#17: Robert Whittaker
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It’s fairly difficult to pin down currently-active fighters among all-time greats, even ignoring the sort of recency bias that drives promotional claims of “he’s the greatest of all time” for nearly every champion at any given time; in a ranking system that heavily factors in losses, active competitors are always in danger of falling heavily down the ladder, and they could also prove to be greater than anyone ever expected them to be. On the other side of that, though, is just how hard it is to be in that conversation while still having a lot of time ahead; the quality of performance and of competition that it takes to be a top 20 all-time talent is nearly indescribable when someone gets there in just a few fights, without the breadth-of-resume that most all-time greats bring. This is what makes Robert Whittaker such a special fighter; as of October, his spot could be jeopardized, but as of today, his last three wins rank (in terms of the quality of his opposition, the quality of his performances, and the relevant context) among the best in MMA history. It’s an uncommonly sudden rise into that rarefied air, but no less deserved.
Whittaker’s status as a middleweight dark-horse (a designation which, in some form, stuck with him even as he won the middleweight title) was largely due to his career as a welterweight; Whittaker smashed his way through “The Smashes” and knocked out the grinding Colton Smith, but his two consecutive losses to Court McGee and Stephen Thompson seemed to cap the young promising Whittaker as sub-elite, even in his preferred area.
Moving Up
The young Aussie wasn’t a top prospect when he moved up to 185, having won 1 out of his last 3 (defeating Mike Rhodes at 170 after his skid), but he quietly developed massively as a 185er; while it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where Whittaker became the man with the tools to take the top of the division by storm, by 2018, “The Reaper” was the man to beat at middleweight.
To broadly characterize Whittaker’s development, he went from being a welterweight with promising moments and fairly sharp tools to becoming a middleweight best described as “karate-Aldo”(Ed Gallo): not only has he proven offensively potent in every range and hard to hit at every point, Whittaker has kept his blitzing sort of style while also being nearly impossible to meaningfully wrestle. He’s developed into one of the better athletes in MMA (both in terms of sheer speed and power as well as in terms of durability and endurance), and the tools he showed as a welterweight have been improved both in isolation and in relation to the rest of his game. One good example is Whittaker’s jab; while he found success jabbing against Thompson, he didn’t have much success taking advantage of Thompson’s responses (often the sort of shifting combination that has become his trademark), where his fight against Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza was a clinic on using the jab well.
Along the way, Whittaker became one of the most robust defensive operators in modern MMA, which aids his counterpunching; among his very polished shoulder-roll, his fantastic head movement both proactively (as he throws) and reactively (as his opponent does), and the gulf of distance that he enforces with his footwork on the outside as well as his jab and his kicking game, Whittaker is consistently able to punish opponents who can’t match his thoughtful process at every step. The finish over Brad Tavares is one of the better ones (even if short) to illustrate how well-integrated Whittaker’s defense is with his offense; Whittaker darted in with a dipping jab before feinting with the right to land a 3-2, stepped in with a left hook directly off a front-kick to drop Tavares, and weaved under a left-hook to land a second one that finished the bout.
Truthfully, Whittaker’s wins outside his last three are fairly peripheral to his claim as an all-time great; while Tavares and Uriah Hall and Derek Brunson are fine wins (especially since he finished two of them inside one round), Whittaker’s position as an all-time great middleweight stems from his win over Ronaldo Souza and his two wins over Yoel Romero. The former was one of the cleanest dismantlings that one is ever likely to see at the elite level, against a fighter who’s generally proven difficult to dominate (and against whom Whittaker was a sizable underdog); Souza’s losses to Luke Rockhold and Yoel Romero prior to that bout were far from decisive, and since Whittaker, he knocked Chris Weidman out and arguably beat Kelvin Gastelum, but Whittaker finished him in under two rounds. Past a single trip with which Souza got nothing done, Whittaker ripped him apart; feinting entries effectively to throw off counters, breaking rhythm on the jab (eventually putting the right hand behind it for a knockdown) and pairing it with the left hook to circumvent Souza’s attempted jab parries, cutting angles in the pocket to land left hooks, defending the right-hands he drew out (with the shoulder-roll or just angling out), and eventually putting Souza away with a head-kick behind a right hand. It was arguably the best performance of Whittaker’s career, even disregarding the fact that it was his best opponent at that time; where Derek Brunson’s mad dash drew a fairly messy fight out of Whittaker until he found a pivotal counter (a frame on Brunson’s face to run him into a left hook), Whittaker didn’t seem to take a clean significant strike in the open from the fearsome Brazilian.
The Soldier of God
Where the Souza fight was Whittaker at his absolute peak against a formidable foe, what has come to define Whittaker’s elite tenure (and what likely will continue to define Whittaker’s career, even after it’s over) is his series against Yoel Romero. What marked that series (beyond just technical soundness at the highest level) was continuous adaptation; up with the highest-skilled trilogies in MMA history, Whittaker vs. Romero was a strategic and tactical arms race across two fights, ultimately ending with Whittaker’s hand raised at the end of both their initial meeting at UFC 213 and their terrifically violent rematch at UFC 225. Not only is Yoel Romero (a genuine athletic specimen unlike anyone else in MMA, one of the stronger boxers in the sport, and an all-time great middleweight himself) one of the best wins anyone can have, those two fights also introduced context to Whittaker’s case as an all-time great that elevates it beyond that of the average champion at a strong division. Where beating someone like Romero at all is impressive, doing it twice with differently debilitating injuries in each against an evolving Romero is impossible to overstate the significance of.
When his jab was nulled by the injury to his lead leg at UFC 213 (pre-existing but aggravated by Romero’s low-line side kicks early in the first round), Whittaker resorted to “boxing him up with his feet” (Callan Gallacher); using the front-kick the way one uses the jab, to push the pace and to intercept Romero’s attacks, as well as to pile up attritional damage to the body that resulted in Romero fading hard after round 2. While it isn’t widely heralded as such, there’s a good argument for UFC 213 being the stage for one of the best performances of all time; even setting the injury aside, putting a pace on a fighter like Romero (at the time fairly unpolished as a striker, but with a sense of timing and rhythm that’s nearly unparalleled) and defending an uber-athletic Olympic Silver medalist’s takedowns so well is an excellent feat, and accounting for the injury makes the feat unprecedented.
The rematch forced Whittaker to approach the fight from a different angle; Romero had turned into a much more deeply-skilled boxer in the time between their fights, one prepared to punish linear kicks and threaten punishing counters every time Whittaker stepped forward, and another mid-fight injury (this time, to Whittaker’s rear hand) left his boxing arsenal hamstrung. Yet even with another obstacle that would’ve insurmountably compromised almost any other fighter, Whittaker overcame the best version of Romero there has ever been, showing the depth of his skill; his jab and his defense were still fantastic and allowed him to navigate the counterpunching of the Cuban, and he showed an elbow-game in close that he’d never shown before. The Romero fights show Whittaker as a technical striker better than nearly anyone who has ever competed in MMA, but most of all, it shows his mind for the sport; pushing through injuries to make one’s original game work (the way that many fighters go about things) requires absurd heart on its own, but to structure a completely new gameplan around a mid-fight injury requires heart as well as the rarest form of adaptability.
Conclusion
It shouldn’t be in dispute that Whittaker is more skilled than many of the fighters above him as all-timers; it’s simply a consequence of the sport itself evolving in complexity, where what’s holding Whittaker back more than anything is his relative lack of longevity at the top. Whittaker is young enough to put together a run that would slot him even higher as an all-time great, but his extraordinary schedule is likely to work against him; even past the fact that his intestinal fortitude isn’t matched by the fortitude of his intestines (which forced him to pull out of UFC 234), the rematch against Romero was damaging in the sort of way that changes careers, and the injuries that Whittaker sustained in both fights aren’t good news moving forward. Even if Whittaker does nothing else in his career, though, he’s earned the spot at which he’s been placed.
With all the skills he’s shown, it would be a profound injustice if he doesn’t get the chance to climb even higher, but Robert Whittaker is an all-time great without a doubt.