Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) welterweight kingpin Johny Hendricks is slowly but surely making his way back to the fight game after bicep surgery, and early estimates have him ready to compete by November. But he may in fact get a few extra months to make sure everything is ship-shape.
He's going to need it.
That's according to UFC President Dana White, who told FOX Sports that "Bigg Rigg" will rematch Robbie Lawler in early 2015, and Hendricks should be worried about fighting a guy as "Ruthless" as the former middleweight after such an extended absence.
"Robbie Lawler has been an absolute stud for us, stepped up, kept taking fights. This is his third fight in four months or something like that. Now he's going to have some time off; time to relax, time to focus and just think about Johny Hendricks. If I was Johny Hendricks, I wouldn't want to be fighting Robbie Lawler, coming off a big layoff. [Early 2015] sounds about right."
Hendricks last competed in the main event of UFC 171 last March in Dallas, Texas.
His five-round unanimous decision win to capture the vacant 170-pound title came at the expense of Lawler -- now 2-0 since going down on points in "The Lone Star State" -- but it wasn't a blowout by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, you could argue a single takedown in the final frame determined the outcome of their fight.
And now we'll get to do it all over again to settle this score once and for all.
Who ya' got?