Aside from Stipe Miocic’s fight with Francis Ngannou, the biggest fight of 2018 by far right now is Demetrious Johnson’s potential superfight with TJ Dillashaw. The caveat is that we unfortunately don’t even know if it is actually happening. Johnson himself has said his team is working on it, but other than that we’ve received no information. The kernel of information we all were hoping for seemed to have been leaked on R/MMA from an out-of-context rip from Johnson’s stream. Unfortunately, it looks like there was nothing to it. Demetrious Johnson appeared on The MMA Hour today to set the record straight.
“When I was getting ready for the MetroPCS purple couch at UFC 219 — make sure you follow my Facebook live and YouTube and all that good stuff — I was doing a stream. One of the segments of the show, was we were going to have [matchmaker] Sean Shelby on the show. We were going to show all of the previous shows in the segment saying, ‘Looking forward to 2018, here are some things that we’re looking forward to but we want to get Sean Shelby’s piece of it.’ One of the pieces was me versus TJ Dillashaw.”
“We wanted to get Sean Shelby’s reaction for that. So, when the producer was doing his thing he goes, ‘We want to talk about TJ versus DJ.’ Not that the fight is — we don’t know if it’s going to happen, or if it’s been signed, or anything like that — that was the segment and then somebody caught it. Some stupid ass troll goes, ‘Oh my God, it’s leaked. I gotta release it, yeah. Put it in MMA Reddit!’ That’s where it came from, so there you go, that’s what it was.” — Demetrious Johnson speaking to The MMA Hour today.
We all think this match-up is fascinating — even the coaches — and would be an insane fight, belt or no belt. TJ Dillashaw has even already started training for it. All signs point to this deal being done, but it’s not there yet. Look at the bright side, at least they are talking about and the gears are turning. We know that money has been seemingly the only roadblock between the giant scrap, so let’s hope the UFC opens up their checkbooks to get this fight booked. …For real this time.
This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 1/2/2018
