Mauricio “Shogun” Rua doesn’t want to hear it, but the voices are getting louder.
Cast around at the headlines leading up to Rua’s main event fight against Ovince St. Preux on Saturday at UFC Fight Night 56, and you’ll notice a common theme.
From Fox Sports’ Damon Martin: ‘Shogun’ Rua has never contemplated retirement: ‘It doesn‘t make much sense’
From MMA Junkie’s Mike Bohn: ‘Shogun’ Rua still has UFC title aspirations, brushes off retirement talk
From B/R’s own Duane Finley: Shogun Rua Focused on (St. Preux), No Thoughts of Retiring
It’s starting to take on an awkward, broken-record quality, really—people asking him about retirement and Rua pretending he has no idea what they’re talking about.
Win, lose or draw this weekend against St. Preux, we already know he’ll serve opposite Anderson Silva as a coach on the next season of The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil. When that’s over, he’ll take on an opponent TBA and—if he gets his way, apparently—just go on about his business as a professional fighter.
In September, he signed a new, multi-fight deal with the UFC and this week told ESPN’s Brett Okamoto he feels he has “four or five” good years left in him.
This statement was evidently made either from sheer stubbornness or simple obliviousness to how the last four or five have gone.
Since Dec. 2012, Rua has compiled an ugly 1-3 record in the Octagon and a 6-7 mark stretching all the way back to Aug. 2007. The last calendar year in which he fought more than once and finished over .500 was 2009, when he went 2-1 with wins over fading stars Mark Coleman and Chuck Liddell.
Somewhere in there—2010, if you’re scoring at home—he won the UFC title, but held it so briefly (10 months) that it only reinforced our notion of him as a shadow of his former self. All told, it’s been a rough half-decade for the man who was once regarded among the top pound-for-pound fighters in the world and perhaps the future of the light heavyweight division.
Rua will turn just 33 years old later this month, but multiple major knee injuries have put him so badly in decline that even his own family wants him to hang up the gloves.
“Every month, my wife and my mother meet and try to make me stop (fighting),” he reportedly told a Brazilian TV show in Sept. (via MMA Fighting.com’s Guilherme Cruz). “But I tell them that’s what I love to do.”
His reticence is easy to understand. Still a very young man in real-world years, Rua probably hasn’t known much outside of fighting. He began his professional career 17 days before his 21st birthday, and through 31 appearances during the next 12-plus years he established himself as a mainstay in the world’s top two MMA organizations.
In 2005, he had one of the greatest individual years in the sport’s history, going 5-0 and winning the vaunted Pride middleweight grand prix tournament. To advance through the bracket, he beat stars Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, Alistair Overeem and Ricardo Arona, three of them by first-round knockout.
All that seems a world away, now, and the great career in the Octagon we all expected never materialized. He showed up stateside in 2007 with a pre-existing knee ailment, lost his debut to a surprising Forrest Griffin at UFC 76 and promptly missed 16 months in order to have the knee fixed. Since then, there have been at least as many downs as ups—the depressing notes outnumbering the inspiring ones the longer he goes on.
This is obviously not a unique story. Athletes get old, some of them—due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control—before they are ready to admit it. The skills that once made them fearsome competitors erode, and they slowly transform from insurmountable obstacles to stepping stones for lesser fighters.
We’ve watched it happen to Liddell, Rich Franklin and Wanderlei Silva, just to name a few. The lucky ones get out while the getting is still good. The unlucky and the headstrong do not and risk becoming tragic figures before our very eyes.
You would think we’d be used to it by now, but something seems particularly jarring about watching this happen to Rua. Maybe it’s because he’s still so young, or maybe because he seemed to have so much promise during those years from 2003-07, when he sprinted to a 12-1 record and looked every bit like the guy who was going to carry the light heavyweight banner into the next generation.
Alas, it seems it was not to be. We know that now, and the sooner Shogun figures that out for himself, we’ll all be better off.
His current unstable footing in the 205-pound division was cast in sharper relief a week ago when expected opponent Jimi Manuwa pulled out with an injury and was replaced by St. Preux. This is a fight Shogun desperately needs to win if he means to keep ignoring all those questions about retirement, and the late change could effectively throw his preparations into chaos.
Instead of Manuwa’s strike-first attack, he’ll now face the bigger, ground-oriented OSP. For a guy who has never been particularly physically imposing at 205 pounds, it could turn out to be a tall order for Rua, provided St. Preux shows up ready to go five rounds.
He’s in the worst of positions: A win doesn’t necessarily do much for his future prospects, but a loss would be disastrous.
Despite Shogun’s declining record, his most recent defeats have come against top-flight competition—Dan Henderson, Chael Sonnen and Alexander Gustafsson. Dropping one to an unfinished product and short-notice replacement like St. Preux would be a different thing entirely and could be framed as the final bit of proof that Rua is officially done.
Nobody wants UFC brass to have to step in and tell Shogun “No mas.”
Then again, if he can’t beat St. Preux, the discussion around him is about to get even more uncomfortable.
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