Filed under: UFC, Strikeforce
Twelve days ago, I would have said that Fedor Emelianenko was the best fighter in the history of mixed martial arts. Now, I’m not so sure. The combination of Anderson Silva‘s spectacular knockout of Vitor Belfort at UFC 126 and Fedor’s loss to Antonio Silva a week later might force me to reconsider and pick Silva as the greatest in MMA history, and Fedor as No. 2.
It’s a close call, and any argument about the best fighter in MMA history is rife with problems. The biggest problem being that there’s not much history to MMA. It’s a new sport, and it’s a really new sport if you want to use an apples-to-apples comparison of fighters competing under modern rules with weight classes. In fact, I think the arguments about the best fighters in MMA history are so complex that I don’t want to deal with them here.
Instead, I’d like to ask a simpler question: Who had a better decade: Silva in the 10 years up to and including his victory over Belfort, or Fedor in the 10 years before the loss to Fabricio Werdum that started his current two-fight slide?