‘There’s a ghost piloting me’: Frankie Edgar on his iconic Gray Maynard trilogy

It’s fitting that the legend of Frankie Edgar was cemented on a night when the former UFC champion didn’t even win a fight, but instead proved to be one of the toughest men alive.

Newer fans may not think to throw the trilogy between Edgar and Gray Maynard into any shortlist of MMA’s all-time great rivalries. The two lightweights never had the bombast of Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz. They never shared the name-brand nostalgia of Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz. They never reveled in the built-for-Twitter pettiness of Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier. Quite the opposite, actually. Even in an era of Affliction and nu metal, Edgar and Maynard embodied the classic lunch-pail worker. Two kindred spirits who always clocked in on time, who always fought tooth and nail to give foes hell, and who always were content to clock out at the end of the day and quietly head home.

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So considering that, is it really much of a surprise to see a trilogy like Edgar-Maynard start to be overlooked nearly a decade after its completion?

Yet the series remains iconic, one of the defining love letters to the UFC’s lightweight division. It’s also the vehicle that forever changed how history will remember Edgar.

“Being a fight fan my whole life, I (grew up) watching some boxing trilogies, always like the Gatti-Wards and stuff like that,” Edgar said on Monday’s episode of The Athletic’s “The Man and the MITH” podcast, which celebrated the four-year saga between Edgar and Maynard with a dedicated episode this week. “So to have my little piece of MMA history is definitely something special.”

While the latter chapters of the Edgar-Maynard trilogy proved to be as explosive as any UFC lightweight bouts ever, the series started on a much more innocuous note.

Edgar and Maynard were both just babies of the fight game when they first crossed paths in the co-main event of UFC Fight Night 13 in April 2008, two undefeated prospects in their mid-20s riding an unbeaten stretch over their first three UFC fights. Back then, the lightweight division began and ended with B.J. Penn, so Maynard’s wrestling-heavy win over Edgar was relegated to an afterthought. But the experience of that first pro loss became a crossroads moment for Edgar, one that spurred him to make several wholesale changes to his life.

“I had a job up until my third fight in the UFC, so that was the first fight where I actually could train all the time. And that’s when I realized, ‘Man, I need to find somewhere else better to train,’” Edgar remembered. “Back when I had a job, I could only really train once a day. Now that I had all day to train, I just didn’t have the resources. I wasn’t training with Ricardo (Almeida). Me and Mark (Henry) were maybe hooking up once a week at that time. So after that Gray fight, that’s when a lot of things changed for me.”

The loss pushed Edgar to join Henry on a full-time basis and led him to connect with longtime coaches Almeida and Renzo Gracie. It also convinced him to plan out his days more appropriately. Edgar was finally ready to go all-in on MMA — and the decision paid immediate dividends.

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“That’s when I realized that to be a professional fighter and do this as my career, I needed to approach it as a workday,” Edgar said. “I can’t just be like, ‘All right, let’s just get a workout in one day.’ I’ve got to approach it as a workday and come up with a system that worked for my goals.”

The five-fight winning streak Edgar rattled off afterward upended the MMA world, culminating in Edgar’s shocking pair of victories over Penn, both of which reshaped the 155-pound landscape overnight.

Ironically, Maynard was the one expected to actually get the first shot at Penn at UFC 112. But after the UFC audibled to Edgar, it didn’t matter — it was clear the two lightweight rivals were once again on a collision course, and this time more would be at stake than just undefeated records.

Edgar vs. Maynard 2 finally came together on New Year’s Day, 2011, at UFC 125.

By virtue of his first win, Maynard strolled into fight week as the betting favorite, while most of the questions around the event centered on Edgar. Did the champion have the power to actually hurt the challenger? Did Edgar have the size to stick around as king of the lightweights?

As fate would have it, those questions soon appeared to be prophetic.

In an opening round for the ages — and one of the most hellacious five-minute stretches of damage you’ll ever see inflicted in a championship fight — Maynard dropped Edgar three different times and dragged his rival kicking and screaming to the threshold of hell’s gates.

If ever there were a first round that deserved an elusive 10-7 score, this was it. Yet somehow, implausibly, Edgar willed himself to survive to Round 2.

His memory, however, didn’t join him along for the ride.

“I honestly don’t think I came to until the third or the fourth (round),” Edgar recalled. “I believe (it was) the fourth, maybe the third. Between the third and the fourth, I remember Mark saying, ‘All right, man. We’ve got two more rounds.’ And I’m like, ‘Two more rounds?!’ I didn’t know what happened to 2 and 3, so I had to get the recap afterward.

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“Even after that fight, Mark was like, ‘Oh, you took him down a bunch of times.’ Like, I took him down? I had no idea I took him down several times.”

Yes, that’s right. For almost 15 minutes in a UFC championship fight, Edgar was running strictly on autopilot.

“It’s like someone abducted me for a round and a half,” he said. “It’s kind of scary.”

“When I got dropped in the first round, I rolled my ankle really bad. And I think in the third or the fourth round, I’m moving around and my ankle started hurting me. I’m like, ‘Damn! What the hell? Why’s my (ankle hurting)?’ I had no idea why my ankle hurt me (because of my memory). None.”

Cageside commentators Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg were baffled. Whatever supernatural force was keeping Edgar alive, it was working. The champion bided his time, then surged into second gear after regaining his senses, seizing the championship rounds from Maynard and eking out a split draw on the scorecards. Amazingly, Edgar became the first person in history to suffer three knockdowns in a UFC fight without losing — a dubious feat he accomplished in just one round.

Afterward, he thanked referee Yves Lavigne for his cool under pressure. With a lesser referee, Edgar’s legendary performance could’ve ended with a dramatically different result.

“We’ve spoken over the years and I tell him, ‘You made the right choice, man,” Edgar said. “‘That’s what you did. So you don’t have to hang your head. You made the right choice.’”

Naturally, Edgar vs. Maynard 2 ended up sweeping nearly every Fight of the Year vote in 2011.

But for Edgar, escaping by the skin of his teeth wasn’t something to be proud of.

“I felt like I lost, honestly,” he said. “Then I look back, I mean, I got to keep the belt and all of this, so I didn’t lose. But at that moment — at that moment, it felt like I lost. And plus, I don’t know, when you get hit in the head and you get rocked, your emotions are a little out of whack for a while. So I was a little emotional at that point, so I didn’t know how to handle it.”

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In the aftermath of UFC 125, doubt once again became the prevailing narrative around Edgar’s career. Like clockwork, Edgar feigned indifference when met by his critics. But the truth was that Edgar heard it all, every word, and he used that smoldering cauldron of skepticism to motivate him for the trilogy fight, which was set for eight months later.

“It almost gives you that defensive take of it,” Edgar remembered. “Almost like, ‘Yeah, you want to come for me? Then I’m ready to back my shit up.’”

In many ways, Maynard’s title reign felt like an inevitability heading into UFC 136. He was the bigger fighter, the stronger fighter, and he’d largely dominated Edgar over two different bouts.

And then it happened again. Edgar’s nightmare scenario.

Just minutes into the trilogy fight, Maynard caught the champion napping with a heat-seeker of an uppercut that sent Edgar into another spin cycle. History was repeating itself.

But Edgar’s autopilot had the champ’s back once more.

“You know what it is? I noticed it going back to the second Gray and third Gray fight, those times where I’m rocked, I’m listening to my corner — and I’m actually listening to my coaches,” Edgar said. “So I think that’s the biggest thing. My autopilot is what I’d normally do, (which) is listen to my coaches. I have faith in my coaches. I’ve always been a very coachable person, so if they’re telling me what to do and I’m responding, then I guess we’re firing on all cylinders — even if there’s a ghost piloting me.”

With Maynard again unable to capitalize on his opening-round salvo, Edgar stormed back from the brink and won the next two frames. Then, in one sublime sequence, four years and 12 rounds and 59 minutes of combat came to a head with the champion finally putting his stamp on the rivalry.

Edgar shot low for a double-leg-takedown attempt. Maynard defended. Then Edgar went upstairs and cracked his counterpart with a picture-perfect right uppercut. Maynard dropped like a sack of potatoes — and Edgar ended one of the UFC’s greatest trilogies with a violent flourish.

Frankie Edgar vs Gray Maynard

— MMA Gone Wild 🅙 (@MMAgonewild) September 19, 2019

“It was unbelievable,” Edgar said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this: In the fourth round, I remember I switched to southpaw and I heard Gray’s coach, ‘When he switches southpaw, throw a right hand!’ So I’d switched back to conventional, and when I heard that, I switched right back to southpaw. He threw the right hand and I went to shoot on it — and that’s when he defended, but that’s when I hit him with the uppercut that rocked him and was able to finish with those right hooks.

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“I kind of (mind-gamed him). I always try to listen to my opponents’ guys.”

Finally, it was over.

Maynard had won the majority of the 12 rounds the two lightweights shared. He’d scored 12 takedowns and had knocked Edgar to the mat anywhere from 4-6 times, depending on your definition of a knockdown. Yet Edgar had gotten the last laugh.

“That was just pandemonium,” Edgar said. “I remember putting my hands up, and then I remember looking for Dana (White) because I wanted to scream at him. I just wanted to scream in his face. I was fired up, man.”

Neither Edgar nor Maynard ever won a championship fight again.

Rarely in combat sports, though, do two individuals so perfectly paired find each other, two dance partners forever guaranteed to produce magic each time they fight. But that’s what the sport of MMA found with Edgar and Maynard. The two were meant to fight each other — and a decade later, the longtime rivals consider themselves friends.

“Me and Gray, we definitely went after it in those fights,” Edgar said. “Sometimes they say you leave a little piece of yourself in there every time, and that could be the case.

“This past year is when I got to sit down with him and hang out a little bit. I was over at Xtreme Couture hanging out while they had a practice, and we were just BS’ing, so there’s never (been) any bad blood, but the tensions are a lot easier nowadays.”

As of this writing, Maynard’s career is in pending. The 40-year-old parted ways with the UFC last year following his sixth loss in his past eight fights.

Edgar, meanwhile, is still going strong. He’s targeting a June return amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, potentially at bantamweight against top-ranked contender Aljamain Sterling.

Without question, the second fight of the Edgar-Maynard rivalry is a shoo-in for the “best fights” wing of the UFC Hall of Fame. And even after a decorated 13-year UFC career, Edgar still credits his trilogy with Maynard as the catalyst that forged him into the future hall of famer he is.

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“I always said I wanted to be the Michael Jordan of this, but it’s tougher to make it happen in a sport like mixed martial arts when there are so many variables,” Edgar said. “So just being considered a dog is fine by me.”

(Top photo of Gary Maynard and Frankie Edgar at UFC 136: Nick Laham / Zuffa)