Dan Henderson only has two fights left on his UFC contract, and at 44 years old, he wants to make those two fights count.
“The two guys I’d like to fight would be Vitor (Belfort) and (Gegard) Mousasi,” Henderson said Monday on The MMA Hour. “Mousasi, not for any other reason than I felt like I didn’t get to fight him. And Vitor, you know, it’d be nice to fight him in the States, without his doctor as the head of the athletic commission.”
Henderson snapped out of his recent funk to score a devastating 28-second knockout over Tim Boetsch at UFC Fight Night 68. The win saved Henderson from facing another round of calls for his retirement after the legend lost five of his six prior fights, including a pair of under two-minute losses to Mousasi and Belfort.
The Belfort loss, in particular, has never sat well with Henderson. “Hendo” was among the trio of fighters who suffered brutal head kick losses during Belfort’s stunning career revival in 2013. All three of those fights took place in Brazil under the watch of the Brazilian MMA Athletic Commission, and at times Belfort’s physique approached comic book proportions.
Coincidentally, the commission’s medial director, Marcio Tannure, doubles as the same doctor who during that time penned Belfort a prescription for testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), the controversial practice of injecting synthetic testosterone that is now largely banned in mixed martial arts competition.
A two-time drug test failure, Belfort recently fought without TRT for the first time in several years at UFC 187, losing to UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman in less than three minutes and doing so with a dramatically slimmer physique.
Henderson, too, was an admitted user of TRT before the practice was banned, however he has his doubts whether Belfort’s usage was ever on the level.
“Physically he looked quite a bit different,” Henderson said. “His stamina went away pretty quick as well. I’m sure he works hard. So do I. But I don’t know, my body hasn’t changed in 10 years. So I’m not exactly sure what was making his body change like that, but it wasn’t the same thing I was doing.”