The 5 Great MMA Stars the UFC Let Slip Through Its Grasp

The UFC always gets its man. Or woman. Most of the time, anyway.

The UFC typically offers the largest sums of cash, brightest lights of fame and highest caliber of opposition. There are all sorts of reasons why the Ultimate Fighting Championship is, warts and everything, the biggest stage and proving ground in MMA.

None of that is news. The surprising part of the narrative comes when the juggernaut fails to win the day.

But it happens. Arguments over money are a thing that still takes place in life, believe it or not. Sometimes, egos clash in a harrowing game of psychological chicken. And you know what else? Sometimes the timing just isn't there.

These are the five biggest stars who slipped through the grasp of the UFC. This is not a list of the five best fighters never to enter the Octagon, though you will note some similarities. This is a list of fighters the UFC actively desired and pursued, but thanks to various circumstances, couldn't quite reel into the boat.

Honorable Mentions

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Shinya Aoki

Here's a list of greats who were pursued by the UFC but never entered the Octagon, and some reasons for their demurring:

1. Shinya Aoki (declined UFC contract offer because he was "comfortable in ONE FC. I think I have more to gain from fighting there.")
2. Rumina Sato (courted in early 2000s, but nothing came to fruition)
3. Igor Vovchanchyn (visa issues kept the tree-trunked Ukrainian from taking part in the UFC 11 tournament)
4. Alexandre Nogueira (fought as a smaller fighter well before UFC established lower weight classes)
5. Sergei Kharitonov (prefers kickboxing to MMA and presumably would not sign a UFC contract preventing him from from kickboxing)
6. Joachim Hansen ("I would rather have bleeding hemorrhoids than fight for the UFC." Well, OK, then.)
7. Cristiane "Cyborg" Justino (seems increasingly likely to happen)

5. Ben Askren

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Is Ben Askren the best welterweight in the world right now? He thinks so. So do many of his opponents. So if his trend needle is going anywhere, it's going up.

Of course, this is all happening around the world from UFC headquarters, at Asia's ONE FC. But don't blame Askren for that. The UFC wanted the dominant wrestler in its stable but apparently not enough to pay top dollar for someone who was decidedly deficient in the spinning-ish department. 

So the UFC let him walk away, and the free-spirited Askren took his talents to Japan, where he has captured the ONE FC welterweight title and advanced his pro record to 14-0 while lobbing barbs at Dana and Co. as the mood strikes him. The UFC, for its part, can't rightfully claim at the moment that its welterweight roster contains all the best fighters the world has to offer.

4. Gina Carano

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Gina Carano

Gina Carano is not the world-beater that some of these other guys are, but she might be MMA's biggest star.

At least, she would be, if the "MMA" part of that tag still applied. Carano fought for the Strikeforce title in 2009 but abandoned competition soon after for the fame, fortune and lower-intensity workouts of Hollywood. Who can blame her?

Despite the fact that she hadn't fought in five years, the UFC desperately wanted to put Carano's big name and marketable face on a poster with Ronda Rousey. So this summer, the company pulled out all the stops, with White even proclaiming at one point that her signing was all but in the bag.

But it petered out. In the ensuing days and weeks, UFC brass blamed Camp Carano for the bottom falling out. They were unprofessional, hard to work with and all that—the UFC said that about Camp Carano, not the other way around.

3. Mamed Khalidov

Mamed Khalidov is the best MMA fighter outside of the UFC right now, and I don't even see a debate.

The well-rounded 34-year-old Chechen is the king of Poland's KSW promotion. He was the promotion's first-ever light heavyweight champ and held the belt until he vacated it to make a run at middleweight. He's only won nine straight in that division over the past four years, twisting up and pounding out names like Melvin Manhoef, Maiquel Falcao, Rodney Wallace and Jesse Taylor. 

Yes, yes, no reason to give him a title shot. Middleweight champion Michal Materla, who does not have a Wikipedia page, surely is not familiar with this man who stalks his division. Or maybe he's just busy with other things. Yeah, yeah, that's it. He's busy.

The UFC certainly knows his name, though. It made him an offer in 2012, but nothing ever came of it. Why? Two prevailing theories are that KSW treats fighters better than you might expect and that Poland is closer to Khalidov's friends and family. But another one—which emerged from Bellator honchos after they, too, were spurned by Khalidov—indicated that Khalidov's devout Muslim faith keeps him from training year-round and would thus cause scheduling problems.

You be the judge. In the meantime, try to catch him in KSW. It's worth it.

2. Rickson Gracie

The Gracie family invented the UFC. So it's strange that its athletic kingpin never stepped inside the Octagon. 

But he didn't. Back in the 1990s, early UFC organizers initially planned to build UFC 1 around Rickson, the clear best fighter at the time in the Gracie clan. But a dispute over the use of family finances (go to about the 8:00 mark in that video) famously led to Rickson's brother, Royce, receiving that opportunity instead. The rest, as they say, is history.

But according to some (including the fighter himself), Rickson remains the best Gracie—maybe fighter—of all time.

1. Fedor Emelianenko

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No one embodies The One That Got Away like Fedor Emelianenko.

Dana White famously coveted the illustrious heavyweight, doing almost anything he could to get Fedor under contract so he could start printing money with superfights against existing UFC stars like Brock Lesnar and Randy Couture.

The two sides played footsie for a long time but never reached an accord. If you listen to the UFC, it was because of the extreme demands requested by Emelianenko's longtime manager, Vadim Finkelstein. The UFC made many concessions to get something done, but in the end, one final ask—the idea of the UFC co-promoting events with Finkelstein's company, M-1—was simply a bridge too far. 

The Last Emperor settled in Strikeforce instead, where he lost three of four in the final stage of his elite career. But he's still known as one of the sport's finest, despite that UFC tenure never quite materializing.

Scott Harris writes about all sorts of MMA topics, including these kinds of hypothetical rankings. For more like this, follow Scott on Twitter.