Melvin Guillard never saw the end coming until the morning he awoke and it was already lurching through his front door. Sometimes, that's just how it goes. Close your eyes and you're a 10-year UFC lifer, open them eight hours later and you're unemployed. Cord-cutting without the grace of a goodbye; no severance package, going-away party or tearful embrace over a decade of service. Just 23 fights worth of memories and a dizzying sense of how things are about to change.
And things certainly did change.
Few expected Guillard, the cocksure TUF 2 relic with the bleach-blonde fade and heat-seeker of a right hand, a lightweight who'd headlined handfuls of events and latched himself atop the bonus list, to be handed his UFC walking papers after a single loss to Michael Johnson in early 2014 -- least of all Guillard himself.