Opinion: Daniel Cormier’s mixed martial arts greatness was one of a kind

Cormier’s accomplishments with the clock ticking in winning two major championships and one of the most memorable tournaments in the sport’s history puts him in the pantheon of the sport’s greats.

But the results are only part of Cormier’s story. How DC handled himself along the way in a ruthless and often dirty game is every bit as important.

While Cormier was on his way up, Cain Velasquez was either UFC heavyweight champion or the top contender. They were best friends and training partners at American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose. They appeared to be on precisely the sort of collision course, which, in the worst scenarios, has ripped gyms apart and turned friends into enemies.

Not Cormier. He decided to go down to light heavyweight, making his 205-pound debut a few weeks shy of his 35th birthday, so as not to damage his friendship with Velasquez. Sure, sometimes DC looked like death warmed over on the scale, but he truly became a star at 205, thanks in large part to his rivalry with Jon Jones.

Jones got the best of Cormier in the cage, sure. But Jones got into one problem after another, both of the regulatory type inside the sport and the legal type outside, while Cormier kept his nose clean the entire time and never had so much as a whiff of a scandal.

Thus it felt like justice when Jones found himself sidelined, and Cormier went on his big run, defeating Johnson for the vacant light heavyweight belt at UFC 187 and winning an all-time war with Alexander Gustafsson to keep the belt at UFC 192.

And it truly felt like karma bounced back around for Cormier when, after injuries put Velasquez out of the heavyweight title picture, things opened up for Cormier to challenge Miocic for the 265-pound belt, creating an electrifying moment when DC scored a first-round knockout at UFC 226.

But this is where we bump back into the first point of this piece: that Cormier started at a late age.

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