Opinion: A ‘Mighty Mouse’ and a Lucky ‘Spider’

Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sherdog.com, its affiliates and sponsors or its parent company, Evolve Media.

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Demetrious Johnson returns to primetime network television for UFC on Fox 24 this Saturday, putting his flyweight throne on the line against Wilson Reis. Johnson is a -900 favorite and one of the least interesting aspects of the entire card, which is replete with contender bouts, exciting style clashes and a host of quality prospects, including the debut of maybe the best blue-chipper in all of MMA right now: France's Tom Duquesnoy.

Even the card's location -- the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Missouri -- seems like the weird sort of cosmic promotional joke that plays out in Johnson's career repeatedly. Johnson's last title challenger was Tim Elliott in December, and Elliott is on this card because he's from Missouri. Of course the UFC schedule would never break in such a way so as to align Johnson's challenger with a meaningful location, as he prepares to face a Brazilian based out of San Diego, California, in Kansas City.

Oh yeah, the NBA playoffs kick off on Saturday, and the NHL playoffs are running head-to-head against this Fox broadcast, which can't even benefit from being promoted during NFL games in April. Got you again, D.J.

However, just because we're all preparing to see Demetrious Johnson do Demetrious Johnson-type things to yet another challenger doesn't mean there's no drama or intrigue to be had. You've heard the history-book pitch already: If “Mighty Mouse” does what he is overwhelmingly favored to do in his UFC flyweight title defense, he'll tie all-time middleweight great Anderson Silva's record of 10 in a row. Reis might be a day in the office for Johnson, but it'd be a historic day in the office.

In the absence of Jon Jones, Johnson is the best fighter in the game, but Silva is arguably the best MMA fighter ever. In pre-fight discussions of Johnson potentially tying Silva's defenses record, this seems to be the way most people have distilled things: Johnson is great, but not that great. Certainly, their title runs are not equal, but their reigns -- and Johnson and Silva themselves -- have more in common than you might think, even if Johnson has never tested positive for steroids via, allegedly, Thai sex juice.

I mean, they're both nicknamed after animals -- and superheroes, if you want to consider Silva's obsession with Spider-Man -- in reference to their physical statures. Case closed, folks.

In seriousness, while Silva's almost seven-year run atop the middleweight division is obviously the biggest part of his legacy, it is not the only part of it and far from the only reason he's considered at worst one of the three greatest mixed martial artists of all-time. Never mind Silva's flirtations with 205 pounds in the UFC. Just after the turn of the millennium, Silva was one of the best welterweights in the world and upset then-undefeated Hayato “Mach” Sakurai, who was largely if not unanimously considered the pound-for-pound king of the game by the summer of 2001. While Johnson's accomplishments as a bantamweight are notable, there are several reasons, independent of comparing and contrasting their title reigns, that Silva is a historical tier or two above Johnson at this point.

Both Johnson and Silva won their titles and inherited underdeveloped divisions. Johnson admittedly gets the shorter end of the stick in this case, as the flyweight division was still decidedly embryonic when he beat Joseph Benavidez at UFC 152 to become the promotion's inaugural 125-pound champion. Nonetheless, many are quick to forget or perhaps don't even realize how long middleweight was the bastard division of the sport. In 2017, we've got an embarrassing backlog of contenders to the point we have to weed them out with fights like Ronaldo Souza-Robert Whittaker. This while another candidate for the all-time greatest mantle, Georges St. Pierre, is coming back to meet improbable champion Michael Bisping. In 2005, a year before Silva took the reins of the division and Rich Franklin's original nose, Nate Quarry fought for the UFC middleweight title by beating Lodune Sincaid, Shonie Carter and Pete Sell, which represented the hottest winning streak in the division outside of Franklin. Seriously.

Johnson and Silva upon winning UFC titles were both immediately subject to a bizarre sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in which the MMA world seemed determined to undermine their futures. For Silva, it was “fans and the UFC don't want a champion that can't speak English,” and for Johnson, it's “no one wants to watch 125-pound men fight.” Both of these statements are categorically untrue but used to explain why both men struggled to draw early on. It may seem half decent today to look back at Silva's defenses against Franklin, Dan Henderson or Patrick Cote and see that they did 300,000 pay-per-view buys or just above, but that was the basement back then; these were seen as failures, just as Johnson doing 150,000 PPV buys is today.

Yes, Silva may be more of a natural entertainer in and out of the cage, but that didn't really matter at all until four years into his reign, when Chael Sonnen started doing “Superstar” Billy Graham's promo -- and steroid -- routine and being the operative author in one of MMA's all-time classic rivalries. Silva made his own legacy, but Sonnen was the catalyst for him morphing into a sports superstar, especially as the UFC began pushing its product in his native Brazil. This is simply dumb luck. If Johnson's next challenger just happened to be a charismatic, trash-talking Mexican telenovela star, he could easily do three to four times what he normally draws as a main event on PPV.

Despite the massive differences in their body types, there's even similarities in points of style, even if Silva is the artist and Johnson is the engineer. Everyone knows how deadly Silva's collar tie was, but Johnson's holistic well-roundedness obscures the fact that his clinch game is probably his greatest asset. It's where he does the most damage, where he can land dizzying, confusing combinations and where his best takedowns originate. While it may not say much for what we're in for with Johnson-Reis, both “Mighty Mouse” and “The Spider” traditionally turned in the greatest performances of their reigns against their greatest opponents. Henderson and Benavidez? Style on them. Thales Leites and Ali Bagautinov? Twenty-five minutes of hell. This is just part and parcel of reigning in a division where you're simultaneously a cornerstone and a trailblazer.

Unsurprisingly, Johnson has downplayed the significance of Silva in his quest for history. He has repeatedly said he's chasing a 10th defense, an 11th defense and not Silva, the man. It's exactly what you would expect the flyweight king to say, especially ahead of a fight that appears to be business as usual. For all the surprising similarities between Johnson and “The Spider,” it's only sensible that “Mighty Mouse” chooses not to focus on trying to be or outright usurp Silva. He's not sitting around waiting for his Chael Sonnen to show up, because sadly, he probably never will. Contrary to what the old maxim says, you can't make your own luck. You can, however, make your own legacy.