Well…
Dominick Cruz wants a title shot…
And nearly everyone would say he deserves it…
He was the champion for quite a stretch of time, both in the UFC and the WEC, before they merged…
And the title fight with Cody Garbrandt was extremely close…
With some saying that he even won the bout…
But now it seems that, when he approached the UFC about another title fight, this one being the winner of the upcoming Cruz/Dillashaw fight, he was sort of met with some extreme hesitance…
“Well I told Sean Shelby what I wanted to do and he’s like, ‘Well, I don’t know if that’s necessarily…’ he’s saying he doesn’t know. I’m saying this is the fight that needs to happen at 135 pounds,” Cruz said during a recent appearance on The MMA Hour.
Thanks to Dominick’s longtime reign as champion prior to his most recent loss, he’s probably the most well known bantamweight fighter, if he’s not the most popular, he’s at least in the top three, sharing the popularity meter with Cody Garbrandt the current champion, and T.J. Dillashaw, another former bantamweight champ… Cody and T.J. are currently duking out as coaches on The Ultimate Fighter (TUF)
“There are three people that people know and it’s me, T.J., and Cody. And the reason you know us three is because I’ve been fighting these two people, and I’ve been talking about them and I’ve been building them on FOX and giving them a lot of shine and I’ve also been bashing on them, too.” he said.
“But, the mixture of the entire thing has built the three of us and I think that between the three of us, we can fight for 10 years and probably have a good fight. But, realistically, that’s the fight that makes sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to me to go down in the division. I’m the number one contender now, and to fight backwards in the division, after the amount of title defenses I’ve had in the past, it just doesn’t resonate or make sense to me,“ added Cruz.
“I am here to fight the best in the world and fight for the title. I think I’ve earned that position, and if I got completely to where I wasn’t even in that fight, I would understand, but I was in that fight from beginning to end. In that fifth round, I’d even say that I won. So there still a case for me in this matchup against Cody or T.J., either one,” concluded the former 135-pound champion.