If you ever doubt that former UFC bantamweight champion Aljamain Sterling has a sense of humor, just ask him how he’d like us all to think of him once his career is over.
“I want fans to remember me as the best damn actor to ever grace the Octagon,” he says with a perfect deadpan expression. “Never forget that.”
This, of course, is a joking reference to how he first claimed the UFC 135-pound title. You remember. How he took an illegal knee to the head from Petr Yan in their first title fight back in 2021? How many fans immediately accused Sterling of playing up the damage from the blow in order to draw a disqualification victory? How even now, more than four years later, the comments sections of his YouTube videos are regularly littered with references to that night in Las Vegas (though far fewer people think to mention that he won the rematch fair and square).
“But you know what, I can understand why there's still some people who think I was acting,” Sterling says. “I do watch that clip sometimes and I go, 'OK, I understand why people feel the way that they do.' So I get it. But no, it wasn't an act. That really hurt.”
It’s not the kind of thing a 36-year-old former UFC champ would like to be known for, obviously. Personally, Sterling happens to think he has a lot of other memorable moments people could fixate over instead.
And when he fights Brian Ortega on Saturday in the co-main event of a UFC Fight Night event in Shanghai, China, he’s hoping for one more of those moments. But he’s also a 14-year veteran of MMA with more than a decade of lived experience in the UFC, so he knows what to make of a matchup like this at a time like this.
Here he is, coming off his first loss at featherweight in the UFC, thanks to what he still feels like was a bad judges’ decision against Movsar Evloev at UFC 310 in December. And across from him is Ortega, a two-time title challenger who was knocked back down the ranks in a lopsided loss to Diego Lopes at last year’s Noche UFC event.
“This is a crossroads fight for both Brian and I,” Sterling says. “I think that’s really it. One guy moves up, one guy moves down. And then whoever’s on the losing side has to figure out what to do then. Because for me to lose two in a row — even though I still feel like I've won that last one — but for me to lose two in a row, it puts me in a spot where now I'm going to have to fight those young up-and-coming guys who are on a five- or a six-fight win streak. And then I have to make that decision of, do I want to do that?”
It’s a tricky and yet not uncommon place for an ex-champion of a certain age to find himself. Sterling has been around long enough to be a known quantity who needs no introduction or explanation. That means value for the UFC, which can put him on a fight card like this one as a way of adding a little oomph to the lineup.
But it also means that matchmakers and fans alike are looking at him the way you might look at an aging dog who’s struggling to make it down the back porch steps. You realize this can’t go on forever. Maybe your mind even flashes forward to that inevitable day when you’ll take him to the vet for the last time. You just don’t know if it’ll be this year or four years from now.
One thing that sets Sterling apart is that doesn’t kid himself about this reality. He knows what you’re thinking. And, to be honest, he’s thought it too.
“I can definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Sterling says. “Training hurts these days. It’s weird, there’s days I feel really good and I'm injury-free completely and then I'll ask for a fight. Then by the time I get the fight, because I’ve been waiting and waiting, it's another six or eight weeks and I'm already dealing with something that just came out of nowhere.
"It’s a young man's sport for sure. I mean, I can still compete with the young kids and the older guys. I don't think skill is a problem. It’s just, will your body physically hold up?”
It helps that, as he’s gotten older, he’s gotten smarter about maintenance. That’s partly because he’s had to, but also because he has more resources at his disposal after relocating to Las Vegas, where he can take advantage of the physical therapy and other benefits offered at the UFC Performance Institute, Sterling says.
Still, he knows the end of his fighting days are out there somewhere. Which, after spending the majority of his adult life fanatically devoted to this sport, is a strange reality to confront.
“It's depressing, actually,” Sterling says. “I got into the UFC when I was 24, so I was the young buck. I was the guy who came in, won his first four fights on his contract, three finishes in a row, 12-0, ranked six in the world after my third UFC fight. It just happened so fast. And now I'm like, damn, I'm Unc now. I’m an Unc. It's going to be sad to move on to something else completely. I have my rum company, Funk Harbor Rum, that I'm running and everything. I'm the founder and owner, and that's fun. It's exciting and everything, but this is what makes me feel alive.
“But I also always knew that this is something you could only do it for so long,” he continues. “And then once that window of opportunity closes for you to compete, you can't do anything about it. You can't get those years back. You can't get back your speed, your reaction time, your chin. Those things, they just deteriorate and that's it. Knowing that father time will catch me soon and it's going to be knocking on the door and I just don't know when, it’s tough. … I don’t know which fight could be the last one. I think we're going to be able to tell from the performance, but I just don't want to be one of those guys who hangs around too long getting hurt and taking extra damage that doesn't need to happen.”
If it ends on Saturday, Sterling says, he could be satisfied. He doesn’t think it will end that soon, of course, but if it did then fine. He’s been a champion. He’s accomplished his goals. He’d still like to win another title as a featherweight. That’s the competitor in him, and once that starts to go, he says, he’ll go with it. He has no desire to just hang around the UFC for fun and a paycheck, or simply to delay the end.
“I understand how this business works, in terms of moving up and progressing, so I need to get this win,” he says. “And I will get this win.”
But how about the real answer to that question we started with? The end will eventually come. Every fighter knows that, whether he can get himself to truly understand and believe it or not. And when it comes for Sterling, he says, he wants people to remember how hard he fought and scratched and clawed for everything he got.
Because, we must admit, it’s not as if the powers that be in the UFC ever had any particular love for him. He was never the promoter’s favorite and therefore never got any gifts he hadn’t earned.
“I want people to remember that I was the guy who fought everybody,” Sterling says. “Never got any handouts, always did it the hard way. Me and [current UFC bantamweight champion] Merab [Dvalishvili] both, we had to fight everybody. There was nothing given to us.
"I fought all these guys who were on win streaks and I beat all these guys to get into title contention. I did it the hard way. I think that’s what I’m most proud of.”
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