Robbie Lawler is back, in a manner of speaking. The former UFC welterweight champion has come out of MMA retirement to grapple Khamzat Chimaev at RAF 14, and he has now explained why a guy who already walked away would sign up to wrestle one of the scariest grapplers alive.
MMA Sucka reported that Lawler laid out his reasons for the return. It comes down to two things. One is the ruleset, a wrestling format far removed from the cage fights that built his name. The other is the size of the challenge. Few names on Earth make a retired man pick up the phone the way Chimaev’s does.
Lawler and Chimaev sit in the co-main event. The headliner is Arman Tsarukyan against Dillon Danis in a wrestling match, according to MMA Fighting’s Between the Links preview. So Danis gets the top spot and Lawler gets the slot underneath. Matchmaking is a strange business.
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The numbers on Chimaev’s side are ugly for anybody stepping onto a mat with him. Per MMA Junkie’s UFC 333 stat package, Chimaev has completed 60.4 percent of his takedown attempts in UFC middleweight competition, the second-highest accuracy rate in divisional history behind Makhmud Muradov (66.7 percent). That’s the man Lawler volunteered to wrestle, with no punches allowed to bail him out.
RAF keeps pulling recognizable MMA names, too. MMA Fighting’s rankings of RAF’s crossover athletes had Colby Covington standing tall on the list, so Lawler is walking into a room that already has some familiar faces.
Chimaev, meanwhile, has spent the week fixated on someone else. He said he’d hand Sean Strickland $1 million from his own pocket if Strickland accepts a rematch by the next day, a claim relayed on X by @DovySimuMMA via Red Corner MMA. He also called Strickland’s injuries “bullsh*t.” ESPN reported that Chimaev believes he should still be the UFC’s middleweight champion and that if Strickland wants to get paid, he should take the rematch.
So Chimaev heads into a grappling match while publicly campaigning for a fight that, as of now, Strickland hasn’t agreed to. That’s a lot of energy pointed in two directions at once.
My take: I love this from Lawler. He made his name by never turning down a fight, and here he is coming out of retirement for a ruleset that strips away the thing he did best. You can call that crazy. I’d call it the most Robbie Lawler decision possible. Chimaev put a one-day deadline and a seven-figure offer on Strickland, and he still doesn’t have an answer. Lawler didn’t need a check from anybody’s pocket to say yes.
