With the opening round of the Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix concluding Saturday night in Dallas, most people who don’t know headliner Fabricio Werdum from his swift throttling of Fedor Emelianenko know him as a faceless brutal knockout on UFC star Junior dos Santos’ highlight reel.
As he stands only hours away from another big challenge in Strikeforce heavyweight champion Allistair Overeem, so is the paradox of his career:
What is Fabricio Werdum?
Is he a top-flight heavyweight, a man who has deservedly sat as high as third on the heavyweight rankings of credible MMA websites, ahead of names such as dos Santos, Brock Lesnar, and the very champion he’ll meet Saturday?
Is he a grappler-turned-mixed martial artist who has benefited from generally favorable matchups that allowed him to display his considerable skills?
Is he somewhere in the middle—not quite what the Emelianenko win had people thinking but not what the dos Santos KO suggested either?
It’s almost impossible to set on an answer.
Werdum is as skilled a jiu-jitsu player as there is at heavyweight in MMA. He’s crafty, but not wildly flashy and has one of the slicker bottom games out there for a big man. Most heavies don’t get used to being on their back and if they do, they still don’t like it. Werdum excels there and it makes him a unique commodity.
He’s also durable, in spite of what the aforementioned dos Santos highlight might betray. Ducking into an uppercut from the best pure heavyweight boxer in the MMA world will knock most guys senseless and, aside from that, he’s survived and even beaten guys who’ve left many unconscious opponents in their wake.
Saturday night will see him in the cage once again with such a threat. In Overeem, Werdum will see an absolute monster of a human being who has a K-1 title sitting on his mantle at the moment and an ever-evolving grappling game that probably deserves more credit than it gets. You’d take Werdum in Abu Dhabi at the Combat Club—in a cage in Texas it’s not a foregone conclusion.
The result? He’s an insurmountable underdog at most online betting parlors, the type that you could place five dollars on and buy a house on Monday with your winnings if he pulls it off.
I’m of the mind that the truth on Werdum is somewhere in the middle. He’s not a top-three heavyweight in the world, but he’s got the tools to beat a lot of big names on any given day. He’s no outlier, not a guy that’s suddenly going to become the best in the world at 34-years-old, but he’s not the guy you see falling like a house of cards every time Junior dos Santos is starring on pay-per-view for the UFC.
And so we’ll all sit and watch this Saturday as he attempts to once again scale the unscale-able mountain that Allistair Overeem has become. Given his recent success, Werdum deserves more respect than he’s gotten, but I don’t need a house bad enough to put that five dollars down on him.
Regardless of the outcome though, we’ll be one step closer to finding out what he actually is on the heavyweight landscape.
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