Hyperbole is so common in this sport that it can be hard to make in-the-moment sense of what we see. This is especially true when commentary and fight promotion tilt us further in the direction of unreality, where every other week there is a new Greatest of All-Time coronation. When the aim of the Ultimate Fighting Championship is to simultaneously appeal to casual sports fans and keep the attention of diehard MMA purists, it isn’t enough to simply say a performance was “great” or that a fighter is “really good.” Fights have to be epic on a near-weekly basis, and fighters have to be not just “once in a lifetime” talents but “once ever in human history.”
Yet at UFC 238 on Saturday in Chicago, three genuinely special performances occurred. In a sport where hyperventilating hyperbole is normal, Tony Ferguson, Valentina Shevchenko and Henry Cejudo were all exceptionally dominant…