On a surface level, Anderson Silva looks the same as he always has. Long and sleek, slick and rangy, the Brazilian still casts a commanding presence in the UFC Octagon. But after Saturday night’s UFC Fight Night 84 performance against Michael Bisping, it’s clear that the cracks we have seen in his recent career have not been and will never be healed. His chin is compromised, his reflexes have slowed a tick, his activity has lessened.
In a sport of milliseconds, that can make all the difference.
Today’s version of Silva is good but far from the all-time great who authored one of the UFC’s legendary win streaks. And in today’s UFC, being good isn’t good enough at the top level. It wasn’t Saturday night, as he tasted defeat for the third time in his last three official bouts (a fourth was declared a no-contest).
That he lost to Bisping, a longtime Top 10 middleweight, can be understood, believed and accepted, if only it were by a routine method. But things rarely go routinely when Silva is involved, so of course some bizarre moments accompanied the action and clouded the aftermath.
This time, there were multiple things to point to: first, a knockout that wasn’t and then a complete lack of urgency to turn up the volume even as it became clear that the fight was a close one that could tilt either way. And…
“Sometimes it’s like in Brazil, total corruption,” he said in Portuguese following the fight in the cage, according to MMA Fighting’s Guilherme Cruz.
Oh, yes, when it comes to Silva events, the bizarre is a regular attendee.
Corruption? No way. According to MMADecisions.com, 16 of 22 polled media sources scored the bout for Bisping with the same 48-47 score that all three judges reached.
It was simply a close fight, and if he looks within, Silva will find his own causes for losing, even if for at least 45 seconds during the bout, it seemed he had snapped his streak.
Instead of talk of triumph, there will be speculation of retirement.
The strange and pivotal moment for Silva came as the third round neared an end. During an exchange, Bisping lost his mouthpiece and pointed it out to the ref. As he did, Silva attacked him. Then, as Bisping broke free from Silva’s muay thai clinch, the Brazilian backed off. Bisping looked for his mouthpiece again, pointing it out to referee Herb Dean, and Silva jumped in with a ferocious flying knee that caught Bisping’s jaw flush and floored him.
It was a clean strike, if not totally sportsmanlike, and his most vintage moment of the fight, showcasing the killer instinct that drove his lengthy middleweight title reign. In the moment, Silva thought he had just scored a knockout, so as Bisping sat slumped against the cage, Silva promptly walked across the Octagon and jumped atop it to straddle the cage and bask in the adulation of the 16,734 fans at London’s sold-out O2 Arena crowd.
However, unbeknownst to him, the bell had rung to end the round just a tick after the knee had landed, and Dean declined to stop the fight, ruling Bisping was fit to continue. As the arena doctors and cornermen poured into the cage as they customarily do between rounds, confusion reigned.
Silva’s corner thought the fight was over and celebrated with him, while Bisping’s corner worked to motivate him for a second opportunity.
As all this happened, a commission regulator pleaded with Silva to get off the cage, repeating several times, “the fight’s not over.” Finally, Silva got the message and had to collect himself with no corner instruction and a possible adrenaline dump.
Round 4 started with Bisping still looking a bit wobbly, but Silva never moved in to take advantage of the situation, failing to throw a strike until 30 seconds or so had passed. A low blow a few seconds later gave Bisping additional time to recover, and with that, Silva’s best opportunity of the night slipped away.
It was all part of an uneven performance that saw Bisping significantly outwork him. Silva has never been a volume fighter, but his indifference in countering many of Bisping’s flurries left little doubt who was winning exchanges much of the time.
Over the course of the fight, Bisping threw 320 strikes to Silva’s 135, according to FightMetric statistics. Overall, Bisping landed 112 strikes to Silva’s 75.
Beyond the numbers, Bisping proved he was there to stay early as he won Round 1 on activity and then punctuated it late by wobbling Silva with a hook.
Then in the second, Bisping took it one step further, dropping Silva with a left hand and swarming with ground strikes.
While Rounds 3-5 were much more competitive and Silva always seemed on the brink of closing the show, he mostly chose to fight in bursts. It was impossible to watch those last 15 minutes without feeling like Bisping was in constant danger, but it was also impossible to watch and wonder why Silva wasn’t putting together more combinations and increasing the pressure.
Occasionally, we see older fighters struggle to pull the trigger. Perhaps that was happening in certain moments; perhaps Silva was content with sniping rather than spraying fire. Only he knows the true reason.
For Bisping, we know exactly what it was. It was a performance that summed up his career, a fighter who wanted to win so desperately that he could not possibly lose a battle of wills.
“It’s about how much you want it,” he said in the post-fight press conference. “I wanted this fight; this was everything to me. It was that that got me through those [dangerous] moments.”
It was everything to Bisping, who has scratched and clawed to reach the middleweight Top 10 and stay there for nearly a decade. It was everything to him because he has won so many times without ever measuring himself against the very best the sport has to offer.
After so many years of having to face that kind of intensity, maybe Silva can no longer rise to meet it in the same way. He wouldn’t be the first champion to suffer that fate, and at his age (he will turn 41 in April), we should come to realize that this might sadly become the norm for him if he chooses to continue. We can laud him for what he’s done and praise him for still trying, but we must ultimately accept that even legends don’t leave the cage gracefully.
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