Dominick Cruz: Catch Me If You Can

By Frank Curreri

Dominick Cruz stands accused of being a light puncher, a winner but not a finisher. His unbeaten opponent, meanwhile, has dynamite in his fists and has never allowed a fight to go the distance. No doubt that perceived power differential goes a long way toward explaining why Cruz, days before Saturday’s showdown with WEC bantamweight champion Brian Bowles, has been branded a 4-to-1 underdog by oddsmakers.

How can the challenger with the catch-me-if-you-can style fend off such a mighty stalker for five rounds? Won’t Cruz, who trains under Brandon Vera in San Diego, eventually slow down and become vulnerable to Bowles’ thunderous right hand or perhaps the champ’s vicious guillotine choke?

Cruz: Nope.

“I could fight ten rounds if I’ve got to,” the 24-year-old asserted. “I feel like in every fight that I go into I have edge in cardio … even if the (other) guy is in the best shape of his life, he’s not going to be in better shape.”

There is no evidence to prove him a liar. We’ve never seen Cruz winded, never even seen him with labored breathing inside of the cage. He can literally run circles around his frustrated opponents. His obsession with cardio skyrocketed three years ago after losing a WEC featherweight title bout against Urijah Faber by first-round submission. Cruz responded with a vengeance, knocking out his next opponent in the first round. The lanky featherweight then reinvented himself by dropping to the 135-pound weight class and has dominated four straight opponents in the WEC. Oftentimes Cruz’s bantamweight performances have been so commanding that it seems as if he were toying with his adversaries, breezing through the fight as if he were participating in a practice session against an overmatched sparring partner.

Cruz’s winning formula has remained simple yet highly effective: He uses speed and movement to tag opponents with three- and four-punch combinations, dodges out of harm’s way, and takes them down every now and again to score with the judges and keep foes off-balance. No one should expect Cruz to veer far from that matador approach as he chases his greatest triumph to date.

“I’m expecting the most in-shape, the most prepared Brian Bowles that I could run into,” he said. “I’m ready to stop the fight in the first round … I go into every fight with a mentality to finish my opponent. But you can’t force finishes, they just happen on their own, you know? I know for a fact that I’ve got power in my hands … I’m (also) ready to take it five rounds. Wherever the fight goes, I’m just prepared for everything.”

While Cruz’s claims of punching power may sound exaggerated to some, bear in mind that many people also labeled UFC heavyweight Cain Velasquez to be a soft-handed, volume puncher but were forced to eat their words following his spectacular first-round knockout over Antonio “Minotauro” Nogueira last month. The fighters are wearing four-ounce gloves, after all, and a lot of fighters’ hands are a work in progress, and as their confidence grows, a lot of times what they can do in the cage catches up with what they can do in practice.

To hear Cruz talk is reminiscent of someone like Jon Fitch, a fighter who single-mindedly thinks about MMA so much that you surmise he might have a disorder of some sort. Describing himself as something of a minimalist, Cruz said he intentionally lives modestly and with few possessions.

“I didn’t grow up with much, so I really have learned to live my life with the bare minimums,” he said. “You know, Top Ramen and sandwich meat is good for me … I live modestly by choice. The less things that I live with, the more time I can devote to my training. I try to devote every waking hour I have into MMA, man, because my goal is to be world champion, be the best fighter I can be. And if you look around, the opponents like Miguel Torres, Brian Bowles – everybody in the weight class – they’re a bunch of beasts, man. I’ve got to do everything that I can to stay on top of my game.”