Everything was looking bad for Anthony “Rumble” Johnson, the welterweight-turned-lightweight mixed martial artist who died last week after a long battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a rare disease called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis. The latter is what you don’t want to read. In any case, he was only 38 years old. Johnson’s luck was bad to the end.
In his last fight, against heavyweight Jose Augusto at Bellator 258 in May 2021, he got licked in the first round and then knocked Augusto out in the second. Nothing was working for him in that fight except his heavy hands, which were close to being heavy hands on a 205 pound body. It had been four years since the fight before this one, a lightweight title challenge against Daniel Cormier that he lost by submission. From May 2012 until his win over Augusto in 2021, Johnson was 13-2. Both losses were to Cormier, a great fighter and strategist. Both losses were from posterior suffocation. He hurt Cormier in every fight, which was not easy to do. Wow, how sad he looked when he lost.
In his prime, Johnson would have lost by rear choke to Cormier a million times out of a million, but he would have beaten everyone else. Future champions like Bellator champion Ryan Bader and UFC lightweight titleholder Glover Teixeira fell like nothing before him. So did top contenders like Jimi Manuwa and Alexander Gustafsson, who nearly beat Cormier and GOAT lightweight Jon Jones.
During that span, only Phil Davis, that smart Penn State fighter who has never been finished once in his decade-long career, and Andrei Arlovski, a heavyweight who has eaten the biggest shots of the most real, they carried Johnson to the final bell, and both. lost by him Arlovski’s fight wasn’t completely one-sided, and instead of praising Johnson, he seemed to condemn Rumble with weak, ungrammatical praise: “The wrestled. [once]!!! I lost that fight, because the bastard referee fell asleep on the clock as a result – my jaw was broken in two places…we fought all three rounds!!! I never got to know him well…”
Arlovski was referring to a punch thrown after the bell after the first round of their World Series of Fighting 2 match in 2013, when he and Johnson were fighting outside the UFC in hopes of waiving that organization Watch the fight now, though, and the result is clear: They traded heavy shots in the first round, but Johnson, who had left the UFC as a 170-pound heavyweight who at times didn’t even reach the limit of average weight 185 lbs. he controlled Andre in the clinch and showed the skills that made him a junior college national champion fighter when he defeated Arlovski in the second round. But Johnson couldn’t knock out one of the coldest men in MMA history (Arlovski has “put himself in the peas” 11 times), and it makes you wonder how his prodigious power would have translated to the land of giants . He hit hard at 205 pounds, though; the various rising stars and top contenders he derailed could attest to that.
But let’s get back to it. Johnson also looked sad in that Augusto fight. It was like he knew the template was ready. The final seconds were ticking away in the fight game, and he had missed the hall of fame with a couple of jabs that failed to hit Daniel Cormier’s frame on the chin. Too bad for Johnson that great champions come only one at a time, and he wasn’t one of them.
It became popular to talk of Johnson as a man who could not put up much of a fight. This is grossly inaccurate. He had all the punches, good hand speed, solid basic wrestling, and an efficient style that finally started to click after he settled in at lightweight. If he could have maintained his conditioning at 170 pounds, like when he decisioned a still-dangerous Dan Hardy and sent Charlie Brenneman headfirst into the stratosphere, he could have been spectacular. There was no one who looked like him at 170 pounds, and for good reason. Vitor Belfort, naked from behind, choked him at middleweight and strong folk fighter Josh Koscheck, national champion at Edinboro University, had not yet fallen in love with his hands and did the same with the welterweight (actually at a catch weight of 176 pounds, because Johnson, true to form, missed weight). For all his grappling prowess, Johnson was often powerless against world-class mat techniques. There were and are levels in this game.
Johnson had a lot of trouble outside the cage. He was charged three times with domestic battery (in 2008, 2014 and 2019) and was convicted the first time. Throughout his career he had anger issues because he couldn’t let it go in the gym. In recent years, he’d gotten used to selling CBD oil, our go-to remedy for outspoken fighters prone to anxiety or tantrums, and perhaps softened it. No one can know if this was true except Johnson and his god.
What really cost Johnson was that he never got to fight Jon Jones. Jones, another former junior college wrestling national champion whose win was two weight classes up from Johnson, had his own problems and missed a lot of time in the cage. He also missed out on fighting Johnson, which meant both men wasted their respective primes by repeatedly fighting a middle-aged, chubby Daniel Cormier. Jones couldn’t lose to him, even defeating the former Olympian, and Johnson couldn’t beat him. But could Johnson have beaten Jones? No one who fought Jones outside of maybe Thiago Santos, who was hobbled after the first round with a leg injury, had anything in the way of real power. Jones fought undersized guys like Chael Sonnen and scarecrows like Dominick Reyes. Maybe Johnson would have taken the real zero from Jones, that disqualification loss to the hapless Matt Hamill as a result of silly illegal elbows doesn’t count, if he got lucky. But Johnson’s luck was mostly bad and held.
If Johnson had been around too long, someone would have left him out. It wasn’t Augusto, none, but late-career Yoel Romero, now 205 pounds of improbable muscle, probably would have done the trick. They were supposed to fight at Bellator 258, a matchup he was eagerly awaiting, but Yoel failed his medicals with some kind of eye problem.
Towards the end of his life, Johnson began posting cryptic messages about his health on social media. You never know what’s on “the gram,” but something was clearly wrong. How right he was. After his death, the usual locust swarm of amateur scientists descended on his profiles to attribute his death to the Covid vaccine, the so-called “coagula”, as is now the custom with all athlete deaths and even injuries.
What is the consensus on his career? Johnson knew how to fight, but his skills weren’t appreciated outside of the highlight reels, which is to his credit because that’s all casual fans tend to see. He made many highlight reels and collected many performance bonuses. What happened to Cormier is unfairly blamed on him. Outside of Magomed Ankalaev, there is no active lightweight who would be better than even money to beat him if he was in his prime.
The obit business is not kind. I tried to sell a much longer version of this story to a mainstream publication, and unlike the wrestlers I put to rest “on a regular basis,” I was told that the beloved and late Rumble Johnson was not a name big enough to warrant star treatment. They were right. Still, it was still a little tragedy, something you could fit in your pocket like my dad’s college copy of Tropic of Cancer, watching what was left of Johnson during the Augusto fight. He was never a champion, great or not. But he made a lot of people, myself included, feel good when he won. It didn’t matter what happened to Augusto in that desolate first round; Johnson still came back and won. But it was all over for him after that. His future was filled with pain and sorrow until he died a few days ago. I will miss him, as well as a bunch of others who saw him bleed from the fame he had.
