People say Quinton "Rampage" Jackson is, at age 33, over the hill.
People say Rampage, he of the chain-link necklace, iron chin and feared knockout power, is long past his days as UFC's reigning light heavyweight champion.
People — and oddsmakers — say Rampage is going to lose Saturday night when he tries to rip away the championship belt as the younger, taller Jon "Bones" Jones makes his first title defense.
Jones, after all, is the youngest UFC champion in history. He's fought 14 fights in his meteoric three-year rise through UFC, losing just one — and that only by disqualification. Jones is aggressive and unorthodox and has taken far fewer beatings in the octagon than Rampage, who has fought 40 MMA fights and lost eight times.
But the winner of Saturday's main event at UFC 135 will face another big name in the 205-pound weight class. And that big name believes anyone crowning the 24-year-old Jones as the future of the UFC is forgetting that Rampage Jackson's impressive past wasn't really all that long ago.
Then, Rashad "Suga" Evans, the former light heavyweight champion who is next in line for the winner of Saturday's fight, goes one step further. He predicts the elder statesman will take down the current champ.
"I give Jon his credit," Evans told a crowd of hundreds of UFC enthusiasts Friday. "He's definitely put a lot of work in, and he's had some very impressive fights and some very impressive wins. But he's still so young in the game, and they want to crown the future, and that can be a double-edged sword. They can crown him, say you're this and you're that, but the minute he messes up, they take it all away and he can just be like Milli Vanilli."
This is life in UFC's most competitive weight class, where every big fight feels like a title fight. Win the title one month — as Jones did in March in a dominating performance against Mauricio "Shogun" Rua — and soon enough you'll face an even better fighter.
The storyline of Saturday's main event is all about UFC's past versus UFC's future. Rampage is a heavy hitter whose boxing skills dominated UFC's earlier days; Jones calls on his college wrestling skills more extensively, which is the direction the UFC is heading. The storyline has a parallel in the co-main event, where UFC Hall of Famer Matt Hughes, nearly 38 and in what could be the last fight of his career, faces the younger (and also favored) Josh Koscheck.
Appropriately enough to the then-versus-now theme, UFC 135's host city of Denver also happens to be the place where UFC was born, where the barely regulated UFC 1 went off in 1993 to a crowd of less than 3,000.
Since then, UFC has grown up, becoming more sport than spectacle. It has capitulated to lawmakers' worries about its violence by instituting stricter rules. It has found a devoted fan base through its pay-per-view fights, and it has embarked on a recent effort to become more mainstream. Through storylines like this — old blood versus new blood, the experience of Rampage's 40 fights in the octagon versus the brashness and unpredictability of Jones' youth — the UFC hopes to reach an even larger audience.
And, of course, through trash talking. This highly anticipated fight has had no shortage of that, a barrage of verbal spats worthy of UFC's less scrupulous cousin, WWE.
Rampage called Jones cocky and said Jones badmouthed his coach. Jones called Rampage a "Mr. T Wannabe." Rampage's camp accused Jones' camp of sending a spy to Rampage's training session. Jones laughed off the accusation.
Through it all, Jones has had the backing of Vegas oddsmakers, who put him as better than a 4-1 favorite. Prognosticators have pointed to Jones' youth, his dominance in his short UFC career and his reach — 84.5 inches compared with Rampage's 73 — as reasons Saturday's fight will go his way.
But Evans, hungry to figure who his next opponent will be, believes it's too early to buy into the Jon Jones hype.
"He hasn't had those epic battles," Evans, ranked by many as the third-best light heavyweight in the world, said of Jones. "You can't take away what he's done. (But) he hasn't fought all the top dogs in the weight class. But he did destroy Shogun. He's been running through people, but I do agree with Rampage in the fact he hasn't really, really put in the work that (Rampage) has."
