It’s futile to look for meaning in the UFC heavyweight division.
When you write about fighting for a living, that’s sort of what you do—search for narratives as you try to make linear sense of a sport where sometimes the only constant is chaos. You attempt to assign meaning and beauty to a space most of the general public views as rank barbarism.
But at heavyweight there’s just no point.
Take Saturday night’s UFC Fight Night 85 main event for example, where Frank Mir will face Mark Hunt in a bout that exists independent of any storyline, context or stakes beyond the purely physical.
Combined age: 77.
Combined record: 4-8-1 in their last 13 fights.
Mir and Hunt both come in on the heels of losses and will compete for no discernible reason other than they are both active members of the 265-pound division who could be healthy and available for mid-March. Also, Hunt is from New Zealand, which will make him a quality draw for local fight fans in Brisbane, Australia, where this event is taking place.
It doesn’t really matter who wins or who loses.
It doesn’t really matter if the fight is any good.
The victor doesn’t move discernibly closer to a shot at the championship. The heavyweight title picture is eternally so muddled that nearly everyone is a win or two away from No. 1 contender status at all times anyway.
The loser doesn’t suffer any indignity beyond the possibility of physical injury and perhaps the hastening of his inevitable retirement.
Perhaps because this weight class is such a disaster, however, we’ve largely made peace with all that.
It’s telling that in a world where the UFC lets Top 10 talents such as Ben Henderson and Phil Davis sail off into the sunset, it keeps Mir and Hunt around essentially indefinitely. So long as they don’t rock the boat, it seems like even the most down-and-out heavyweights will always have a home in the UFC.
These two will likely have a fun confrontation Saturday night. The bout will match Hunt’s fearsome power against Mir’s burgeoning striking skills and long-envied submission game. In all probability, somebody is going to get finished.
So long as you don’t think too deeply about it, that’s good enough.
Why? Because we like heavyweights. Heavyweights sell. There’s nothing like watching two enormous men meet in the center of the cage and try to knock each other’s block off. It’s OK that it won’t mean much. We’ve been taught over more than two long and painful decades not to expect any better from this division.
Aging heavyweights basically exist in the UFC at this point to headline international cable TV fight cards. Take any combination of guys like Mir, Hunt, Roy Nelson, Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva and Josh Barnett, give them passports and a cage to fight in, and they can main-event any Fox Sports 1 outing on any continent in the world.
A few hundred thousand people will tune in and make the wager of staying up late to watch, on the offhand chance this fight ends by exhilarating early stoppage and doesn’t devolve into a five-round slog.
But honestly? It could go either way.
If any weight class embodies the phrase “it is what it is,” it’s heavyweight.
Which is not to say the entire division is lost property. On those rare instances that Cain Velasquez and Fabricio Werdum can both be healthy enough to make their bookings, the action can be great. There’s nothing in sports like the electricity that surrounds a big heavyweight fight.
It’s just that those occurrences are the exception and not the rule.
The rule typically looks a lot more like Mir and Hunt. Two fearsome and relatively well-known individuals playing out the back nine of their careers the best way they know how.
They’ll fight.
We’ll watch.
It might be bad.
It might be good.
And that’s all you need to know about that.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com