ONE Championship’s Demetrious Johnson was once the UFC flyweight champion, and he won’t take any smack talk from anyone.
That includes current UFC bantamweight champ Aljamain Sterling, who ahead of his appearance at UFC 292, called Johnson “too little” and asserted that he’d dominate “Mighty Mouse.” Demetrious Johnson was less than impressed, describing how he tried to help Sterling’s latest opponent, Henry Cejudo, take on the bantamweight chapm.
Demetrious Johnson Fires Back At Aljamain Sterling’s “Too Little” Dig
“I’ve been trying to help Henry develop his clinch game. If Henry had a better clinch game in that fight, and if Henry was more savvy and grappled more, when Aljo did that shot, and he failed the shot attempt, and he stayed down as a grounded opponent and Henry hit his head head there…
I said, ‘Henry, you circle around that motherf***** and you make him get up, you put your hooks in, you start a grappling exchange, you’ve got to grapple.
I feel his weakness is he has no clinch game. “Like, I would eat his ass up for breakfast in the clinch game. I feel like rhythm wise, I move way better than he does in the feet.
[In] grappling, he is longer, so I would never let him get my f****** back, because he’ll lock them f****** ‘Funk Master’ legs in a body triangle like he did at Peter Yan, and then I’ll have to survive him doing that.
The one thing he does that helps to my advantage is that he crosses a distance for me, right? He does this [jabs the air], and a funky-ass kick, and I’m like, ‘Perfect. Come here, I wanna show you a thing called Muay Thai clinch.’ I just feel like I’ll eat him alive in a clinch.”
Demetrious Johnson actually declared that he wants to fight Sterling when asked by a ONE matchmaker. While the matchmaker believes that will never happen, given the fact that Johnson was traded by the UFC to ONE five years ago, “Mighty Mouse” is very open to the possibility.
“There’s a complexity to his game that I feel like I can solve it, and he’s the big dog over here in America. I’m the big dog over in Asia.
If that was brought to me as an opportunity, it would be like, ‘OK, that’s a problem I can solve that I would love to solve.’ I would put myself through a training camp for that fight.”
Johnson, now 37, is eyeing the tail end of his illustrious career. He may well be more interested in sparring, perhaps just grappling, with Aljamain Sterling, just to test himself against an active champ.
“Let’s play spar. Come spar, and I would love to grapple you. I love that. Just move and see how you just do your thing.”
