaker managing to return in that same year — claiming to be refreshed by his third long layoff in a row — and again banging out two wins in the span of three months was so starkly against the trend that one couldn’t help but believe him. Those wins weren’t tune-ups, either; two very different opponents, both directly off impressive showings against fringe-elite middleweights, and Whittaker kept the elite gate like he had never left. Whittaker’s 2020 has both defied and clarified the concerns that one may have had after his pathologically desperate fight against Adesanya — despite that loss, he was still the stabbing fencer who dealt death by a thousand cuts to the greats of 2017, and the Till and Cannonier wins showed that the great Australian was there to stay.
A Problem of Style
Whittaker dropping the championship to Israel Adesanya appeared to support the notion that Whittaker wasn’t in fact a striker but an “anti-wrestler”; that is, rather than being a well-developed component of a striking style, Whittaker’s stellar takedown defense was often taken as evidence that he was built solely to outkick-box fighters who didn’t really want to kick-box. From the start, this wasn’t a sensible position; pigeonholing late-career Yoel Romero as a wrestler and not a boxer ignores all the boxing (quite good boxing, at that) he did to find any success at UFC 225. As if that hypothesis needed to be tested, though, Whittaker’s opponent off the Adesanya loss was the pure striker Darren Till — off an upset over Kelvin Gastelum, the rangy southpaw was the sort to test the assumptions that were made upon Whittaker’s fall, and the Englishman was also poised to show whether he was still all there or not. Whittaker turned in a strong return performance, and showed some problem-solving ability in the face of a matchup that was far thornier than it looked on the surface.
From the start, the worry with Till was multifaceted; an impossibly-sized welterweight who became a long and tall middleweight, Till would classically look to push his opponent to the fence, feint out their intentions as they couldn’t back off, and use those reads to inform the path of his left hand. Whittaker — off a layoff that might convince any opponent that he was ready to be pushed around — made it a point to gain respect, running the Brit onto his lead hand several times early (including a gorgeous inside-angle jab as Till tried to do the stock southpaw outside-angle work, shortening his rear hand but walking onto Whittaker’s shortened jab in the process).
That said, Whittaker had some trouble leading with his hands against Till — not as much a function of Till’s counterpunching, more of his range and his insistence at staying far away. For instance, here’s Whittaker looking to jab in as he usually does — but Till’s length and his massive retreat, as well as the open-stance extending the distance and forcing Whittaker to fight the hand before bounding in, left jabbing both energy-intensive and difficult to build on. Till’s reactions to the jab weren’t useful unless he didn’t have the room to back off, and Whittaker wasn’t a pressure fighter — bursting in was probably safer than the early counter made it look, considering Till’s historically inconsistent counter work, but that shot understandably left Whittaker a bit skittish.
So the question for Whittaker was twofold: scoring from the outside range that Till maintained, and/or closing the gap to find his harder shots. From range, Whittaker found a reliable solution — Whittaker could draw that retreat from Till and kick the trailing leg for free (that is, as Till was headed backwards quickly, he couldn’t simultaneously plant that leg to check or counter). Till sustaining a knee injury probably hampered his ability to figure that out, but Whittaker also proved to be quick on the defensive trigger when Till did plant and counter — every Whittaker fight has some gorgeous defensive moments, and this fight wasn’t an exception (even if the matchup made it a bit of an outlier) as he weaved off his own leg kick in a way that evoked the best of Justin Gaethje.
With the leg-kick established to punish Till for his rapid backtracking, Whittaker was able to re-integrate his blitzes; as Till started to try to hold his ground so that Whittaker would have fewer easy openings to kick him for free, more of classical Whittaker’s boxing game revealed itself. Till’s chronic uprightness in exchanges hurt him there, as did his attempted defensive mechanics — used to being rangy enough that he could step back and messily lean from anything coming his way, Till found himself with his feet crossed and his head up for the first knockdown as he was more loath to take big strides back.
Aside from the specific themes of this fight, Whittaker’s boxing is always a joy to watch, and these exchanges show a few reasons why. The first knockdown was also the product of a clever rhythm break — Whittaker conditioned Till to his bounces forward and backwards, then charged directly off a “forward” bounce to both cover some extra distance (with the double-step) and surprise Till with what amounted to an offbeat stutterstep. In the second clip, note Whittaker’s head-movement — Whittaker is offline automatically as he throws his rear hand, taking away that counter-uppercut, and he’s exited on an angle so Till can’t just eat the shot and keep punching with him. Whittaker has great reactions, but a great deal of his defensive integrity is proactively built into his offense — which makes him far harder to counter than his blitzing style makes it look.
As the fight developed, the pocket work largely became a function of transitions — and on the lead, Whittaker had an Edgar-esque look that reliably got him in and out safely. Whittaker’s bursting nature had long been suspected to allow for surprising level changes, and that came to bear in this fight — Whittaker could draw the reaction from Till with the entry and get on a leg, then start cracking Till on exits as he looked to keep his balance. In the first one, Whittaker punishes Till for pulling him back up into the clinch with the underhook; in the second, he elevates the leg as he yanks down a collar tie to break Till’s posture and works from there.
Whittaker’s counterpunching (punching in general, in fact) also connected to transitions as the fight went on, in a tactic that was also notably used by Jussier Formiga against Deiveson Figueiredo (Ed Gallo). Seen earlier how Whittaker could use his left hook to put Till off crowding, but when that shot missed, the hook could be turned into a collar tie — and Whittaker was quick to take advantage of that with the right uppercut. In a way, this is a very orthodox boxing combination, where the lead hook and the uppercut play off each other to exploit an opponent’s posture in response to one of them — but the use of the collar tie to extend that window is a great example of how longer clinchwork changes the game a bit.
Whittaker/Till wasn’t a tremendously convincing nor comfortable win; Till had a definite argument to a draw despite getting 10-8ed in round 2, and the entire fight was contested in a range that made Whittaker work hard for very little reward. For his part, Darren Till has proven to have the monkey’s paw of effectiveness — Till has reliably made many of his opponents look confused and subpar just by being big and powerful and reasonably threatening on the counter, even if he hasn’t been able to turn that into convincing wins. All that said, for a fighter who was in a scary spot of potential decline, it wasn’t entirely discouraging to see Robert Whittaker finding ways around a bad matchup with craft and heart when his primary game proved unwise. He seemed on the path to becoming an old tough veteran and appropriately gritted an ugly veteran win — or so it looked, until Whittaker faced Jared Cannonier and looked every bit as effective as the Whittaker of old.
A Problem of Margin
In contrast to Till, Jared Cannonier was not a tough matchup on paper for Whittaker. A former heavyweight who was a puncher even for that weight, Cannonier took advantage of a short-notice fight against Dave Branch and smashed his way to the top three in just three fights at 185 — and already had the champion Adesanya’s attention, as Whittaker was openly a title eliminator for the American. For Whittaker, this was just a return to work (the first time having two fights in a calendar year since his title run in 2017) but also a query of whether Whittaker was the same man who handled Yoel Romero for minutes at a time. Cannonier was no Romero, but he was something of a crude analog on the feet — a power-counterpuncher who commanded the ring just by occupying it, taking some time to let his opponent do their worst before completely crushing them for trying. In range, pace, and directionality, this was a comparable test to the contenders that Whittaker faced on the way up, and Whittaker’s task was to show that the oddness of the Till fight was because of Till — that he could still win fights the way he used to, navigating the dangers as adeptly as he had in the past. Still marked by the headwound from the final seconds of the Till bout, Whittaker made the right point — as UFC 254 became a Greatest Hits album for Blitzkrieg Bob.
Cannonier seemed to have two distinct ideas on how to limit Whittaker’s output — one very good idea, and one more questionable idea. The very obvious play was Cannonier’s kicking game — an avid and powerful legkicker, Cannonier seemed poised to exploit the weakness Rafael Natal found in Whittaker as a prospect years ago. Whittaker’s side-on stance leaves him vulnerable to getting knocked off balance by outside low-kicks, and it also leaves them relatively difficult to check when the “outside” is often just the back of his leg. So Cannonier immediately began attacking Whittaker’s step-in with the counter low-kick to dissuade them, and attacking the speedier man’s leg at range.
As the fight developed, outside a few isolated checks, Whittaker’s tactic for dealing with Cannonier’s kicking was often just to jab through them. Cannonier has a hurting leg kick and a decently-timed one, but the difference between kicking well and kicking a lot is often just contingency-planning — a fighter like Renato Moicano or Justin Gaethje can angle or weave off kicks, where Cannonier relied on his kick just blowing Whittaker off his feet every time he landed one. Whittaker could often eat the kick and keep jabbing through, and Cannonier would be driven straight back to eat the rest. Cannonier dealt very real damage that required serious durability for Whittaker to sustain — but Whittaker also stopped letting Cannonier get that for free.
The other play was Cannonier going southpaw, which made…less sense. It could’ve been an attempt to take away Whittaker’s jab, but (as seen later) it didn’t really work — and Whittaker had enough experience facing hulking southpaws in his 50 minutes with Yoel Romero that he had a few open-stance tricks. Whittaker playing the straight off the headkick was the easy one — Whittaker kicking at Cannonier’s arms apparently broke one of them early — and Cannonier seemed unsure of which stance would work against a Whittaker who looked very prepared for both.
Cannonier’s counterpunching was a very real threat through the fight — but Whittaker was largely at his defensive best, in a way that was very reminiscent of his fight against Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza three years ago. Whittaker’s commitment to jabbing in meant that he could consistently get behind his shoulder as Cannonier looked to cross over that — both his spearing and damaging jabs and his feeling entries came with built-in defensive options, and the latter was often too quick and noncommital for Cannonier to time the counters before Whittaker was away anyway. Cannonier’s danger vastly outstripped his depth, and once Whittaker seemed to have Cannonier’s two primary jab counters worked out, the cannonfire didn’t really change in type nor detail.
Another interesting look was Whittaker’s use of the shortened straight — where he’d square his shoulders and transfer his weight before throwing his rear hand, which would take off a great deal of the tell on the shot (the shoulders) and just make it faster, even if it didn’t actually have the weight transfer to power it. Whittaker did it twice, but the second time, Whittaker did a Fedor Emelianenko — entering off that straight to weave underneath and get to the bodylock. Not a huge factor in the fight, but something cool and more evidence of Whittaker putting emphasis on transitional offense.
With Cannonier’s weapons largely sussed out, Whittaker went to work himself — the shorter range of the fight gave Whittaker concrete defensive reactions, rather than Till’s straight backtracking (or Adesanya’s angle taking), making Cannonier a perfect mark for Whittaker’s brand of offense-building. The former champion eventually funneled Cannonier into a blow that probably should have finished the fight, in a signature sequence that has come to define Whittaker’s trickery as a kickboxer.
To simplify a bit, Whittaker began to key his attack toward two particular defensive responses of Cannonier. The first is how Cannonier would look to roll underneath the more committed lead hand actions of Whittaker (and eventually, Whittaker could draw the weave out by just feinting the entry) — and Whittaker used his lead uppercut to take that away. The lead uppercut also served a few other purposes, same as it did against Yoel Romero; Cannonier’s southpaw switch was partly addressed by Whittaker sending his lead hand from below the point where Cannonier could handfight it, Whittaker could chain that shot with his rear hand (see later), and the naturally low lead-hand of Whittaker often gives some concealment to the up-jab or lead uppercut that other strikes don’t necessarily have.
The other response was Cannonier’s outside slip — if Whittaker just led or darted in with the straight, Cannonier was ready for it, even if the jab found the mark more often than not. Especially as the lead-uppercut started being threatened in round 2, Cannonier began to lean more and more on the slip, and the bit of rhythm-change on the aforementioned shortened straight probably didn’t hurt in convincing Cannonier to react urgently to any movement from Whittaker. So at the end of round 2, Whittaker started to draw that slip out —- Whittaker would jab into range and see if Cannonier was anticipating the straight, and if so, Whittaker would slam him with it as he was in the middle of resetting from the slip. Whittaker did this twice in the final seconds of round 2, and it paid off handsomely at the beginning of round 3.
Encouraging Cannonier to slip deeper to the outside to avoid Whittaker just adjusting the path of the straight, Whittaker would land his best shot — the same one that he used to cement himself as a title contender in his finish of Souza. The lead uppercut stood Cannonier up, the right hand got Cannonier slipping, and the head-kick behind that caught Cannonier completely bare — cutting across the path of his slip as he’d been goaded into overreacting to the straight. Whittaker’s head-kick was never an inordinately powerful one, and it caught Cannonier with the edge of the foot — but the setup did the lifting, as Cannonier himself gave the kick the power it needed. This was the definition of an earned sequence, where Whittaker didn’t just do something cool, but forced it to work — taking Cannonier’s avenues away from him, and driving the killshot through the only path left.
Even as Cannonier’s land at the end of the fight showed, he was a truly dangerous fight for Whittaker; while Whittaker seemed to be built to take that sort of opponent apart, Cannonier was one of the better versions of “big powerpuncher” out there, and he had some ideas to specifically attack the weaknesses of Whittaker that didn’t entirely fail. He even did some tricky shifting through feinted kicks to draw the jab and counter, which wasn’t anything systemic but showed some offhand craft from the Alaskan. That Whittaker came out nearly untouched, with what likely should have been a 10-8 round 3 and potentially a 3-0 sweep of the rounds, came down to Whittaker’s brilliance in his favored sort of fight — even against the toughest and most potent destroyers at his weight, Whittaker’s science could reign supreme.
Parting Thoughts
Is all this to say that Whittaker’s likely rematch against Israel Adesanya is sure to go better for him? Not really. While Whittaker is easily the most compelling rematch (and perhaps the most compelling fight) on the market for the Nigerian, it still isn’t one that looks closer than before — Whittaker’s need to explode across distance was exploited thoroughly by Adesanya’s craft at UFC 243, and Adesanya being a far more educated kicker than Cannonier could also prove to be trouble that Whittaker didn’t get the chance to encounter the first time. Most of the limited intrigue of Adesanya/Whittaker 2 just comes from Whittaker being the only truly elite and superb fighter available to Adesanya at this time — middleweight has been cleaned out by the pair, and light heavyweight doesn’t have a single talent as deeply skilled as either. The statement “if anyone can give Adesanya a good fight, it’s Whittaker” is probably true, but also just a sign that there aren’t any contenders at this time who are likely to give Adesanya a good fight.
What should be made clear from Whittaker’s recent campaign, though — whether he gets the belt back or not — is that he’s one of the most truly special fighters in the sport’s history. It’s been said before how the Australian sports culture tends to be a bit like that of the American Kickboxing Academy (work harder and not smarter) and Whittaker’s skillset always seemed a counterpoint to that philosophy, but his training methods apparently proved to be exactly that — so Whittaker seemingly returning to normalcy after recognizing the downside to that sort of approach is laudable in itself. Even more than that, though, Whittaker’s career is just a monument to heart — the heart within fights to survive all manner of damage, the heart to get to fights through brutally stupid training, and the heart to keep ticking after a career that would’ve rendered even the sharpest fighters irreparably brittle. The 29-year-old veteran improbably looks like a contender on the rise again, and — just like he did for Brunson and Souza — is back to making the oddsmakers look like fools. Unfortunate circumstances might have kept Whittaker from being the chosen one, the way he looked for middleweight when he proved to be the best in the world at UFC 213, but contributing to his legacy the way he did in 2020 is often beyond the reach of even the greatest champions — as he himself said after his loss of the belt, he’s not going anywhere, and perhaps it would’ve been wiser to listen.