Can Stipe Miocic break the UFC heavyweight champ curse?

Stipe Miocic was attempting to answer the unanswerable on Tuesday, three days after becoming the 17th man to hold the UFC heavyweight champion.

None of the previous 16 ever made more than two defenses of the belt, which was created on Feb. 7, 1997, and was won by Mark Coleman at UFC 12.

Four of those champions – Randy Couture (during the second of his three reigns); Tim Sylvia (during the second of his two reigns); Brock Lesnar and Cain Velasquez (during the second of his two reigns) – each made two successful defenses.

None, though, ever made three.

And without knowing it, Miocic showed why on Saturday in the main event of UFC 198 when he knocked out Fabricio Werdum in Curitiba, Brazil, to give the city of Cleveland its first sports champion since the Browns won the 1964 NFL title.

Miocic pulled a Chuck Liddell, knocking out Werdum while he was going backward.

The kind of power it takes to knock someone out while backpedaling, as Miocic was, is usually the place of the sport’s biggest men.

“There are a lot of big strong dudes at heavyweight who hit very hard,” Miocic said while attempting to answer the question of why the heavyweight title changes hands so often.

Though the finish didn’t go according to script, it wasn’t by any means a fluke.

Miocic, under head coach Marcus Marinelli and his staff, actually practices throwing punches while going backward. It’s something, he said, they do all the time.

A lot of fighters describe being able to feel a knockout blow all throughout their bodies when they connect cleanly.

Miocic, though, had no such feeling.

“I hit him and he fell and I was so in shock,” Miocic said, chuckling at the memory. “I was like, ‘Holy crap!’ I was so ecstatic, but I knew I had a chance to get on top of him. I didn’t want to allow him time to recover. I know that was my shot right there.”

And now with the belt firmly in tow, he’ll head to the Cleveland Cavaliers game against the Toronto Raptors at Quicken Loans Arena on Tuesday in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals as the Cavs’ guest. It was a reward for bringing the first world title to the city in more than 50 years.

But his most important task is figuring a way to keep the belt for a while.

There are plenty of elite challengers, with Alistair Overeem most likely up next. But looming is the winner of the July 9 bout between Velasquez and Travis Browne, ex-champion Junior dos Santos – and even interim light heavyweight champion Jon Jones.

Miocic said his 2014 loss to dos Santos helped put him on the path to the title. It was an exceptional bout, and many thought he’d won, though all three judges had dos Santos.

“Junior is such a tough guy and to go in there and bang with a guy like him who is so strong and so smart and so skilled for 25 minutes is not an easy thing to do,” Miocic said. “I 1,000 percent believe you learn more from a loss than you do from a win and that fight is the one that let me know I could be a champion.

“You always want to understand why a loss happens and you wind up taking a lot from them. But just the confidence level that fight gave me… We were beating the crap out of each other for five hard rounds and I knew then that I had the ability to win this.”

Miocic is one of the great athletes in the UFC, and is skilled and powerful enough to hold the belt for a while.

But the challengers are elite, and the heavyweight division would only improve if Jones decided move up a weight class.

“He’s probably pound for pound the best and there is no question that he is an amazing competitor,” Miocic said. “If he decided to move up, I would love to test myself against a guy like that. At this level, there is no such thing as an easy fight, but a fight like that against Jon, that would be something.

“I know what this is all about. It’s going to be tough guy after tough guy and I need to keep improving if I want to hold onto this thing for a while, like I’m planning to do.”