With a tough decision loss to Rich Franklin on Saturday night at UFC 147 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, former PRIDE star Wanderlei Silva’s future has been set in stone.
It’s time for the MMA legend to retire from the sport that he helped bring to the mainstream.
After seven losses in his last 10 fights, the once-feared fighter has become nothing more than a shell of the man that wreaked havoc on the middleweight and light heavyweight divisions.
The Brazilian brawler has gone from The Axe Murderer to the middleweight gatekeeper; that’s not how this legend should end his career. It’s time to get out before the end gets any harder to watch.
Silva told ESPN following his unanimous decision loss about his chance to end the fight and how he couldn’t finish Franklin off:
At the end of the second round, I thought I was going to knock him out but I wasn’t able to. I pushed it a bit too much. I wanted to knock him out.
There was a time in Silva’s career when he could have ended any human being on earth’s night early, but the fact that he admitted that he didn’t have the power or speed to do it was a scary proposition.
Without his KO power, Silva is not an upper-echelon fighter.
Dana White and the UFC need to sit down with the star and let him know that his new style of fighting isn’t working and that it may be time to hang up his gloves for good.
Don’t get me wrong, Franklin deserves plenty of credit in this fight for taking what Silva was offering and handling it, but the hometown hero didn’t have the skills anymore to end the fight early.
As hard as it will be to say goodbye, Silva’s run is over. It’s time to walk away.
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