“I used to work at Journeys shoe store,” Johnson (21-2-1 MMA, 9-1-1 UFC) said. “I was assistant manager. And my manager was always like, ‘Hey man, make sure you push these socks.’ And I was like, ‘Dude, if somebody comes in this shoe store and they want to buy f-cking shoes, they’ll buy a pair of shoes. If they need a pair of socks, they’ll buy a pair of socks. I’m not gonna try to push a pair of socks on some dude with a drawer full of socks.”
Yes, I thought right away. I know that feeling. I’ve felt that feeling. Like most people who have spent at least part of their adult lives floundering around in search of, if not a career, then at least a temporary paycheck, I’ve tried my hand at sales-oriented retail jobs. I had exactly the same attitude about it that Johnson did. And I was a terrible salesman. As in, maybe the worst salesman you’ve ever seen.
At best, I could resist my natural impulse to talk you out of buying something (“But, when you think about it, do you really need more socks?”), but almost never could I succeed in convincing you to buy something you weren’t going to buy anyway. To do that takes skill. Maybe it even takes a certain gene. Whatever it is, I don’t have it. Neither does “Mighty Mouse.”
And the people who don’t have it? Usually they don’t even really want to have it. They might want the rewards it brings, but not badly enough to fake their way through it and hate themselves the entire time.
So those people stay away from sales jobs. You know, ideally. They go into other career fields. They make things that other people can’t make or do things that other people can’t do. In Johnson’s case, they become the best 125-pound mixed martial artist in the world, which sounds like the best-case scenario for someone in his situation.
Then he gets to the top and realizes, wait, this is just another sales job.
At least, that’s what it must feel like on weeks like this. Here he is, one of the most dominant champions in the UFC, one of the few fighters where, when they throw around phrases like “pound-for-pound best” during the commercials, it feels pretty legit, and when he makes the media rounds what we want to know is, So why should we pay for this?
For people with the sales gene, it’s the question their skills are designed to answer, sometimes even before it’s been asked. For people like Johnson, it presents two unappealing options: 1) Stumble and fake and guess your way through an answer, probably poorly, or 2) Refuse to acknowledge the validity of the question.
More and more these days, it seems like Johnson is going with the second option. As he later told Sherdog in that same interview, if people decide that UFC 186 isn’t worth their money, “That’s their f-cking bad.”
UFC champ ‘Mighty Mouse’ can’t sell, but at least he can do the next best thing | MMAjunkie
We all enjoy the show before the fight. Hate it sometimes over the top? Sure. But we all love a good story. And most fans don't know anything about might mouse.
If he fucking up longterm financial success by refusing to play the game of house hold name? Will talent eventually force that anyways?