Lawler's proving ground
Robbie Lawler is as nonchalant as if he were taking the dog for a walk on a quiet Sunday morning rather than defending his middleweight championship in front of millions of fans on network television.
He feels no pressure, he insists, as one of the stars in the first mixed martial arts card broadcast on a legacy television network. He will defend his Elite XC middleweight title against challenger Scott Smith on Saturday at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.
"I just have to go out and do my job," Lawler said on Thursday.
He's achieved a certain level of success in a career that began in 2001, the can't-miss kid so talented that he was expected to take the UFC by storm. He was less than two months past his 19th birthday when he made his UFC debut in 2002.
He was more than respectable in the UFC, winning his first three bouts and four of his first five. But then he lost back-to-back bouts to Nick Diaz and Evan Tanner and suddenly nobody was talking about him as a superstar in waiting.
The UFC unceremoniously cut him, believing he wasn't as good as advertised.
But his friend, confidante and training partner, UFC legend Matt Hughes, said Lawler's early woes were simply immaturity. "He was so young," Hughes said Thursday. "He was fighting in the UFC at 19, but he was more like a 17-year-old."
Lawler has recovered from those up-and-down early days. He's won four in a row and seven of his last eight and has rebuilt his reputation to such a point that Sherdog.com ranks him as the fifth-best middleweight in the world and MMA Weekly.com has him at fourth.
He won the ICON Sports middleweight title and later the Elite XC crown by decimating Ninja Rua.
On Saturday, the world will get an indication of whether Lawler has, indeed, finally reached his immense potential or whether he's been beating up a series of has-beens and never-weres. Smith is a middle-of-the-road middleweight who is not ranked in anyone's top 10, but he’s good enough to give all but the very elite middleweights a run for their money.
But Smith has not given an indication he can hang with the likes of men such as UFC champion Anderson Silva, WEC champion Paulo Filho and ex-UFC champ Rich Franklin, men who are Lawler's peers at the top of the Sherdog and MMA Weekly rankings.
The hard-punching Smith hopes to use Lawler as a steppingstone to bigger things. He's come up short when he's stepped up in class, losing to Ed Herman and Patrick Cote in the UFC, but he believes he's positioned for a career-changing victory.
"This would be huge," Smith said of a win over Lawler. "This would put me right where I want to be. I've been knocking on the door to the top 10 so many times, and then I lose a big fight. Winning a big fight like this would put me right back there. If you gave me a list of the top 20 185-pounders in the world, I would hand pick Lawler. So, this is a huge opportunity for me."
It's even bigger for Lawler, though, because it would establish his credibility as an elite middleweight and less of an MMA version of Ryan Leaf.
It's easy in hindsight to scoff at the fact that there was talk prior to the 1998 NFL Draft that the Indianapolis Colts should choose Leaf and not Peyton Manning with the first selection. The Colts, of course, chose Manning, who has gone on to lead them to a Super Bowl victory, transform them into one of the league's most consistent winners and become one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history.
San Diego was saddled with Leaf at No. 2 and he turned out to be one of the biggest NFL Draft busts ever.
Lawler may never be the MMA version of Manning, but he sure doesn't want to be tagged as its version of Leaf. And wins over fighters such as Smith are what he needs to prove himself to an increasingly skeptical public.
"He needs the exclamation point of a Scott Smith win, maybe by knockout," Elite XC president Gary Shaw said.
Lawler is a soft-spoken sort who is the last to talk smack about an opponent or brag about himself. Indeed, Shaw said Thursday that Lawler needs "to work on being more cordial with the press, and not because he doesn't like the press, but because if you want to be a true star in this business, that's a part of it, too."
Lawler, now a grizzled veteran at 25, prefers to make his mark in the cage. He said he had to fight enough to learn the proper pace once the bell rang.
In his younger days, he was so frenetic that he was always going twice as fast as he should and was missing openings he should have been able to see. Once he was able to slow himself down, he said, his performance level rose. "I'm just a lot smarter overall today than I was in those days," Lawler said of his uber-prospect years. "I have the same skills and the same technique and I always trained hard, but mentally, I wasn't there the way I should have been in those days.
"Back then, I didn't think I needed a game plan. I just thought I'd crush everyone and that's how I fought. I figured that when I'd attack, they'd fall."
Lawler said he's slowed down his own pace so he's not as frenetic when he's in the ring. He's now more able to see the openings and take advantage of them.
The fight with Smith figures to be a standup battle, one which has the potential to steal the show on CBS. Lawler chooses not to think about the stakes of the bout or the exposure he'll receive from fighting on network television or the pressure involved or, for that matter, anything other than beating Scott Smith.
"When you get in there, it's just a fight and it doesn't matter what channel you're on or how many people are there or anything else," Lawler said. "The only thing I really am focusing on is Scott Smith, because he's the only thing that matters. If I worry about who's watching me on TV, I could be in for trouble because my focus wouldn't be on Scott. When you're a professional, I believe you put that other stuff aside and you focus entirely on the fight. And that's all I am doing."
What he does on Saturday, though, will go a long way toward how his career is judged and whether he'll be regarded as just another fighter or a guy who was able to match the hype.
