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When Dricus du Plessis first hit the octagon nearly five years ago, he did so having already won championships in two different weight classes and with multiple notable regional promotions around the world.
But the man who now wears UFC middleweight gold is under no illusions that he could have burst on the scene and taken over right from the jump.
“I needed the time, for sure,” du Plessis told The Post on Thursday via video call. “But I did that climb easy.”
That’s typical of UFC newcomers, but it didn’t stop a number of excited observers from imagining what Khamzat Chimaev, the challenger to du Plessis’ throne for the UFC 319 main event on Aug. 16 in Chicago, might be able to do against championship-level competition amid his electrifying UFC start — when he won his first three bouts in the octagon during the three months preceding the current champ’s promotional debut.
With hindsight as a tool, du Plessis thinks it was just plain silly to imagine how then-welterweight Chimaev would have fared against the best in the world only nine fights into his pro career.
“There’s no way on Earth,” he says of that notion before referring to a 2023 bout to drive home his point. “Kamaru Usman was the [welterweight] champion at that stage. He fought Usman, off the couch and [on] 10 days’ notice [at middleweight], and that fight could have gone either way, in my opinion.
“So, yeah, no, he wouldn’t have been champion.”
That’s just the reality of the situation in the eyes of du Plessis, who put South African MMA on the map by becoming the nation’s first UFC champion in January 2024 and making a pair of successful title defenses leading up to this one.
That’s not to be dismissive of Chimaev (14-0, 12 finishes), who du Plessis earlier this week told The Uncrowned’s Ariel Helwani is a “special fighter.”
“He’s unbeaten at the top of the sport. That makes anybody special,” du Plessis (23-2, 20 finishes) elaborated to The Post. “To stay unbeaten in this game is really, really hard. Another thing that makes him special is the fact that he has this hype, and people see him as a champion but he is not one.”
Each of du Plessis’ last four wins came against men who, at one time, held the championship he now carries around his waist: Robert Whittaker, Sean Strickland (twice) and Israel Adesanya.
Adesanya’s name reached star status during his vaunted first of two championship runs, but a victory over Chimaev might go a longer way to establishing du Plessis as, perhaps, one of the pound-for-pound best because of Chimaev’s aura as an unbeaten who’s mauled 12 of his 14 opponents.
Those other two, however, were incredibly competitive three-round battles with Usman and Gilbert Burns, a former welterweight title contender.
It’s those fights that offered chinks in the armor as they revealed a Chimaev who is still capable but also less effective as a fight goes on.
Don’t count on a rope-a-dope strategy from du Plessis, though.
“No, that’s not me. That’s never going to happen,” said du Plessis, a finisher who has gone the distance just three times as a pro. “You can’t go and say, ‘Oh, this guy always gets tired.’ What if he doesn’t?”
“You don’t bargain on somebody else’s weakness when you go and fight,” he added. “You don’t know what that guy’s going through, how he’s preparing. … When the ref says, ‘fight,’ I’m fighting as hard as I can for as long as I can.”
Two of those three decision victories came against Strickland, the first in a competitive clash to win the belt and the second a more one-way victory in February to retain gold.
Stopping Strickland is a tall order, du Plessis explains, because he’s defensively sound, doesn’t take chances and “takes a punch like a champion.”
Chimaev’s aggression in the cage is notorious, offering what du Plessis agrees is a more favorable scenario to secure the finish he seeks “from the first second to the last.”
“In a fight like this, the finishes are much more all around us than a fight like Strickland.”
