Anderson Silva still has a long way to go, but looks like the former UFC middleweight champion wants the Octagon to be his final destination.
Silva suffered a gruesome injury in his rematch against Chris Weidman at UFC 168 in Las Vegas, Nev., and is expected to return to training in six to nine months after undergoing emergency surgery on his left leg. According to Silva’s coach Pedro Rizzo, he plans to fight again.
“At the hospital, Anderson told me ‘I will be back, master. I will be back,’” Rizzo told MMAFighting.com. “I told him ‘yeah, you’ll be back home to recover and rest’. And he said ‘I will be back, master.’ He’s a fighter. He has six months to recover, heal and then decide what he’s going to do next.
“He has everything to come back to fighting if he wants. He has a good head to handle all the pressure from the UFC through all these years. Anderson will decide that. He just broke a leg, he has a lot of things to think now. He has nothing left to prove inside the Octagon. But if he decides to fight again, we will be there to help him.”
Rizzo was in Silva’s corner at UFC 168 and was devastated when he saw his leg break during the second round.
“That’s an ending nobody could ever imagine,” he said. “Two months of hard work, man. We had no Christmas. We spent the Christmas evening at the gym in Las Vegas. He was focused during the whole camp, he was ready.”
Rizzo, a former UFC heavyweight contender, started working with Anderson Silva in 2011, and was confident he would claim his title back.
“I was absolutely positive that he would win that fight,” he said. “I worked with him since the Vitor Belfort fight and I never saw him in a better shape. We already expected that Weidman could be better in the first round, but Anderson always starts slowly and then gets loose. We’ll never know what would have happened, though.”
The Brazilian knows exactly what Weidman went through at UFC 168, as he also caused a fracture in an opponent’s leg in a fight before.
“It happened to me when I was fighting muay thai in Belgium,” Rizzo said. “My opponent kicked, I blocked it and his leg broke. It was the same injury. I didn’t feel that was a victory, and I believe Weidman felt the same way. It was an accident. I don’t consider that a win or a knockout, it just happened. It’s really bad, you don’t even celebrate.”
It was an accident, but Rizzo doesn’t believe Weidman was “lucky” in his second win over Silva.
“Weidman blocked the kick and it happened,” he said. “It happens all the time in muay thai fights, broken legs or deep cuts. Weidman used a technique to block the kick, but breaking the leg was an accident. He wasn’t lucky, but we were the ones that had bad luck.”