Life is weird.
It’s not the same for all of us. There are different paths to walk, different destinations at which to arrive, a host of obstacles to be overcome along the way.
The idea of a prime, a time when you get to peak and experience the wonders of the world at the pinnacle of your physical and mental acuity, has existed for as long as researchers have been keen to study such phenomena.
In life, different people might argue different timeframes or even different primes. Those primes would probably range from ages 10-75 and be applied to any life experiences from playing video games to playing shuffleboard.
It’s all a matter of your age, acumen and interests when it comes to your prime in a given activity.
A largely agreed-upon timeframe to most though, would be athletic performance. Most would probably suggest professional athletes are at their best in the back half of their 20s, when experience meets up with optimal athletic output to put a man or woman in that sweet spot of excellence.
Sure some sports, like perhaps tennis, might skew a little younger on average while others, like combat sports, might skew slightly older, but that’s generally where many would place one’s athletic peak.
Which is what makes Ronaldo ‘Jacare’ Souza such a fascinating case study.
After his utter demolition of Gegard Mousasi at Fight Night 50 on Saturday night, the UFCs hottest middleweight contender set a new bar for peaking late. Though he’s been an active MMA competitor since 2003, he’s clearly entered the prime of his career over a decade later, as his 35th birthday approaches.
The Mousasi win, salvation for a loss he suffered to the Dutchman six years ago, was his seventh in a row. Six of those have come by stoppage, with only Francis Carmont surviving a full 15 minutes (most of which he spent being aggressively mauled by the aptly Portuguese-titled Alligator).
To state it as purely as possible, Souza is the best middleweight alive not holding the UFC title. While the ghost of Vitor Belfort (or perhaps, more appropriately, the ghost of his TRTtor incarnation) will get the next crack at Chris Weidman’s belt, it’s Souza who is the undeniable second-best 185er in the promotion.
His blend of remarkable physical tools and unparalleled jiu-jitsu acumen were always exceptional, but his ability to add a reasonable level of fistic technique as an accent to his natural power have made him essentially unstoppable.
No high-end grappling competitor has ever proven so adept at imposing his jiu-jitsu in an MMA fight, and the result has been that Souza‘s fights now look like poetic muggings as opposed to fair athletic contests. His standup is worth fearing enough that he can set up a grappling match at his leisure, while his grappling is so purely horrifying that he can wail away on the feet if he so chooses.
He’s an outright nightmare for anyone in the division, a man who rolls through the guys he should and then even more thoroughly rolls through the guys who look like a serious challenge on paper. You’ve surely heard Joe Rogan bellowing, “Who can stop this man!” on more than one broadcast, but in the case of Souza, it’s beginning to become a question with no evident answer.
And it’s all coming at an age when most guys are either too chinny to stand in the cage or too creaky to keep the pace once they get there. Against all odds, Souza is actually continuing to get better.
That basically means two things: No one should be thrilled to fight him, and it’s time we all reconsidered what it means to be in one’s athletic prime.
Every broken man Ronaldo Souza‘s leaving in his wake is evidence of that much.
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