By any metric, 2013 was a weird year in mixed martial arts.
After years of setting our watches by the UFC’s welterweight and middleweight champions, both Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre disembarked for the great unknown. The world’s largest …
By any metric, 2013 was a weird year in mixed martial arts.
After years of setting our watches by the UFC’s welterweight and middleweight champions, both Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre disembarked for the great unknown. The world’s largest MMA provider continued to pack its schedule with more and more fight-related goodness, and its relationship with its biggest competitor (BellatorMMA) hit an all-time low.
New champions were crowned (Chis Weidman, Anthony Pettis), while some familiar faces (Robbie Lawler, Matt Brown, VitorBelfort) reinserted themselves into the conversation. There were bad beats and drug cheats, as well as copious examples of bald men shouting at us from our TV screens, imploring us to open our wallets to purchase their wares.
Perhaps most importantly, women finally came to the UFC. Ronda Rousey was crowned bantamweight champion, and late in 2013 we got word that strawweights are on deck. They’ll be featured in an upcoming season of The Ultimate Fighter.
These are heady times, friends, and to quote the great poet Ferris Bueller: Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Before we plunge headlong into the nonstop sprint that will be 2014, Bleacher Report MMA lead writers Chad Dundas and Jonathan Snowden look back at the year that was. Together, they grapple with the calendar turn’s most gripping question: Who won 2013?
In the end, it was fitting that Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre left the party together.
The Octagon’s two biggest stars began their respective title reigns a little more than a month apart in 2006 and, though St-Pierre’s was briefly i…
In the end, it was fitting that Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre left the party together.
The Octagon’s two biggest stars began their respective title reigns a little more than a month apart in 2006 and, though St-Pierre’s was briefly interrupted by Matt Serra, they’ll likely always be linked in our minds.
But if 2013 is remembered as the year that UFC lost both of its most bankable champions at consecutive pay-per-view events, then 2014 shapes up as a serious rebuilding year for the fight company.
Silva and St-Pierre leave behind a fairly massive hole, not only in the fabric of the sport but also in the UFC’s bottom line.
The dominant story of the next 365 days may well be the organization’s search for someone who can possibly fill it.
The leading candidates? Here’s a status update on some of them: Heavyweight champ Cain Velasquez is out until late next year (shoulder), lightweight champ Anthony Pettis is out for four to six months (knee) and featherweight champ Jose Aldo is nearing the end of a six-month layoff (foot).
But wait, it gets worse: In the wake of his UFC 168 win over Silva, middleweight titlist Chris Weidman revealed he could need knee surgery. Meanwhile, Nick Diaz is still happily retired, and the rumors of a Brock Lesnar return grow colder by the day.
All told, it adds up to a lot of uncertainty and fear that our sport could experience another season of sluggish ratings and bleak PPVbuyrates. To keep 2014 from seeming like a very long year, the UFC will likely have to lean on two fighters who so far have been slow to connect with fans: Jon Jones and Ronda Rousey.
It goes without saying that the organization will need both those champions to be a good deal more active than they were in 2013, when each fought only twice. Jones needs to have a 2014 that more closely resembles his 2011, when he went 4-0 and won the 205-pound title.Rousey won’t have the luxury of spending next year out making movies.
The good news, if there is any, is that both of the promotion’s last superstars left standing already have fights coming up. It’s possible that could give the UFC a nice running start headed into the new year.
Rousey arguably emerged from UFC 168 as the new face of MMA, and matchmakers (or maybe just the UFC’s accountants) weren’t about to let her momentum languish. At the post-fight press conference, Dana White already had a poster printed up for her UFC 170 bout against Sara McMann eight weeks from now.
Rousey has the full complement of attributes needed to be an all-time great, but she’s already talked openly about taking some more time off after that fight. Somehow, UFC brass will have to convince her to stick around.
For his part, Jones returns after nearly a seven-month break to take on Glover Teixeira at UFC 172 in April. Assuming he wins that—and can stay healthy—he’ll rematch with Alexander Gustafsson and then maybe take on Daniel Cormier near the end of next year.
Provided Cormier gets past Rashad Evans, of course.
Granted, having Jones and Rousey carry the flag is going to put a slightly different spin on the UFC’s marketability, but the company could do a lot worse than to claw its way through next year with them as its top draws.
Where Silva and St-Pierre were largely beloved by MMA fans (especially those in their home countries), some fans have struggled to accept Rousey and Jones into their hearts. It’s possible that next year a significant portion of viewers will tune in to their bouts not to celebrate their greatness but hoping to see one or both of them lose.
Whatever works, though, right?
With a cadre of young talent seemingly a win or two from a breakthrough (guys like ConorMcGregor, Gunnar Nelson, Dustin Poirier and KhabibNurmagomedov) and a group of salty veterans (Urijah Faber, Robbie Lawler, Matt Brown and Chad Mendes) on the road to reasserting themselves, any current or future crisis of leadership will surely pass.
For all its flaws, the UFC is nothing if not resilient. It has survived worse than this, and with the embarrassment of talent-richness that is its current roster, chances are somebody is going to step up.
With Silva and St-Pierre gone, 2014 may turn out to be an awkward year, but the party is far from over.
As the UFC president himself might say, somebody must still want to be an (expletive) fighter.
The first time Chris Weidman fought Anderson Silva, it ended in controversy, public bickering and demands for an immediate rematch.
The second time there was merely sadness, and that queasy feeling in the pit of our stomachs that comes when very bad th…
The first time Chris Weidman fought Anderson Silva, it ended in controversy, public bickering and demands for an immediate rematch.
The second time there was merely sadness, and that queasy feeling in the pit of our stomachs that comes when very bad things happen to good people.
Weidman retained his middleweight title on Saturday at UFC 168, but only after his hotly anticipated rematch with Silva ended in a gruesome leg injury that may well end the greatest career in MMA history.
The finish came one minute and 16 seconds into the second round, when Weidman checked one of Silva’s whipping low kicks and the former champion suffered a badly broken left leg. Silva crumpled instantly to the mat, where UFC cameras lingered on cageside doctors attending him as he writhed and screamed in pain.
Weidman won again, and we still had no definitive answer as to who was the best 185-pound fighter in the world—a question that suddenly didn’t feel so important anymore.
As the scene unfolded, the only thing we could say for certain was that Silva faced a long, arduous recovery. At 38 years old and already coming off his first loss in 17 fights, fears were immediately raised that we’d seen the last of “The Spider” in the Octagon.
“First of all, I just want to say, no matter what happened in this fight he’s still known as the greatest of all time,” Weidman told color commentator Joe Rogan following the fight. “Lots of props to Anderson Silva. I wish him the best.”
If Silva can’t return, it will make a startling, unforeseen end to a 16-year career that was by turns sublime and occasionally frustrating. It will also stand as a stark reminder that a sport as taxing and at times brutal as MMA spares no quarter, even for its all-time greats.
The injury made for an unsettling outcome to the biggest rematch in UFC history and a bizarre climax to a pay-per-view card the company expected to be its best seller of the year.
Viewers who shelled out the inflated price of $59.95 for UFC 168 had already seen a couple of strange finishes. First, a very overweight Diego Brandao got crushed in a featherweight bout against Dustin Poirier. Then, longtime Octagon veteran Chris Leben likely ended his own career by conceding to Uriah Hall while on his stool between rounds.
Add to the mix a couple of quick finishes during the PPV card (which necessitated that the company re-air some prelim fights) and it was not at all the message the UFC wanted to send with its gala year-end show.
The last two eagerly-awaited fights were supposed to clear the air after the earlier weirdness. Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate did their part in the co-main event, brawling through the three-round Fight of the Night before Rousey retained her women’s bantamweight title.
Silva and Weidman, though, was supposed to be the homerun in the bottom of the ninth.
It has been nearly six months since Weidman took Silva’s title at UFC 162, via the sport’s most disputed knockout. Some fans and analysts dismissed it as a fluke when he caught a clowning Silva with a short left hook back in July and the second fight was meant to serve as a referendum on the first.
We wanted resolution. We wanted to see what would happen if Silva played it straight. We wanted to know if Weidman was as good as the shiny gold belt around his waist said he was.
Now we’ll probably never know.
Just this: Through the first six minutes, the second fight had been all Weidman. The new champion hurt Silva with a short right hand from the clinch early in the first round. He came close to finishing the bout with a series of strikes on the ground before grinding out the rest of the stanza from inside Silva’s guard.
It seemed like shades of their first meeting when Silva came out a bit more game in the second. He caught Weidman with a pair of low kicks in the first minute and fired off a couple of mean-looking straight lefts.
It was on the third low kick that disaster struck. Weidman checked the kick and caught it on his knee. As Silva stepped back and tried to plant his foot on the mat, he collapsed in obvious pain, and referee Herb Dean stepped in to stop the fight.
Silva left the arena on a stretcher and went straight to the hospital. At the postfightpress conference UFC president Dana White said he expected the former champ would have surgery within the hour.
“I don’t want to count him out,” White said, “but I don’t want to count him in, either. That’s not what’s important right now. The important thing is that he gets the surgery and we go from there.”
For his part, Weidman knows that his second straight win over Silva will again spur the doubters, but said while he felt bad for his opponent, it was no accident that he started checking those kicks.
“That was the No. 1 thing I got hit with in the first fight, so I did work a lot against guys with good kicks, working on checking them a lot,” he told Rogan. “I did actually think, if he’s going to go that hard on kicks like he usually does and I catch one on my knee, it could really hurt him. But it’s still crazy how that happened.”
This is how rumors get started.
The scene is a 23-second video shot during the media scrum portion of Thursday’s UFC 168 pre-fight press conference. Company president Dana White (unshaven, in a black V-neck) sits front and center as the disembodied voi…
This is how rumors get started.
The scene is a 23-second video shot during the media scrum portion of Thursday’s UFC 168pre-fight press conference. Company president Dana White (unshaven, in a black V-neck) sits front and center as the disembodied voice of The Media asks him about reports that Brock Lesnar will be attending the event on Saturday.
What The Media wants to know is, does the notoriously reclusive Lesnar, who retired after a loss to Alistair Overeem in Dec. of 2011, have business with White in Vegas? Or will he be there strictly for pleasure?
“Really?” White says, as if Lesnar‘s presence at UFC 168 is news to him. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
Then three full seconds of silence stretch before another voice, this one belonging to MMA Junkie.com’s John Morgan, asks: “Honestly?”
White cracks a grin. “Honestly,” he says, his eyes slipping to the left. “I don’t know.”
Fade to black, and…cue the blogosphere doing what the blogosphere does.
Roughly 24-hours later, White turned up the tease, responding to Ariel Helwani‘s questions on the subject by throwing even more accelerant on the long-dormant media firestorm that is Lesnar.
“If there was something there and I hadn’t announced it, why would I tell you, anyway?” White said, grin still in place. “You don’t worry about what’s going on with Brock. If something happens with Brock, you’ll know about it.”
At his point, we have no idea if White is just messing with us here, though anytime somebody uses the word “honestly” so many times in quick succession, the last thing it does is convince us that person is being honest.
We just don’t know if there is any truth to speculation that Lesnar could return, and drawing conclusions from the fact that he apparently wants to watch Anderson Silva‘s rematch against Chris Weidman in person is a bit of a stretch.
But in MMA circles, any mention of Lesnar—who for the briefest moment was UFC heavyweight champion and the sport’s biggest star—has a ripple effect akin to dropping a 6’3”, 265-pound boulder into the middle of a deep lake.
Not to mention, any inkling that the Big Fella could return, groundless or not, comes at an interesting time in the UFC’s history.
The company’s biggest draw (Georges St-Pierre) just announced an indefinite fact-finding mission on the bright side of life; its most dominant champion of all time (Anderson Silva) told Helwani this week there’s a “great chance” he’ll retire on Saturday; the heavyweight champ (Cain Velasquez) expects to miss most of 2014; and the lightweight champ (Anthony Pettis) just had knee surgery.
All of which is to say, you can understand why White could conceivably pick this moment to give Lesnar a call and see if he wants to hang out, you know, just as friends.
But if Lesnar is really, seriously considering a comeback to the UFC—and, again, we have no evidence that he is—please allow me to offer him some unsolicited advice: Dude, don’t do it.
We all saw how the Lesnar experiment ended the first time around. The former NCAA national wrestling champion and WWE star started his UFC career on a 4-1 tear, becoming heavyweight champ and a bonafide pay-per-view powerhouse before his shortcomings suddenly, violently, caught up with him.
He was a once-in-a-generation type of athlete with a fine wrestling base, but he simply came to the game of mixed fighting too late in life and with too limited a skill set. He was unable to close the holes in his stand-up game (not that it seemed like he tried especially hard), and eventually the best fighters in the division exploited his weaknesses.
Oh yeah, and diverticulitis. Lesnar’s career was twice interrupted by the rare intestinal ailment that reportedly almost took his life and did take a sizeable chunk out of his colon.
For a while, his grappling and his physical gifts were good enough, but then at UFC 116 in July of 2010, Shane Carwin poked a tiny hole in Lesnar’s balloon. It merely took another year and a half for the air to leak out completely, first at the hands of Velasquez, then Overeem.
Lesnar is 36 years old now and nearly two full years removed from the sport. By and large, age is not the friend of large men, and time away from the cage? Well, that’s Kryptonite.
Since early 2012 he’s been on retainer in WWE, getting paid good money to carry a soft travel schedule and perform “extreme, no rules” matches with the likes of John Cena and CM Punk. His MMA career may have ended on a down note, but it gave him new life in the world of professional wrestling.
That’s good—albeit taxing—work, if you can get it.
At this late stage in his athletic career, with enough money to never worry about it again and a pretty cushy gig in WWE, it’s hard to believe Lesnar would seriously consider a comeback to the UFC.
And yet, there’s Dana White, smiling that smile, unable to look us in the eye as he tells us he has no idea why Lesnar is coming to UFC 168.
In any case, the hard truth is this: Unless he spent every waking moment he was not on WWE TV in a temple somewhere working on his striking with Freddie Roach and the ghost of Cus D’Amato, a UFC return seems like a very bad idea.
If Lesnar remains retired, history will continue to look on his brief run as UFC heavyweight champion as a short-lived, but smashing success. If he comes back, he might win a few fights, but in the end he’ll likely end up on the wrong end of more beatings from the new breed of MMA heavies—the Velasquezes, Overeems and Junior dos Santoses of the world.
What would Lesnar gain from that? Why risk it?
The man got out while the getting was good, and the getting likely won’t ever get any better than it already got.
Here’s a weird little fact you probably already know: MMA is obsessed with the future.
In order to satisfy what we’re led to believe is a nearly inexhaustible interest in our sport, journalists and fans are constantly spinning things forwar…
Here’s a weird little fact you probably already know: MMA is obsessed with the future.
In order to satisfy what we’re led to believe is a nearly inexhaustible interest in our sport, journalists and fans are constantly spinning things forward, trying to jump the line of reality to predict what might happen next.
We prognosticate, we forecast, we speculate wildly about outcomes we couldn’t possibly know. Before the sweat is dry on the brow of a winning fighter, we’ve usually already booked his/her next fight, predicted the likely result of that fight and decided what it will mean amid a landscape of other things that probably haven’t happened yet.
There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s all in fun—a natural byproduct of the fight game in the age of instant communication—but even though I willingly participate, I’ve never fully made peace with it.
That’s why one of the most exciting things about Saturday night’s UFC 168 middleweight title rematch between Anderson Silva and Chris Weidman is that I have no earthly idea what’s going to happen.
You don’t either, and I love that about this fight.
In fact, one of the most anticipated aspects of what is arguably the most anticipated rematch in UFC history is that we have no clue what’s going to transpire when Weidman and Silva enter the cage. We don’t know who will win, how they’ll do it or how strange it may or may not be.
Even more than normal, there’s a sense that this bout could break any which way. In a sport where there is an allegedly big fight every month and so many crystal balls are routinely polished to such a high gloss, that’s the ultimate luxury.
Granted, we’ve tried to guess. We always try. But if you took all of the stories written about what will happen at UFC 168 (mine included) and put them on a spool, we could bill it as the world’s largest toilet-paper roll. We could pitch a tent roadside in Ohio and charge tourists $5 to take pictures with it.
Because that’s what all our conjecture is worth this time around.
The circumstances of their first bout at UFC 162 put us in this delicious mess. Prior to that bout, some people picked the upstart Weidman to unseat the longstanding champ. A bunch of people played it safe and went with Silva. In the end, none of it mattered. Nobody, and I mean nobody, thought it was going to go down like that.
When Weidman responded to the tired old saw of Silva’s playacting and mockery by stepping up and knocking him out, it essentially made all our guesswork moot. If that can happen the first time, well, why even waste our breath talking about how the next one will go down?
There are just too many unknowables here. Was Weidman’s win legitimate? Did Silva beat himself? Can the challenger-turned-champion possibly do it again? Will Silva repeat the same bizarre performance he’s been presenting on and off for the last few years? Does he even want to be there?
Anyone who says they know the answers to these questions is lying, and they are not your friend.
This time, it might be nice to dispense with all the speculation and just soak in the fight.
Because, really, here’s the point: Oftentimes, our sport gets so wrapped up in asking “what’s next?” that we forget to enjoy the present. In our clamor to get to the next thing, we don’t give ourselves time to revel in right now.
And this is a moment that deserves to be savored.
Not to overinflate things (another of our industry’s recurring sins), but what we have on tap this weekend is something we’ve never seen before. It’s something we might never see again.
Our sport’s greatest champion will try to rebound from a loss inside the Octagon. He’ll take on a competitor who is undefeated, and in their only previous meeting, he proved to not only be his equal but also his superior.
The waiting is almost over.
By this time on Sunday, we’ll know the future of the UFC middleweight division. We’ll know whether Chris Weidman’s initial win over Anderson Silva was more luck than destiny. We’ll know whether the 38-year-old former champio…
The waiting is almost over.
By this time on Sunday, we’ll know the future of the UFC middleweight division. We’ll know whether Chris Weidman’s initial win over Anderson Silva was more luck than destiny. We’ll know whether the 38-year-old former champion was able to reassert his storied dominance.
We’ll know if Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate squashed the beef.
These and other truths will be revealed. Until then, though, we’re just going to have to guess.
In the name of semi-educated conjecture, MMA lead writers Jonathan Snowden and Chad Dundas (that’s me) are here to offer their bold predictions for UFC 168.
Begin the slideshow (if you dare) to read Sunday’s headlines today…
In the end, it was fitting that