Cain Velasquez ready to solidify his heavyweight contendership

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By Chuck Mindenhall

The last time Cain Velasquez fought, back at UFC 99 in Germany this past June, it was under somewhat extraordinary circumstances. For starters, he was fighting nine time zones away from his California home. That wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t just welcomed his baby daughter, Coral Love, into the world only a few weeks before that bout. Transatlantic flights and newborn babies made for a very tired heavyweight when he stepped in against Cheick Kongo—who originally was supposed to be Heath Herring—in Cologne that night.

Confused? He was too.

Maybe that’s why heading into his heavyweight clash with Big Ben Rothwell, the co-main event at UFC 104 in Los Angeles on October 24, he’s seeing some advantages in the grand scheme of things—Rothwell is ready to rumble, L.A.’s an hour flight from San Jose, and hey, baby is on a schedule.

“She’s getting better, yeah, she’s sleeping a lot better than she was back then,” says the 27-year-old who trains out of the American Kickboxing Academy. “It’s definitely a lot better than the last time, and it’s good for me.”

That he still beat Kongo via a dominant unanimous decision under all that duress speaks to Velasquez’s wherewithal as a fighter. To boot, as it was only his fourth fight with the UFC, if there was any question about his chin, he answered that too. The heavy-handed Frenchman Kongo landed some powerful early-round shots that seemingly rocked Velasquez for the first time in his MMA career.

Seemingly, that is, because all those haymakers really did was wake the beast.

“You know what, now that I look at it, it looks pretty bad,” he says. “But the way I felt—it didn’t feel as bad as it looked. It was like a blink, pretty much, that’s what it felt like. I wasn’t out of it and wondering where I was. I was like, he hit me, now I’m taking him down.”

Nobody has ever been knocked out by blinks, but the point is it’s nice to be able to take a fight wherever you want whenever you want, as the 240-pound Velasquez can do. The former two-time all-American wrestler from Arizona State University has dominant Octagon control, impressive striking and punishing ground-and-pound. He finished his first three UFC opponents—Brad Morris, Jake O’Brien and Denis Stojnic—by TKO (strikes). It’s one of the reasons he is being mentioned among the most dangerous contenders climbing up the heavyweight ladder.

With each victory, the chorus gets a little louder for Velasquez as a legitimate contender for the title. But if you think that’s on his mind, you’re wrong. When the UFC switched his opponent from Shane Carwin to Ben Rothwell, it was immediately clear that the guy they put before him was still the biggest hurdle of his young career.

“There was a little disappointment at the beginning when I found out I wouldn’t fight Carwin, but you can’t dwell on it,” he says. “You can’t say, ‘oh, if I had this fight then this could have happened.’ When I found out they gave me Ben to fight, I looked at Ben. I can’t look past him. For me it’s just win the fight, win it and whatever option is in front of me I’m going to take care of it.”

One of the reasons that he can’t see past the so called “North Star” is that Rothwell (30-6), though making his UFC debut, has been fighting professionally since Velasquez was wrestling at Kofa High School in Yuma, Arizona. Needless to say, the former IFL standout has a notable experience edge over Velasquez, who fought his first professional MMA fight in 2006, shortly out of college.

“He’s a big guy, a tall guy, and he moves well,” the soft-spoken Velasquez says. “He’s a good stand-up fighter, and I think he’s the best all-around fighter that I’ve seen so far when compared to my past opponents. He’s had 36 pro fights, so he has a lot of experience.”

By comparison, Velasquez only has six, but he has won them all handily. He feels like he has been around MMA a lot longer, having trained with some of the sport’s best in Javier Mendez and the guys at AKA.

“I’m starting to feel more comfortable in there,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the jitters to the point where I don’t perform well in the Octagon. But just knowing how the game goes, I’m starting to get the hang of it. I think a lot of it happened before my first fights, just training with guys who have been in the UFC for so long like Mike Swick, Josh Koscheck and Jon Fitch. Being around those guys helped before I got to the UFC.”

Cameo appearances by big, tall, not-entirely-un-Rothwell-like, Paul Buentello, who’s been around to help Velasquez prepare, haven’t hurt either. But the thing about Velasquez is how fast and how naturally he’s taking to mixed martial arts. As anybody serious in the sport will contend, it’s about constantly improving in all aspects.

In fact—“I think even my wrestling skills can improve,” he says.

Always a mean competitor while wrestling in high school (where he went 110-10 in four years) and later in college, where he arrived on the scene by winning the NJCAA National Championship at Iowa Central CC before transferring to ASU and becoming an all-American, Velasquez says wrestling was a ton of fun and that he would be interested in coaching it at some point.

But . . .

The problem, he confesses, was that he wanted to get his knuckles involved.

“For me, when I was wrestling in college . . . I mean, I loved wrestling. I loved everything about it. But there was something missing. And that was the striking part. I wanted to hit people when I was wrestling.”

Not a problem any more for Velasquez—on that front, he and mixed martial arts are simpatico.