Upon hearing the news that “The Axe Murderer” Wanderlei Silva was retiring from MMA, I found myself both sad and glad.
It is a relief that he has finally conceded that the time has come to step away from a sport that by its very nature consumes the excellence of those who ply it as a trade. The world of combative sports is demanding and void of mercy or compassion. Far too often it makes old men out of the young—sometimes overnight, as in the case of Meldrick Taylor—and continues to feast upon their flesh because the last things to age are pride and desire.
For me, it doesn’t matter why he is stepping away; the important thing is that he is doing so of his own volition while reasonably healthy and with enough coin remaining in his pocket that his future need not be mortgaged just to stay off the soup line. If he has invested his money wisely, he can finally rest—content that the blood he spent in the ring and cage has ensured that his legacy will cast a shadow over the sport well into the future.
And if anyone has earned a rest from the sport, it’s Silva.
In an era when fans and promoters will burn a fighter in effigy for not stepping up to face a last-minute replacement opponent (and will in fact cancel an entire event and throw the effigy aside in order to blame said fighter as a result, as was the case during the UFC 151 fiasco), Silva was, in his prime (some 10 years earlier), essentially a middleweight who stepped up to fight heavyweights.
In today’s era of fandom, we see excellent fighters disparaged because they don’t fight for the finish or are unwilling to fight anyone at anytime. They get bad pub because they’ve have never been a champion or never faced their closest rival.
None of that can be said with any truth about The Axe Murderer.
What follows is a true and honest (as honest as I know how to be) examination (or retrospective, if you will) of the career of one of the most transparent and genuine figures in the history of the sport.
Silva has always been a savage figure who, at his core, has been simple without being stupid—an advocate of consistent aggression with no compromise. His modus operandi, his architecture of aggression, has always been knock-out-or-be-knocked-out.
After that, the media and the fans of the sport—both positive and negative on both sides—were trusted to sort out the rest and apply whatever spin or bias they wish, in accordance to the safe distance needed to acquire both.
Thus, I say to his detractors—who act as if his successes in MMA, from the beginning through to the end, have been based on nothing more than steroids or testosterone replacement therapy or whatever is the miracle enabler of the day—that pills or intravenous solutions may empower the body, but they do not enrich the mind to the point where jumping onto the track of an oncoming freight train seems like the wisest course for career longevity.
In short, they do not create true courage. To fight heavyweights like Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic and Mark Hunt—when you are a middleweight in the Pride ring, where kicks, stomps and knees to the head of a downed opponent are legal—takes more than drugs can give you; it takes a willingness to live by the sword so few are willing to acknowledge even exists.
And yet Silva is not just the sum total of his fights; when he was poised to fight Chael Sonnen, The Axe Murderer gave his critics perhaps their biggest loaded gun, and in truth, it cannot be dismissed so easily.
Obviously, Sonnen was using no small amount of projection, in order to cast the eye of critical judgment upon someone other than himself. But be that as it may, Silva still fled from a drug test.
We don’t know how much, if any, of his career was tainted with whatever chemical enhancements were available at the time, and to assume he was tainted at all is to assume the worst on behalf of a man who always gave us his furious best.
Obviously, anyone who watched the sport back then cannot forget his reign of terror, just as they cannot forget the recollections of Mark Coleman, who spoke of the kind of out-of-bounds-gamesmanship that seems to have occurred on a regular basis in Brazil in the early days of the sport.
Coleman said that he went into Silva’s locker room and found that the Brazilian was being oiled up for the upcoming bout—a damning statement to say the least. You won’t find me calling Coleman a liar at any time, especially considering that I was not there.
But when watching Silva’s bout with Mike Van Arsdale, both men look like they ended up pretty dry come fight time, which is what matters most.
And so, while we were not there, we are here, in 2014, to try and quantify the positive and the negative of one fighter’s career.
The rub is found in the fact that such a career spans two different and incredibly demanding eras. Back then, defeat was as distasteful and condemned as it is now, and Silva tried to utilize a single method of operation in order to rise above all time constraints: fight to the finish above all else.
He wasn’t the worst during those time periods, yet he was nearly the best that purely violent intentions could give, spanning almost two generations in the 17 years he was active.
Hate him as you must, love him as you will, but never forget him as the man who, in his prime (which occurred when North, South, East and West were about as wild and dangerous as you can imagine) never shied away from a fight, no matter how dangerous or big the opponent.
This is the career of Wanderlei Silva, a true and undeniable product of the Chute Boxe camp and one of the greatest middleweight champions in MMA history.