Dominick Cruz and Urijah Faber feuded for over nine years and now, with both men retired, they can look back fondly on the heated trilogy that defined a large chunk of their careers.
The two first met at WEC 26 in March 2007, with Faber, then 27, defending his featherweight title against the 22-year-old Cruz. Faber won the first meeting via submission in just 98 seconds, kickstarting a feud that would stretch to 2017, by which time both fighters had established themselves as legends.
That might not have happened were it not for Faber’s fast finish.
“Whether I wanted to admit it or not, you were pretty much the rocket ship for my career early on,” Cruz said on his Love & War podcast to his guest, Faber. “The loss, it lit a fire under my ass losing to you.”
Cruz might be understating the impact that loss had on him.
Following that defeat, Cruz would not lose again until 2016, stringing together 13 straight victories, including two UFC championship defenses against Faber, with their rematch and trilogy bout taking place at 135 pounds. Along the way, the rivals had many heated exchanges and were happy to take shots at each other in interviews, with Cruz often coming off as detached and calculated, while Faber was the picture of California cool.
According to Cruz, that public perception was no accident, as a difficult upbringing made him genuinely resent Faber’s attitude. Cruz explained how his father was a meth addict who was frequently absent from his family and that meant a young Cruz shouldered the lion’s share of the responsibility when it came to taking care of his mother, grandmother, and brother. The trauma from those experiences informed how Cruz approached his fighting career and his opponents.
“I didn’t know, but I had a lot of toxic traits from that with my dad,” Cruz said. “I became very codependent, and a lot of weird habits, and love wasn’t safe for me. It was never safe. So I wouldn’t allow myself to say it and the second I started to feel it, I would get more angry and more mad and I would lock deeper into fighting and shut you out more. Anybody that was around that was loving or wanted relationships or depth with me.
“Then I get to a point where I get older and then you realize that’s the juice of life. That’s the meat of everything, that loving thing that you can share and connect with people, creating a win-win. I was tapped into it, but didn’t know it, because I put my family first and I wanted to get them out of the trenches. So I was tapped into a loving mindset, but out of anger, and that’s the guy you met. You only met that person. You never saw anybody but the guy that had to get the family out. And I was mad at you because you seemed to have it figured out on the other end.”
Faber showed great respect and appreciation to Cruz for sharing his story. In comparison, Faber said though his parents divorced when he was young, he was well-supported by both of them and that certainly contributed to his outwardly cheery demeanor.
When he eventually found his MMA foil in Cruz, he welcomed the challenge.
“First off, I enjoyed having an enemy because I didn’t have many enemies,” Faber said. “So I was like, ‘I’ve got an enemy. F*ck, let’s run with this.’ So I enjoyed that whole process. I always had a lot of respect and hearing this, even more respect to you. … I remember you talking about the runs that you would do in the morning sometimes. I can’t remember what it was, but you’d have a certain day of the week or a couple of days a week that you would do this intense run at five in the morning or six in the morning or something, and I remember thinking this guy’s going to be trouble because I just knew that you were on track, doing the right shit, and you had the championship mentality. I saw it and knew it was coming.”
Cruz and Faber’s rematch took place at UFC 132 following the promotion absorbing the WEC roster, including its featherweight and bantamweight fighters. Cruz entered the bout as the defending champion and won a unanimous decision over Faber in a five-round thriller. They would meet once more at UFC 199 in June 2016, with Cruz in his second reign as bantamweight champion, and again Cruz retained via unanimous decision.
In the lead-up to their bouts, there was always plenty of trash talk, much of it personal, which Cruz and Faber chalk up to their perceived differences as well as a desire to continue selling the feud that millions were invested in.
“I’ve thrived in scarcity,” Cruz said. “I really did, looking back. I learned about an abundance mindset as I matured and got older and started searching ways to make my life less painful for myself and different frameworks of mindset, and I always noticed that about you. You always looked on the bright side. You always had, ‘Yeah, you know, it’s fine.’ I just remember being like, ‘F*ck you, bro, it’s not fine. I’m going to beat your f*cking ass, dude.’ I hated you for that shit. I just couldn’t understand it. I just didn’t know.
“I had to go through certain things, so I can always appreciate looking back, I always wracked my brain. Because I wasn’t always resistant to it, I would take it in what you would say and be like, OK, this is working for him, so what was he doing? I can take these things that are making him successful and add them to myself. ‘I’m beating him now’ is what I thought, so if I can just also add what’s working for him, maybe I can double up. That was always the mentality, so I’m grateful in the times we had in those little moments where you would share, but I always felt like you had a back pocket agenda. I always felt like you were going to use that against me at the next talk.”
Faber chuckled at the thought of getting under Cruz’s skin without necessarily intending to.
“I remember you saying that to me, ‘He’s using that against me,’” Faber said. “You also said one time, because we had got along really well for, like, two days or three days, when we had to work together in that environment. We went back to being kind of haters on each other and you’re like, ‘He isn’t all that he seems’ and I think that’s what you were talking about. Like, we’re kind of buddies now, and now he’s talking shit again, and we just right back to it.
“We had to do that because we were going to try to kill each other. It was real. We were really going to try to kill each other.”
Cruz and Faber shared plenty of laughs during their conversation, with Cruz joking that Faber kept sending his teammates—or “minions” as Cruz called them—including Joseph Benavidez and Scott Jorgensen, to face him before their second fight. But there was nothing more amusing than when they first faced off in the WEC cage, a pair of 20-somethings with no idea what was ahead of them and, apparently, no clue as to how they should present themselves on television.
“If you look at our first fight, and you said this one time, your hair looked like Lloyd Christmas and I looked like I just got out of the back of a van, like I was living that van life,” Faber said. “We didn’t realize that people were going to be watching this, millions of people go back and watching these fights.”
“I had no idea,” Cruz said. “I was wearing pajama pants on the way out.”
“We didn’t realize, oh, this is on TV and going to go down as a historic bout,” Faber said.
“It shocked me,” Cruz said. “It literally shocked me, that fight, having the camera in my face.”
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