There are moments in sports that will stick with you forever. UFC 134 featured one of those moments when Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira knocked out Brendan Schaub three minutes into the first round.
Fighting in front of a partisan hometown crowd, Nogueira made his return to the octagon following an 18 month layoff due to a series of nagging injuries that seemed like they would never heal, and he left the crowd in attendance and everyone watching around the world with a moment that they will never forget.
“Minotauro” will go down in history as one of the greatest heavyweight fighters of all time. And he is unquestionably the greatest submission fighter of his generation. But he had a lot of questions that he had to answer against Schaub and he was able to do that.
It is no secret that Nogueira’s days in mixed martial arts are numbered. At age 36 and with 41 professional fights under his belt, his body has taken a pounding and he has become a shell of his former self.
But he came into this fight in the best shape that he has been in in years, which is remarkable considering that he said he ended his rehab early to train for this fight, and ended up knocking out one of the rising stars in the heavyweight division.
This victory by Nogueira will stand alongside Tito Ortiz’ submission win over Ryan Bader at UFC 132 as the most surprising result from 2011, but what made this victory special was the crowd.
Everyone in the HSBC Arena treated Nogueira like a returning hero and wanted to see him win so badly that when the referee stopped the fight, the emotion came pouring out of every fan in the arena and Nogueira was clearly overwhelmed by it.
Defining a perfect moment is impossible because “perfection” means many things to many different people, but Nogueira’s victory over Schaub was, for all intents and purposes, as close to a perfect moment as you can get in sports.
