Rich Franklin has always taken the road less traveled in his MMA fighting career.
A former math teacher in Ohio, Franklin has always kept his head down and let his hard work do the talking, an approach that helped him climb to the top of the middleweight division and defeat Evan Tanner for the UFC title in June 2005.
There has never been a better role model for the sport.
Franklin accomplished the highest honor in securing UFC gold, and he will one day walk across the stage and accept his plaque from UFC President Dana White as an inductee into the UFC Hall of Fame.
What else does he have to prove? Is it time for him to retire?
In October, Franklin will celebrate his 38th birthday. He is probably stronger mentally than he’s ever been in his entire career, but physically, things are slowly beginning to taper off for the former middleweight champ.
His chin and reflexes aren’t what they used to be. Despite Franklin’s incredible ability to recover, it doesn’t take much to put him on wobbly these days.
He continues to see improvement in his striking, but his overall speed and reaction time has steadily declined over the years.
Franklin is one of the hardest workers in all of MMA, but Father Time makes humans of us all.
With that said, Franklin still has much to offer the UFC and the middleweight division. It shouldn’t come as a shock if he even finds a way to climb back into title contention. There aren’t many middleweights out there with his size and experience.
He is certainly at his strongest at 185 pounds, and it’ll be interesting to see how he matches up against some of the other upper-echelon contenders.
People tend to get hasty about pushing fighters into retirement, but honestly, only the fighter and his camp can truly decide when it’s time to hang up the gloves.
It doesn’t look like Franklin plans on doing that anytime soon.
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