I’ll be the first person to tell you I hoped Anderson Silva would never fight again.
I didn’t think he would return to the Octagon. Not after that horrific night last December, when Silva went in the cage to challenge Chris Weidman for the middleweight championship and ended up carted out of the arena and taken straight to the hospital while clutching his leg and screaming in pain.
I’ll never forget that night. I wrote about it in some detail immediately afterward, and the sound of Silva’s leg breaking and his vocalized anguish have stuck with me ever since. It is, and will remain, one of the worst things I’ve seen while covering this sport in a professional capacity.
I never wanted Silva to experience a downward spiral in his career. I wanted him and his magical middleweight title run to live on in our collective hearts, like if Michael Jordan had gone straight from playing for the Chicago Bulls to being the dude who wears dad jeans and owns an NBA franchise instead of playing for the Washington Wizards. I didn’t want Silva to turn into Fedor Emelianenko. I wanted him to go out on top, or at least as close to on top as he could possibly get after losing to Weidman the first time.
That didn’t happen, of course. Silva lost a second time, and this time, he suffered a gruesome injury. Who would blame him for walking away? He’d done so much. There was nothing left to prove. And besides, his leg was mangled.
“I went through the worst month of my life. It was a lot of pain the moment when I broke my leg. When I realized my leg was broken, I thought my career was over,” Silva said during a Tuesday press conference from Brazil, televised live on the UFC’s Fight Pass service. “You might think that depression is not something serious. But I was depressed. And if I didn’t have the people I have by my side, maybe I wouldn’t come back.”
But now, he is coming back.
He’ll face Nick Diaz at UFC 183 in one of 2015’s most anticipated bouts. Nobody knows if he’ll be able to recapture any of his former glory. It is difficult to imagine Silva unleashing the kind of furious leg kicks he’s known for without the thought of last December and his broken leg crossing his mind. Not just for Silva, of course; for anyone.
That kind of injury never goes away. The bones heal, but the mental scars? They’re there forever. But Silva said he doesn’t believe mental blocks will be an issue.
“Everyday that goes by, I’m going back to my origins and being able to kick without any fear, and I believe that I on fight night I will be 100-percent,” Silva said, before adding a joking refrain. “But when in doubt, I’ll kick from my hip up.”
Why come back at all? Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of Silva vs. Diaz and Silva vs. other top middleweights as much as anyone else. But again, I only want to see it if he’s able to compete. I don’t want to see Silva going in the cage as a shadow of his former self. If that’s what is in store for all of us, I’d rather he just stays at home.
But that’s not for me to say. It’s not for anyone to say. It was and will remain Silva’s decision alone. And if he feels he has some reason to come back, or if something is eluding him, well, that is his right. And given his comments at the close of Tuesday’s press conference, it is clear Silva has something worth fighting for.
“This thing about returning, it’s because I feel that I let something go in this whole road,” he said. “In my last fights, I let something go, and I’m looking for that again. That’s what I’m after. I lost a lot of things because of my personality, and I’m learning to deal with that and to understand that a lot of things need to change.
“I’m very happy to have a lot of people rooting for me. I want to come back and I want to give everyone happiness.”
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