Last week BJ Penn made it official to the MMA world that he will be returning to the UFC to take over the featherweight division.
To cap that news he also announced he will be training with MMA powerhouses Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the preparation of his octagon return.
While I still have memories of his lacklustre performance against Frankie Edgar in his last contest, we have to ask ourselves whether Penn, at 37 years old and a million MMA miles, can still compete with top ranked competition.
Jackson and Wink seem to think so. So it’s got our attention.
We can all agree that without the go ahead from Jackson and Winkeljohn it would be a classic case of an athlete coming out of retirement for a paycheck. Penn was known to have lacked motivation, commitment and surrounded himself with yes men during his career, which proved his downfall.
With the proper guidance and team in place, is a once impossible task of a successful Penn comeback now a possibility? I don’t think anyone is too sure.
The Jackson-Winkeljohn MMA Academy are known as mastermind tacticians, having trained the likes of Jon Jones, Carlos Condit, Holly Holm, Georges St-Pierre, John Dodson and countless other high-level MMA athletes.
Their recipe for success is proven and should never be questioned, but what happens when you throw a legend of Penn’s status in that type of environment? Will he listen, is he willing to learn from his teammates, and how will he deal with living and training with a new team in Albuquerque?
Will his motivation last throughout an entire camp? All of these questions are vital in figuring out whether Penn can complete a successful return.
Media and fans are comparing Penn’s return to the same tune of UFC heavyweight Andrei Arlovski. Arlovski, who also is a former UFC champion, was completely written off by the MMA world.
He joined Jackson-Winkeljohn to work with arguably the best team in the fight business and went on a run that no one saw coming with four consecutive wins over the likes of Frank Mir, Travis Browne and Antonio Silva.
He skyrocketed his stock in a year and a half to being a top-three ranked heavyweight in the world’s biggest promotion.
It was truly a remarkable story of a champion in the old MMA era competing with the best in the world in the new one. However, this case is a little different and we shouldn’t set our expectations quite this high.
Firstly, Arlovski had been with Jackson-Winkeljohn for years prior to his resurgence. It’s not like he wasn’t high level.
He put in the time, drilled, game-planned and eventually after years of working with the best and always having the hunger to get better he simply saw his hard work pay off.
Secondly, heavyweights are known to last a lot longer in age then the lighter weight classes – Arlovski at 36, Werdum at 38, and even Travis Browne, a younger heavyweight at 33. Heavyweights just get into their prime in the mid 30s. So it’s safe to say when Arlovski made his return he was still in his athletic prime for that weight class.
Penn, at 37, will be competing against featherweights. A division full of 20 and early 30-year-old men who are at their athletic peak.
While a Penn comeback is very fun to talk and write about, he should stop selling us a featherweight title run and focus on beating Nik Lentz at lightweight and making it out of training. Thirty-seven is simply too old for that stacked division.
A Lentz win alone would be an amazing accomplishment for Penn and the Jackson-Winkeljohn MMA Academy.
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