There’s something to be said about the loudest voice in the room, particularly in the fight game. The more the public pays attention to you as a person, the more they will pay attention to your fights. It’s why Sean O’Malley needn’t justify his rematch with Merab Dvalishvili, even as purists stamp their feet. “Suga” Sean is etched into MMA’s psyche as a natural promoter, and after a sustained hiatus he managed to resurface a changed enough man to reinspire the masses.
He claims he no longer smokes weed. He doesn’t game like he used to.
“I haven’t [even] j’d the peen,” he said in a recent podcast, to sink home just how far his sacrifices run.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Lerone Murphy, a red-hot English fighter who returns this weekend for a scrap with Josh Emmett, is still buried under a pile of featherweight babble. Despite having gone undefeated in his first eight fights in the UFC, he sits tenth in the promotion’s own rankings. That doesn’t make much sense, considering that Diego Lopes — a dimpled darling who runs a pretty solid gram — is sliding into a shot against Alexander Volkanovski for the vacant title despite going only 5-1 thus far in his UFC career.
The problem with Murphy? It might be that he’s too reserved by fight game tastes.
“I believe if you’re not making noise, people don’t really get behind you or think you are up there with the best,” Murphy says. “Even with Arnold Allen. I noticed you didn’t say his name, only because he’s quiet. He is very quiet.”
This kind of thing has been developing for a long time, now. During an in-studio visit to "The Ariel Helwani Show" this week, no less of an authority than comedian Andrew Schulz said something similar when referencing Dvalishvili’s social media posts.
“The days of being a quiet athlete in fight sports are done,” Schulz said, with his eyebrows spiked high. “If you want to sell fights, you’ve got to make some noise.”
Not that Murphy isn’t marketable. He has some things in his pocket, things that run from being novel to outright absurd. For instance, he’s an undefeated Englishman coming up still very much within the golden era of U.K. fighters, acting as the standout star at Carl Prince’s burgeoning Manchester Top Team (the gym Dakota Ditcheva started at before moving to ATT). That’s kind of cool.
What else? Oh yes … then there was that time he got shot in the face.
Those six words can bring a room to attention. He got shot in the face. It happened in 2013, a couple of years before his MMA career, near his home of Manchester. Random stuff — wrong place, wrong time. He took two bullets in the grill and spat them out…which, if you think about it, is a fairly lively detail, too. Spitting out the bullets like they were sunflower seed shells. The crazy thing is that he lived to tell about it, which is how he got his nickname, “The Miracle.”
