Andrei Arlovski is apologizing after he said he came out the winner over the late Anthony Johnson, the heavyweight everybody called Rumble, because Johnson is dead and he’s alive. The former UFC and current BKFC heavyweight champion posted a statement to social media on Sunday after a couple of days of backlash, Cageside Press reported. The Mac Life also covered the apology Monday.
The original comment came during an appearance on The Dave Guttman Podcast, while Arlovski was revisiting his 2013 fight with Johnson at WSOF 2. His exact words: “I’m the winner anyway. He’s dead, and I’m alive.” Fight fans reacted about the way you’d expect.
Johnson died in 2022 at 38 years old after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis. He fought in the UFC and later became a star in Bellator. People in this sport still talk about him with real affection, which is part of why the line hit so hard.
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The fight he can’t let go of
The WSOF 2 bout went the distance, and Johnson got the win. Arlovski’s jaw broke in the first round, and he fought the rest of the way on it. On the Guttman podcast he made it clear he believes punches thrown after the bell contributed to that injury. That’s his account, and it’s obviously stuck with him for 13 years.
In Sunday’s post, he tried to separate the grudge from the man. Arlovski wrote that he wanted to clear things up because he’d been getting a lot of hate over what he said about Johnson in the interview, and then he gave Johnson his due.
“Anthony beat me in the Octagon. That’s a fact and I have nothing but respect for him as a fighter!!!”
He didn’t fully retreat from the original point, though. He still stood by the idea that being alive makes him a winner, with an all-caps yes and three exclamation points attached, while insisting Johnson’s death was never something he counted as a victory.
“I NEVER meant that his passing was somehow my victory … That’s not who I am and that’s not what I believe!!!”
Then he got personal, and this is the strongest stretch of the statement.
“I’ve fought cancer THREE TIMES myself. Three times I had to face an opponent much bigger than anything I’ve ever faced inside the Octagon,” he wrote. “And believe me when you’ve been through something like that, you understand how precious LIFE really is.”
Arlovski also said English isn’t his first language, and that sometimes his words don’t properly express what he’s thinking or feeling.
My take: the cancer paragraph is the part of this statement that actually works, because a guy who has stared that down three times knows exactly what it means to lose someone at 38, and I believe him when he says he wasn’t celebrating. The all-caps yes is the part he should have deleted before hitting post. Arlovski can be mad about shots after the bell for the rest of his life, and he’s entitled to that. Tying the grudge to a dead man’s name on a podcast was the mistake, and Sunday’s post only cleaned up half of it.
