Fighting a Nightmare: How Tony Ferguson Terrorised the Lightweight Division
Photo By Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images
Further analysis by Lukasz Fenrych
So, then. Tony Ferguson. T-Ferg. El Cucuy. How to encapsulate this fighter, and his career? How to whittle down his idiosyncratic, varied and just plain odd career into a few words?
Well, as it happens, these writers think that Ferguson’s career (thus far, and most likely, to come) is worth more than a few words. For all his oddities and endearing charisma, Tony Ferguson is a genuinely excellent fighter, let’s be in no doubt about that. At age 36, and fighting since 2008, Ferguson’s career has spanned an era in MMA that has seen an explosion in technical proficiency and well-roundedness amongst fighters.
Some might say not winning the undisputed title (he did, after all, win an interim strap) is an indication of limitations reached, but if he doesn’t (he still might) Ferguson, perhaps more than any other fighter currently fighting, might fear his career will be overshadowed by one of MMA’s great what-ifs.
MMA has for the longest time been derided as boxing’s shallower cousin, at least in terms of history and sporting mythos, but it seems that this may finally start receding, and Ferguson came through just in time and in just the division for several championship-calibre fighters to be tearing up the division simultaneously.
That Ferguson managed to amass such an impressive win-streak in a sport that is famously unpredictable, (which, let’s not forget, lasted twelve fights and seven fucking years) is nothing short of astonishing, particularly with the sheer variety of offence to hand or foot on offer.
That, coupled with injuries at crucial times to both himself and opponents he was to fight, means he toughed it out in wars and battles against top opponents for as long a time as many actual UFC champions, many of whom probably don’t approach his level.
And also, all other reasons to celebrate him aside, he’s just an exciting motherfucker in the cage.
See?
Plus, he did it all in such a way that fully justifies his fight name: El Cucuy, an Iberian/Latin mythical monster feared for lurking in the shadows and snatching young souls.
For the lightweight roster, Tony Ferguson was that fear. A prospect gaining some notoriety? Good for you, you would have to face him eventually. If you were a fading ex-champ looking to get back into contention, feel free to take a crack at El Cucuy. Step into his world, the octagon, and you had to fight to the last breath or be changed forever.
Building the Myth
Even monsters have to learn somewhere. If you swear by his last few fights, it might just seem like Ferguson comes to each bout essentially the same; a spiky, jagged mass of pressure and aggression that usually ends in an ugly, thrilling win.
However, if we examine a few key fights from his UFC tenure, we’ll see that as a matter of fact, not only does Ferguson have irregularly solid form, he also develops quite profoundly as his career progresses and his successes mount.
After amassing a 10-2 record on the regional Californian circuit, Ferguson arrived at a wider public attention with his run in The Ultimate Fighter 13. The three wins he collected in the house won’t show up on his professional record, of course, but they garnered some infamy and started him on his path. They are also somewhat curious to watch now, having his later career in mind.
The first two bouts, against Justin Edwards and Ryan McGillivray, were short scraps in which Ferguson played the patient counter-striker against the more aggressive, higher-volume opponent and scored first-round KOs. The last, against Chuck O’Neill, did see him on the front foot against the outboxing O’Neill, providing the MMA world with its first glimpse of the ‘before Tony/after Tony’ effect.
The bout also had him using a more conventional, orthodox, hands-up-head-tucked boxing style, typically throwing one opportunistic punch at a time. The creative angles and constant overwhelming pressure were not quite visible yet. His best openings were created with some fairly devastating leg kicks, which took O’Neill off-balance, opening up some holes in his opponent’s defence.
His first fight in the UFC proper, on the other hand, was the final of TUF 13 against Ramsey Nijem. The bout was characterised by a lack of kicks, demonstrating Ferguson’s variability (a trait which hasn’t always been to his benefit, as we’ll dive into later).
What the fight clearly showed was a microcosm of Ferg’s career to come - even his dominant wins are rarely clean, yet all his fights are hard on the opponent. It also showed Tony’s habit of dipping in and out of useful and bad habits, the wavelengths of which elongated as his career panned out.
For example, against Nijem, Tony showed some shockingly good head movement from the off, on the back foot even. He hit a reactive takedown, and mixed in some excellent combination punching.
Then, for some reason, in the same fight (in the same round), he didn’t, allowing himself to get clipped repeatedly.
Most importantly, this fight showed that Ferguson has serious power in his hands; something that he will prove time and again going forwards. Even if he doesn’t KO his foes, Tony demonstrated his terrifying capacity for inflicting damage.
Here, he showed some poise under pressure as he countered a crude Nijem swing, dropping him with a clean 2-3 counter to win his UFC contract.
From that point on, Ferguson’s tenure showed no signs of soft-balling. His second opponent in the UFC proper was the Bahamian, Yves Edwards, a surprisingly steep jump in competition for someone fresh out of a talent-finding reality show.
Even at the time, Edwards was a hugely experienced veteran, coming into the fight with tale-of-the-tape numbers not often matched in modern MMA: a professional record of 41-17-1. Ferguson was 13-2 going into the fight. Yves was a former pound-for-pound lightweight in an era when the UFC hadn’t yet recognised a lightweight champ, and would go on after this fight to earn a highlight-making victory over the tenured Jeremy Stephens.
It should come as no surprise that even the notoriously free-wheeling Ferguson appeared to approach the fight with a considered, initially tentative gameplan. He stayed composed, holding his distance and leading with hard outside leg kicks, remaining committed to proactive head movement whilst keeping range. Edwards had a reputation for clean, hard striking of hand and foot. He showed it too, landing a headkick in round one that would likely have cleaned out weaker-chinned men than Ferguson.
It didn’t take long for Ferguson to grow in confidence, however. His growing realisation that most opponents simply don’t have what it takes to put him out easily is palpable as he slowly shrank his own range, setting closer and closer, whilst relying on a mixture of rolling off Yves’ punches and just plain snacking on them. Tony also beganto handfight from up close, landing lead uppercuts, visibly trying new things out on the fly.
By round three, he had becoming an incessant, probing swarm of a human being. To Edwards’ credit, he stayed composed and never folded (as one would expect of a veteran of such experience), and he had considerable success of his own, but the unanimous decision result in favour of Ferguson was incontrovertible.
It may be somewhat missed out in the Ferguson mythos, but the Edwards victory is an important seeding moment to his burgeoning legend.
Michael Johnson would be Ferg’s next fight, and it stands as something of an anomaly on Ferg’s UFC resume. Not so much that he lost, since he’s been defeated before and after, but rather how he lost. What seems instructive is what he took from the defeat. And he did learn (well, we’d argue) because didn’t lose again for almost three-quarters of a decade.
Johnson, unusually, won pretty much every minute of their encounter. It wasn’t a total domination, but Ferg was never comfortable with the range, nor did he ever seem to adjust particularly well to Johnson’s speed or straight-punching accuracy.
It’s a workable theory that Ferguson’s notable commitment to all-out pressure stemmed from this fight. He very rarely gets close enough to even handfight, let alone kick effectively.
We would wager it is also quite likely that Tony developed his increasing late-career penchant for throwaway shots, feints, handfighting-as-setups, as well as a host of other distraction tactics to compensate for a discrepancy in natural feel for timing discovered in this fight.
Unfortunately, head movement wasn’t quite the priority here as it was in previous outings, which is a particularly dubious trait we see Ferguson sporadically adopting and abandoning down the line. Still, he obviously learned from his loss, because he went on an absolute tear after this.
The next fight we’ll look at in detail is his bout with ex-Strikeforce champ, Josh Thomson, taking place three years and five victories later.
It ended in a dominant decision win, one of only two victories in that run that went to the judges cards. (The only other decision victory being a slightly unconvincing performance vs Danny Castillo). Tony had run through the likes of Rio, Kikuno, Trujillo and Tibau (who of course famously gave Khabib such ‘trouble’) in short order, littering the records of his opponents with KOs, TKOs and submissions.
By this point, however, he did pick up one unfortunate habit, as early as against Mike Rio in 2013: allowing himself to get rocked, and often dropped, before eating up his opponents.
However, his weapons and favoured tactics were solidifying and sharpening. Increasingly consistent pressure, a higher rate of kicking, rapid-fire stance switching, an affinity for keeping his hands on his opponents…all of this allied to a high degree of unpredictability made Tony Ferguson something akin to a walking Swiss Army knife of hand-to-hand combat.
The Run
All of this development converged against Thomson, representing the true beginning of the ‘El Cucuy’ legend.
Against Thomson, a good-level kickboxer, Ferguson started furiously fast, diving straight into range. He also began kicking within ten seconds, and basically never let up. While he had kicked to solid effect before, here they were largely used to keep Thomson’s legs occupied with checks, to push him back with teeps to the gut, or to slam his shins into Thomson’s body... all this, plus whatever else Ferguson decided to throw.
Here, Ferguson is suddenly manifest as the frightening pressure fighter than many fans and pundits came to know him as. Not only is he always trying to touch Thomson, but along with constant efforts to kick or jab him, Tony also constantly reaches out to handfight, grab Thomson’s wrists, or to check Thomson’s lead hand.
Ferguson also demonstrates that the pressure ideal has matured in his head. He is no longer zeroed in on just ‘press-press-press’, now, he is constantly hitting little angles, stepping in and dropping back. Instead of bulling his way through opponents, Tony’s depth of skill came to the fold in this bout, exemplifying a fighter capable of creating small pockets of space to attack, before cutting across the cage to block an exit.
Thomson simply cannot get him away, and as the pressure eventually tells, Thomson wound up missing wildly with various attempted counters. Even a reactive takedown was simply shrugged off with a tasty little mid-air roll;
after which, Ferguson was right back at it, chipping, chopping, prodding, kicking, smacking.
The biggest takeaway from this fight is the move that cemented Tony Ferguson’s status as the feared wildman of the division: his love of elbows and his adeptness in applying them.
We mentioned his potential lack of natural timing and distance. However, as we also pointed out, a potential fix for this is to close an opponent down and handfight to maintain contact as often as possible.
This sort of hands-on approach opens up opportunities to fold elbows over into your opponent’s hairline. Ferguson really took this to heart - one particularly nasty elbow really should have scalped Thomson.
The speed and force of it was such that the elbow didn’t seem to deflect or slow as it sliced through Thomson’s skin, and began the deluge that turned Ferguson’s white shorts a tasteful shade of pink by the end of the bout.
Thomson’s handsome mug was a mess of cuts and blood by the end, and the first entry into the popular ‘Tony’s last seven opponents’ meme, wherein a bevy of minced opponents grimace through claret-soaked strife with Ferg in the middle looking absolutely delighted at his work.
Witness:
Messy eater
The UFC marketing department couldn’t dream of better star-building material if they tried, so it remains a mystery as to why Tony remained so uniquely unpopular with the brass, but I digress.
Next, we arrive at the Edson Barboza fight.
Oh yes.
Perhaps the quintessential Tony Ferguson performance. A fight in which his primary defence against Barboza’s vaunted and voluminous kicking was the Imanari roll (the first of which worked a treat - see intro). In which Tony consistently outstruck Barboza from off his back, but also got a point docked in the first round for an illegal upkick. A performance of unrelenting pressure facilitated by bizarre angles, unorthodox approaches, and a willingness to eat two to land one.
A second round so bloody (thanks to an exchange of elbows) that it gets its own separate violent content warning when you watch it back on Fight Pass now. A D’Arce choke ending after a scramble from Barboza’s own takedown. This fight had it all. It might also be the best showcase of Ferguson’s greatest staple: his mental strength and unflappability in the cage.
As mentioned, both of them were cut by elbows in the second round. Barboza’s body language and gameplan were affected immediately, almost entirely dropping his kicks, punching more tentatively and shooting for takedowns. Ferguson, on the other hand, did not give an inch and piled on the pressure.
Both cut by elbows, but only one is trying spinning shit while the other - understandably - flinches and braces for impact. And Still Ferguson comes on afterwards.
By the end of the fight, Tony was even winning the kicking game, laying such a volume of strikes on his opponent until Barboza initiated the sloppy takedown that led to the finish.
Next, Lando Vanatta. Another wild fight (boy, there are a lot of these). Vanatta took the fight on two weeks notice, replacing Michael Chiesa to make his UFC debut, and he nearly pulled off one of the greatest shocks in MMA history, hurting the more experienced fighter multiple times in the first round before almost finishing him with a kick that Ferguson leaned into.
Seriously, how did he survive this? A naked marching body kick is easily caught by Vannata, who also takes advantage of Ferguson’s ignoring of defence to lean him into a CLEAN headkick.
It is a fight that seriously highlights some of latter-career Ferguson’s weaknesses; namely, his own wildness and unorthodoxy often meant he was leaning into (and eating) shots he didn’t need to against another wild unpredictable fighter. On the other hand, it also shows much of what sets him apart from other such unorthodox fighters. His chin and stamina are certainly two major factors, but underneath it all, Ferguson does have a solid fundamental underpinning.
In the second round, Tony was able to go to that well, manage his distance and timing a lot better, and shortening his strikes by switching to straighter output, as opposed to the more wing-y and spinny things he was throwing in the first.
Suddenly, Ferguson begins throwing straight kicks to the body instead; much harder to catch, and head movement does nothing to compensate for this. This also allows him to flow into sharp straight punches to the head, too. He also manages his own distance much better by stepping back like a normal human and not ducking and spinning out.
This had the effect of short-circuiting Vanatta’s head-movement based defence whilst cutting off many of his attacks before they began. At the best of times, that head movement worked against Vannata as the youthful prospect slipped a jab straight into a guillotine which transitioned into the fight-ending D’Arce.
Rookie mistake: head movement, usually so lauded, is not advisable quite so close to your opponent, especially when they’re as opportunistic at wrapping you up as Ferguson has always proved.
By no means was it a perfect or even necessarily good performance by Ferguson’s standards, but it is a solid exemplar of what made Tony Ferguson is so indomitable.
That segues perfectly into the textbook definition of what is a good performance, arguably the best of Tony’s entire career: the Mexico City war and subsequent victory over Rafael Dos Anjos. In contrast to the Vannata fight, Ferguson did appear to plan a moderate degree for his opponent, as opposed to simply making up offence on the fly.
He used the first round to get a feel for RDA’s timing (even if it meant eating a few shots), because he knew that information would let him now how to set up his defence and attack from the second round onwards. It is fair to say that Tony came in having dialed down some of the more wild movement to bring back his more conventional boxing-style stance and footwork from early in his career.
Note the step-and-sliding as he cut the cage or creating angles more often with proactive head movement from the waist rather than leaning and pushing off with his feet.
Ferguson here uses pitch-perfect footwork and headmovement to stay off-angle and out of range of Dos Anjos’ strikes while landing damage of his own.
The patented kicks were still there, but they were restrained in the early going, probably just as well since Dos Anjos countered them well with punches whenever Tony kicked without a setup. Defensively, his head movement was not as much of a factor, but his feet were, with Ferguson either taking the sting off or simply sliding back from many of RDA’s attacks with his movement.
This commitment to keeping a certain range also meant the handfighting and guard manipulation weren’t as much of a factor, further highlighting a sometimes underrated versatility within the overall high-pressure framework. It really felt like a demonstration for Tony’s underrepresented intelligence in-fight, cranking up certain facets of his game for specific opponents whilst muting others, depending on the opposition.
Of course, he still found time to be Tony Ferguson.
The story of the fight itself was one of an excellent, high-level war, one in which the first three rounds were all extremely close, back-and-forth affairs, but Ferguson’s stamina and pressure began to pull away as El Cucuy solidly controlled, if not quite dominated, RDA in the last two frames, winning a unanimous 48-47 decision for the most significant win of his career.
After that, Kevin Lee. Despite being the fight where Tony won the interim title (losing it later to injury in the infamous tripping-over-a-cable incident) there isn’t an awful lot to say about this one from Ferguson’s perspective.
Much of the story of the fight is about Lee, his massive weight cut, his very visible staph infection, his strength advantage, and his gas tank. For Ferguson, it may be worth noting that in a fight against a top MMA wrestler with a big strength advantage he fought conservatively, not just in style but volume, and didn’t really ramp his pace up even after Lee had very notably slowed.
Perhaps that more measured pace indicated that a lot of his confidence in risk-taking lies in backing himself to scramble his way out of trouble, if he falls over or is knocked down.
Eventually though, he was. Once Lee had Ferguson on the ground, he knew he could offer threatening positions (and strikes) even from his back, offering armbars and peppering him with elbows before pulling him into the winning triangle choke.
As Lee hits a well-timed takedown in the third, he lands in Ferguson’s full guard. As Lee wrestles for position, Ferg manages to gain some separation by assuming some bicep control on Lee’s right arm, and then creating distance by wedging a knee in between himself and Lee. However, instead of using this opportunity to push off Lee’s hips or gets his own hips out, Ferguson instead uses the space to immediately start punching and throwing elbows from bottom.
The final two fights of his winning run can almost be taken together, at least as far as analysis goes. Both of them were fun wars and if you enjoy Tony Ferguson, you should watch them, but both of them were against aging star names.
Anthony Pettis and Donald Cerrone have well-documented trouble with pressure and increasing issues with durability. Gimmes is too strong a word, but the pattern of each fight was easily predicted: both fighters would engage with Tony as much as possible while possessing little in their arsenals to stop his relentless forward movement.
Tony would invariably eat some shots in round one but would take very few by the time the second rolled around.
What these fights do is showcase Ferguson at his most savage, irrepressible self. Witness this silly yet brutal moment where Pettis manages to catch him mid-flurry. Bear in mind Pettis had already damn near knocked him out previous to this;
Naughty-naughty
Both bouts ended somewhat anti-climactically, with Pettis withdrawing between rounds from a broken hand and Cerrone being stopped against his wishes by the doctor after blowing a broken nose closed an already damaged right eye. Fitting with Ferguson’s relentless onslaught of offense, but strikingly bleak as well.
Unstoppable force vs Immovable Object
So, we approach the end of the run. We must talk about it. In Justin Gaethje, Ferguson faced a man who could perhaps match him in many of his best areas; every bit as violent and relentless, nearly as durable. More to the point, Justin was a man every bit as confident as Tony himself in his ability to either gain a good position or get back up, should the fight hit the ground.
What he might not have expected is the solidity of the outboxing game Gaethje brought to the table. Instead of attempting to beat Tony in his own wheelhouse, the younger man preferred to step back, let his opponent come to him, and counter him off the backfoot.
As in the loss to Johnson, timing was key here. Gaethje consistently read Ferguson’s intentions and beat him to the punch. The difference is that in this fight Ferguson did attempt to throw off Gaethje’s reads with feints and throwaways, but Gaethje had his number and simply ignored all of them, reacting almost entirely to the true attacks.
It was a masterpiece of understanding one’s opponent, and it led to the rare, nigh-unheard of sight of Ferguson flagging as the fight progressed, finding fewer and fewer answers before eventually being stopped after reacting badly to a jab in the fifth.
In the end, his modus operandi was turned back on him, as he was the one who ended the fight bruised, bumped-up and covered in his own blood.
Tony may have flagged, but he never truly wavered until the very, very end. He took some shots that are quite nauseating to watch back, more-so in the sports era of no crowds, wherein an observer can hear every wet smack and thud of knuckle, elbow or shin on skin.
Gaethje has been an absolute warhorse, breaking people or fighting until he himself breaks. He even managed to incite stoppages in Michael Johnson, an early Ferg nemesis, and sparking out double-tough bastards, the likes of Barboza and Cerrone in extremely short order.
Gaethje giving him a taste of his own medicine; Ferguson deciding it tastes fine
Ferg proved that he is almost impossible to break mentally. Even as he got smashed into submission, there was a visible urge not to turn away, but to face his foe, continuing past the point where any reasonable party should’ve thrown in the towel.
Then, the next day, he posted a video of himself dancing in the hospital, all smiles and cheesy grin.
One of a kind.
In Conclusion
Today, almost as a post-script, it feels necessary to note one facet of Ferg’s career that will always be the unfortunate unknown.
There will forever be the one that got away, and it is impossible to round up Ferguson’s career as it stands without mentioning it: the erstwhile lightweight #1 and consensus 155lb greatest of all time, the Dagestani powerhouse, Khabib Nurmagomedov.
The careers of these two men have been intertwined for many years. Since 2015, they have been booked against one another an absurd five times without ever actually meeting. The tragedy of these missed opportunities is that four of them were due to injury, two apiece per each fighter, and the supposed final meeting, due for April 2020…well, we’re all aware of a certain pandemic that briskly took care of that one.
At the time of the first booking, Ferg was six fights into a win streak and Nurmagomedov was unbeaten. By the time the fifth booking was attempted, Ferguson had doubled his win streak, and Khabib remained unbeaten. It is almost unheard of to have two competitors with such ludicrously compelling arcs not meet, and it felt inevitable that they eventually would. It remains a genuine shame that a fighter of Ferguson’s quality and accomplishments has never had a crack at the title proper, earning only an interim bauble, only to then have it arbitrarily stripped from him. Really, it could have only happened in a division as ludicrously deep as lightweight.
The matchup had (and to a degree, still has) that greatest of titillating titbits; Khabib had never faced anyone who was truly happy to meet him on his terms. His wrestling and ground-and-pound had everyone shitting themselves the moment they stepped into the cage with him. The one thing we can absolutely be sure of with Ferguson is that he would not have been scared to enter those deep waters with Khabib.
He has shown before that along with being a pretty opportunistic grappler and submission artist, Tony is also genuinely willing to fight off his back when others might be reluctant, especially against Khabib. Against the aforementioned power wrestler Kevin Lee, Tony made his full guard (an assumed position of comfort for Lee) a living hell.
Whatever his chances of winning might have been, we would have surely got one hell of an intriguing match-up, simply because Ferguson would’ve tried things that nobody else would have dared. He probably never will, following his retirement, which leaves the elusive Tony vs Khabib matchup as one of modern MMA’s saddest questions to be left unanswered.
If this conclusion is beginning to sound like a career retrospective, let’s get one thing straight: Ferguson does not appear to be done. He has been just as vocal on social media since his defeat to Gaethje as he was before it. El Cucuy’s appetite for war does not seem diminished in the least bit. Plus, with the lightweight division being what it is, there are oh-so many tasty match-ups for our funky boi Ferguson.
Ferguson vs Poirier? Yes please. Ferguson vs McGregor? Why the hell not. Ferguson vs Dan Hooker, Max Holloway or Charles Oliveira or even Paul Felder? Oh, baby...
The man’s business is war, and the man does his business. Let him loose.