(Now cast-free, the Spider will reportedly be walking without crutches by next month. / Photo via Instagram.com/UFC)
I’m not sure if this is good news or bad news, but Anderson Silva has no plans to retire following his sickening leg break at UFC 168, and the former middleweight champ is looking for a third fight against Chris Weidman as soon as he recovers. In fact, Silva is already trying to build heat for a re-rematch, crapping all over Weidman’s latest win in a new interview with Globo. As MMAFighting’s Guilherme Cruz translates:
“I believe that, if you pay attention to these technical details, you will see that (Weidman checking the kick) was instinct, not something that he trained to do,” Silva said. “No, I don’t think (Weidman should consider it a win). It was an accident. And I’m pretty sure I would have won the fight…
“To land the perfect kick, I needed to distract him by punching him in the face so he wouldn’t pay attention to the kick. He was protecting the upper part of his body, and the raised leg instinctively. The kick was so strong he lost balance…I saw my mistake, and now I’m only worried about my comeback. If the UFC thinks I deserve another opportunity (against Weidman) or if I need to earn it. I just want to do what I do, it doesn’t matter if it’s for the title or not. I want to do what I do well.”
Yes, Anderson, he raised his leg instinctively — almost as if he’d been drilling the defensive technique for months and was doing it on muscle-memory alone. Since the fight, Weidman has repeatedly stated that checking leg-kicks was a specific part of his gameplan going into his second meeting with Silva, so to imply that the checked kick was in any way “accidental” is absurd, and kind of disrespectful. Plus, Silva is “pretty sure [he] would have won the fight” if his leg didn’t snap in half? Congrats, Andy — you have officially entered the loss-justification leaderboard, somewhere between “the Japanese poisoned my food” and “I had a cracked skull, bro.”
Anderson’s desire to return to action is even crazier when you consider how agonizing his recovery has been to this point:
Right after he suffered the injury, “The Spider” wondered if he would ever walk again.
“The only thing I was thinking was ‘is it over? Will I walk again?’” he said “I was scared that I wouldn’t walk again. Many things were going through my head at that moment. I’m 38 now, and I will be 39 in April. That’s what I’m afraid of, but I’m confident that I will. I will be back”…
The MMA legend is still in pain, and he revealed that sometimes he asks his wife to take him for a ride around Los Angeles so he can just sit and cry away from his kids. Pain is part of Silva’s routine now, and he can’t even sleep without it.
“When I landed the kick I heard a loud noise, the sound of a bone breaking, and the pain was huge. And since I left the hospital, I can’t sleep,” he said. “It’s really hard. I think about it, and I wondered why. ‘Why, my God, I had to go through all this?’ I wonder which message He’s trying to teach me at this moment.”
Jeez, I don’t know. Maybe He’s telling you to walk away now while you still have your mental faculties? Maybe He’s teaching you a painful lesson about hubris? Maybe bad things happen to good people because God doesn’t actually intervene in the lives of human beings, positively or negatively? Like, He’s content to just hang back and watch, and it’s up to us to avoid breaking our legs? Maybe God doesn’t actually like MMA in the first place, and has always preferred boxing and pro-wrestling?
According to athletes who have already lived through what Silva is dealing with, the Spider will never be the same after this. He’s been a professional MMA fighter for over 16 years, and his daily life is now filled with inescapable pain. As an outsider looking in, I can’t comprehend why any fighter — especially one who has already established himself as the greatest of all time — would want to further risk his health, just to have a third fight against a guy who already beat him twice. Of course, Silva is crazy like a champion, and I’m just some regular shmuck. But still, is it really worth it?