It’s easy to forget about a fighter like Rick Story.
There was a time when the Vancouver, Washington-based fighter was a rising star in the welterweight ranks, riding a six-fight winning streak into a headlining opportunity opposite Nate Marquardt. At the time, the most impressive victory of the bunch was his UFC 130 nod over former title challenger Thiago Alves, the final conquest in the six-pack that had him on the brink of title contention in the 170-pound ranks.
But then Marquardt had issues with his testosterone levels and was pulled from the bout at the 11th hour, replaced by Charlie Brenneman, who made the most of the opportunity by orchestrating an upset in his last-minute co-main event bout against Story.
Five months later and after serving as a live sparring partner for the surgical strikes of Martin Kampmann, Story found himself suddenly riding a two-fight losing streak and backed into a corner. He’d alternate wins and losses over his next seven outings, beating the fighters he was “supposed to beat” while coming out on the wrong side of the results in contests against Demian Maia, Mike Pyle and Kelvin Gastelum. Three years after amassing six straight wins to become a dark horse contender in one of the deepest, most competitive divisions in the sport, “The Horror” was staring down a must-win matchup against Leonardo Mafra.
What a difference two fights can make.
After dispatching Mafra with a second-round arm triangle choke in July, the now 30-year-old Story walked into the Octagon on Saturday in Stockholm and brought Gunnar Nelson’s climb up the welterweight rankings to a screeching halt. Outside of having changed camps – trading his long-time base at Brave Legion for the warmer climates and greater collection of talent at The MMA Lab in Glendale, Arizona – Story is essentially the same fighter he’s always been. A leopard can’t change its spots and Story is always going to be a blue collar grinder with strong wrestling, good hands and an extra helping of heart.
That formula was enough to hand Nelson the first professional loss of his career and elevate Story into the Top 15 in the latest iteration of the UFC Fighter Rankings, where he landed at No. 12 on Monday.
As much as Story earned a return to the rankings following his victory on Saturday, the truth is he should have been there all along.
Let me be clear: I got this one wrong too.
Like most people, I expected Nelson to earn his fifth UFC win and predicted he would do it in rather convincing fashion. Story had been up and down for nearly 10 fights and despite a strong showing against Mafra, Saturday’s pairing with Nelson felt like a bad match-up for a fighter who had fallen prey to a nasty neck crank two years earlier against Maia, the last jiu jitsu ace he’d shared the cage with. Add in a trip across the Atlantic and the momentum the SBG Ireland team was riding off Conor McGregor’s victory at UFC 178 and it simply felt like the UFC Fight Night 53 main event was primed to be a coming out party for the 26-year-old emerging star.
It was anything but, as Story pressed the action, made Nelson uncomfortable and won every frame, at least according to my at-home scorecard and one of the officials scoring the bout; another saw the contest 49-46 for the American welterweight, while the third somehow had Nelson winning 48-47, which is easily one of the worst scorecards of the year… and there have been some pretty bad ones this year.
The reason I say Story should have been ranked all along is that if you look beyond the wins and losses that line his resume over the last three years and think back to the fights themselves, it’s not that difficult to turn the one-fight winning streak he carried into his appearance over the weekend into a run of five consecutive victories. Many people believe he deserved the nod in his split decision loss to Gastelum and you could ask 100 people to score his fight with Pyle and probably come away with equal numbers giving the fight to either combatants and a handful calling the contest a draw.
But we forget just how close fights are when all we see is the result in their Wikipedia page or Sherdog profile and opt against going back to check out the footage or read the archived play-by-play somewhere.
(Note: seriously, Fight Pass is a godsend for analyzing fights and remembering exactly how bouts played out and I know I intend to use it even more going forward.)
On top of that, Story is one of two men that holds a victory over current champion Johny Hendricks, and you don’t hear “Bigg Rigg” calling shenanigans on that result the way he does his UFC 167 loss to Georges St-Pierre. While there certainly has to be a statute of limitations on how long a victory can carry influence in how you’re viewed, a unanimous decision win over the guy that is currently standing atop the division should have more than a four-year shelf life. Hendricks has added more polish and greater confidence since that bout – and began his climb to the top following his first professional loss to Story – but it’s not like this was a case of the current champion getting thrown in over his head and coming away with a loss or anything.
It was an evenly matched contest at the time and Story simply outworked Hendricks from start to finish. While the champ has made the greater improvements and adjustments since, we can’t just dismiss the fact that Story outworked him for 15 minutes when they shared space in the cage.
But that’s exactly what happens.
Part of it is an offshoot of the hectic schedule and the impact recency has on our perceptions of certain fighters. The guy that won in spectacular fashion stands out more in our memories than the fighter that was able to grind out a hard-fought victory three months back and we tend to inflate the importance and value of fights that just transpired compared to those that we’ve already catalogued to memory.
The other part of it, however, is just forgetting how damn tough and talented a lot of these UFC fighters are and putting far too much emphasis on results, momentum and buzz.
Story is gritty as hell – always has been, always will be – and outside of the night Maia snatched up that neck crank and forced blood to shoot from his nose (jump ahead to the 4:30 mark), he’d been a notoriously tough out for everyone he’s faced. But given his recent inconsistencies, Nelson’s string of impressive performances since debuting in the UFC and a healthy amount of hype carrying the unbeaten up-and-comer towards the cage, we tend to overlook the fact that Story had four-times as much UFC experience as his adversary on Saturday, including several bouts with Top 20 fighters and that forgotten win over the current champion.
We probably also didn’t factor in how big of an impact switching camps would have on Story either, but migrating to work with John Crouch, Benson Henderson and the lot at The Lab is a big step up from being the big fish in a little pond back home for someone like the 30-year-old welterweight.
None of this is meant as a commentary on rankings (which are a useful, albeit flawed tool) or to point fingers at anyone for dismissing Story’s chances. Like I said earlier, I didn’t factor in any of these things when doing my analysis of the matchup.
It’s simply an acknowledgement that we all kind of missed the boat a little on this one and an attempt to both explain how and why it happened and help ward against it happening more in the future.
