He is the greatest of all time. He does what others can’t. He breaks the rules, then makes you may for it.He, of course, is the current UFC middleweight champion and greatest fighter in MMA history, Anderson Silva. On Saturday night, he earned a first …
He is the greatest of all time. He does what others can’t. He breaks the rules, then makes you may for it.
He, of course, is the current UFC middleweight champion and greatest fighter in MMA history, Anderson Silva. On Saturday night, he earned a first round TKO victory over Stephan Bonnar in a light heavyweight fight.
In the process, Silva became the first person to legitimately finish Bonnar during his career, and it took less than five minutes for him to do so.
Let’s see where Silva sits in the pound-for-pound rankings after another dominant fight.
(Heading into his bout at UFC 144, Jackson found strength in the words of his former Shaolin master: “Ret ra rage fro froo you.” Ten minutes later, this happened.)
Rampage Jackson’s ongoing feud with the UFC — which we feel so far removed from that we’ve all but completely forgotten what started it in the first place (money? boring fights? stank bref?) — has clearly taken a toll on both his popularity and his fighting career over the years, as Twitter rants and rape videos are wont to do. After getting submitted by Jon Jones at UFC 135, Jackson showed up heavy, then got wrestlefucked by Ryan Bader when we last saw him, in a performance that would quickly be out-shined (not in a good way) by his hilariously awkward foray into the Japanese hip hop scene later that evening. Needless to say, it appeared as if the power-bombing, Liddell era-ending Rampage we all came to know and love was but a distant memory.
Jackson was then expected to finally bid the UFC adieu at last weekend’s UFC 153 event against Brazilian slugger Glover Teixeira, but then yada yada yada he got injured. Teixeira would go on to beat the ever-loving dogshit out of Fabio Maldonado, whereas Jackson would go on to eat the ever loving shit out of some chili cheese FRITOS. But after consuming those heavenly bits of artificially flavored corn and realizing that Teixeira was in fact a legitimate opponent to build his post-UFC resume on, Jackson quickly doubled back on his “I don’t care who I fight anymore” mentality and proceeded to call Teixeira out on Twitter:
Yo @danawhite set up that fight with Glover please! Lets give him what he wants..fans I won’t let u down #fightofthenight
Dana White quickly responded with “sounds good bro,” which basically means that this thing is a done deal. Basically.
(Heading into his bout at UFC 144, Jackson found strength in the words of his former Shaolin master: “Ret ra rage fro froo you.” Ten minutes later, this happened.)
Rampage Jackson’s ongoing feud with the UFC — which we feel so far removed from that we’ve all but completely forgotten what started it in the first place (money? boring fights? stank bref?) — has clearly taken a toll on both his popularity and his fighting career over the years, as Twitter rants and rape videos are wont to do. After getting submitted by Jon Jones at UFC 135, Jackson showed up heavy, then got wrestlefucked by Ryan Bader when we last saw him, in a performance that would quickly be out-shined (not in a good way) by his hilariously awkward foray into the Japanese hip hop scene later that evening. Needless to say, it appeared as if the power-bombing, Liddell era-ending Rampage we all came to know and love was but a distant memory.
Jackson was then expected to finally bid the UFC adieu at last weekend’s UFC 153 event against Brazilian slugger Glover Teixeira, but then yada yada yada he got injured. Teixeira would go on to beat the ever-loving dogshit out of Fabio Maldonado, whereas Jackson would go on to eat the ever loving shit out of some chili cheese FRITOS. But after consuming those heavenly bits of artificially flavored corn and realizing that Teixeira was in fact a legitimate opponent to build his post-UFC resume on, Jackson quickly doubled back on his “I don’t care who I fight anymore” mentality and proceeded to call Teixeira out on Twitter:
Yo @danawhite set up that fight with Glover please! Lets give him what he wants..fans I won’t let u down #fightofthenight
Dana White quickly responded with “sounds good bro,” which basically means that this thing is a done deal. Basically.
As Glover stated in his post-fight interview, he would love the chance to face a “motivated” Rampage, who he considers to be one of his idols (Author’s note: Dude, we need to find you some better idols.), so it looks like the rematch we’ve all been kinda sorta waiting for is looming on the horizon once again. Yayyyy…..
We’re not going to delve into this any further until the fight is actually booked, but now that Glover has established himself as a fighter worthy of a big name, this matchup seems to make even more sense than it did before. Agree or disagree? And while we’re at it, who you got?
For some months now, Glover Teixeira has been the most hyped fighter in the UFC. At UFC 153 on Saturday he proved why. He stopped the otherwise unstoppable Fabio Maldonado at the end of the second round, leaving Maldonado’s face a bloody mess. We&rsquo…
For some months now, Glover Teixeira has been the most hyped fighter in the UFC. At UFC 153 on Saturday he proved why.
He stopped the otherwise unstoppable Fabio Maldonado at the end of the second round, leaving Maldonado’s face a bloody mess.
However, one man is noted to have immediately jumped at the chance.
Quinton “Rampage” Jackson has only one fight left on his contract, and he wants to go out with a bang.
He was originally due to face the Teixeira in Rio deJaneiro, Brazil this past weekend, however, an injury forced Maldonado to step in.
And now, after the dust has settled from that fight, both men are again vocalising their desires for a meeting between them.
“I’d like to fight Quinton Jackson; he’s talking a load of crap about me. I never talked sh*t about him,” Teixeira said after his fight (H/T ESPN).
“He’s my idol; I loved that guy in Pride. He said I was talking bad about him, but I wasn’t; he’s talking bad about me. Step in the ring with me. I’ll fight anyone.”
Rampage was quick to respond, tweeting a plea to his boss to set up the fight:
Yo @danawhite set up that fight with Glover please! Lets give him what he wants..fans I won’t let u down #fightofthenight
Critics of the match will say that it makes no sense for Teixeira to take a fight against a man coming off two losses and with one foot already out of the UFC.
Rampage may have been a legend in his heyday, but at this point in his career, he can hardly be considered the top-five opponent which would, rightly, land Teixeira a shot against light heavyweight champion Jon Jones.
However, there are many reasons why this fight does make sense.
Despite how his career has slipped of late, Rampage is still a massive draw in MMA. Having fought two relatively unknowns in Kyle Kingsbury and Maldonado, a fight against Rampage would get Teixeira massive amounts of exposure.
What’s more, the former light heavyweight champion is still a big step up from both Kingsbury and Maldonado, a step in the right direction for the Brazilian’s career.
But, despite all this, one of the more compelling reasons is that both men are two of the most exciting fighters in MMA. They both look for the finish and are comfortable swinging punches in the pocket to the satisfaction of bloodthirsty fans.
There are inherent dangers in this, however, for Teixeira more than Rampage. The latter is already looking to end his career, but if Teixeira lets himself get caught by a Rampage short hook, it could set back his title aspirations by years.
We saw Maldonado come close to knocking him out on Saturday. A single counter-strike had Teixeira on wobbly legs and almost put an end to all the hype. There’s a chance that this could happen again, and it would not do to lose to Jackson as it would to say another top five like Rua.
Still, a win would reward Teixeira in his MMA career, and it would be a great fight and a great swan song for Rampage.
It seems clear at this point that no single strategy is sufficient to beat Anderson Silva. For a while there, we thought that high level wrestling might be enough to halt Silva’s record-breaking run. Then “The Spider” made it abundant…
It seems clear at this point that no single strategy is sufficient to beat Anderson Silva.
For a while there, we thought that high level wrestling might be enough to halt Silva’s record-breaking run. Then “The Spider” made it abundantly clear that wrestling alone is only effective if he happens to be recovering from double knee surgery or nursing a broken rib.
No, beating the 37-year-old Brazilian requires something a little extra special. It demands a potently eclectic mixture of skills, a high level combination of wrestling, jiu jitsu and striking—a durable chin would also come in handy for when things get a little hairy.
There are a few members of the UFC roster who have the skills to get the job done, and I doubt you will be surprised by who they are.
At the risk of hopping on the bandwagon, Chris Weidman has just the right skill-set to give Anderson a headache—both literally and figuratively.
However, I would simply be repeating myself if I elaborated on why the former All-American wrestler would pose problems for Silva. Read this article from earlier today if that particular matchup intrigues you.
The perennial pound-for-pound No. 2, Georges St-Pierre, has recently been discussed as a potential opponent for “The Spider” next year.
Though he wouldn’t be the favourite coming into the fight, the Canadian star has, at the risk of sounding like Liam Neeson, a particular set of skills that would make him a formidable opponent for the middleweight champion.
The problem for GSP is that he is considerably smaller than Anderson Silva.
However, this may not be as big an issue for him as it would be for some. The long-time welterweight king boasts the kind of athleticism that would allow him to overcome the size disparity.
Perhaps more importantly, GSP is arguably the most dominant wrestler in the sport—despite having no wrestling background. And as ever, this is the key piece of the puzzle.
If you can’t get the Brazilian to the floor, you might as well shake hands and depart the cage—even if GSP is a proficient striker in his own right.
Once on your back, the Montreal native possesses a smothering top game. Indeed, he has proven himself to be one of the sport’s best guard passers, slicing through the legendary guards of BJ Penn and Jon Fitch like a hot knife through butter.
If the pair do meet in the Summer of 2013, do not expect GSP to sit in Silva’s guard and play around with the Brazilian’s tricky bottom game. Rather, he is likely to utilise his passing skills to dodge that particular bullet.
It might not be pretty, but there’s no doubt that St-Pierre has the skill and athleticism to get the job done.
Perhaps the man with the best shot at dethroning the pound-for-pound king is Jon “Bones” Jones—the mention of his name here will come as no surprise to most of you. In fact, he may even enter the contest as favourite, given his size advantage.
Not only does the New Yorker have a terrific wrestling base, but he may be the one fighter on the roster who can compete with Silva’s striking.
While Jones may not be as technical as the Brazilian, his height and reach have thus far proven to be his biggest assets.
He might be able to keep “The Spider” at arm’s length while he searches for openings to initiate grappling exchanges—allow me to again stress that he might be able to.
Yet despite posing a whole host of physical issues for opponents on the feet, Jones would look to put Silva on his back and make use of his near-peerless ground-and-pound, mixing up punches with his razor-sharp elbows.
At this point, it will take a truly next generation mixed martial artist to stifle Silva’s talents. And the aforementioned athletes may be the only ones equipped to do it in the current mixed martial arts landscape.
I’m not a fan of Stephan Bonnar—nor are most people, if Twitter is anything to go by. According to our own Twitter rankings from last August, Bonnar is nowhere in the top 40 most-followed UFC fighters currently signed with the promotion. Wh…
I’m not a fan of Stephan Bonnar—nor are most people, if Twitter is anything to go by.
According to our own Twitter rankings from last August, Bonnar is nowhere in the top 40 most-followed UFC fighters currently signed with the promotion.
Which means that Bonnar’s insistence after his fight against Kyle Kingsbury last year that he’ll only come out of semi-retirement if the UFC lines up a fight against someone with more Twitter followers than himdidn’t actually mean much. Any number of fighters could be chosen.
However, with the strange way that the universe works, and after campaigning hard for months to be given a big name opponent to end his career, Bonnar was given the man with more Twitter followers than any other in the world of MMA—Anderson Silva.
Bonnar’s Twitter obsession comes from an inconsistent career which has seen this little-more-than-average fighter finish with a 15-8 record after what could be his last fight on Saturday. As far as Bonnar sees it, the UFC has lined up too many unknown opponents who went on to become superstars following their victory over him, rather than the other way round.
He’s talking about Jon Jones.
Bonnar was Jones’ second opponent in the UFC and was a fighter the TUF alumni was meant to beat comfortably. But instead, Jones broke him apart over three rounds and has gone on to become the most dominant light heavyweight since Tito Ortiz.
Bonnar was left far in the distance, fading to further losses after that fight and becoming little more than a journeyman before Silva was offered to him.
However, when we’re talking about “legacy” and Bonnar, we are obliged to mention his performance on the first finale of TUF and his fight against Forrest Griffin, which Dana White once referred to as the most important fight in the promotion’s history.
It’s hardly that.
That fight went down in 2005, the UFC’s middle years, and its importance has long been superseded by endless turning points that have seen MMA become one of the fastest-growing sports in the world.
Few MMA fans, who joined the sport post-Brock Lesnar—and that includes the vast majority of followers of the sport—will remember that fight.
Nor are they likely to remember many of his other fights. All his subsequent decision losses to Rashad Evans, Forrest Griffin (again) or Mark Coleman are instantly forgettable. So too are his occasional wins against obsolete fighters such as Mike Nickels, Eric Schafer or KrzysztofSoszynski.
In the end, his two losses to two greats of the sport, Jones and Silva, will linger much longer in the memory.
Against Silva, he gave us an opportunity to see the Brazilian’s sublime brilliance in the cage against a completely inadequate opponent—and for that, we thank you, Bonnar.
The first time I really felt I understood Anderson Silva was almost four years ago at UFC 90. I was in Chicago to cover the UFC as it hit the Windy City for the first time. Silva, it seemed, was well on his way to being a star; a legitimate box office …
The first time I really felt I understood Anderson Silva was almost four years ago at UFC 90. I was in Chicago to cover the UFC as it hit the Windy City for the first time. Silva, it seemed, was well on his way to being a star; a legitimate box office draw in the days the UFC needed a star badly, when Brock Lesnar was still an experiment and not an automatic million buys on pay-per-view.
Silva had absolutely annihilated everyone and every thing in his path, including the UFC’s middleweight poster boy Rich Franklin (twice) and Pride champion Dan Henderson. He had even taken a journey to light heavyweight where he made short work of James Irvin.
It was that night in Chicago where the wheels fell off Silva, at least as a box office attraction. Against Patrick Cote, a Canadian fighter who had won four consecutive fights in the UFC but who no one mistook for a legitimate challenger to a man like Silva, the middleweight was clearly bored. As a dance display, I gave it high marks:
He sashayed around the cage gracefully, but the fans were hoping for more fisticuffs and less lambada. Cote was the only one in attendance who was happy with Silva’s game plan—he was happy just to survive.
It was fairly clear from the start that Cote was no match for Silva. But rather than look to make an early night of it, Silva danced. It was almost like he felt disrespected at Cote’s mere presence across the cage from him. The titular challenger was a challenger in name only.
“What was he doing?” a reporter for one of the local dailies asked me after the fight. Dana White didn’t have an answer for that, telling us after the fight that, “I think I’m living in an alternate universe. That was Bizarro world…normally he annihilates people.”
But I thought I understood.
“He was having fun,” I told one of what was then a new breed of mainstream reporters following the sport. “Like a kid pulling legs off a helpless bug.”
If White found Silva’s display against Cote bizarre, he was in for a rude surprise. The champion was just getting started. He gesticulated and clowned throughout a title defense against Thales Leites, and did so little in his fight with Demian Maia in Abu Dhabi that White furiously stalked to the back before the fight was over.
Silva didn’t seem interested in fighting Maia at all, passively watching for much of the fight’s 25 minutes, occasionally exploding in furious bits of violence, screaming “Come on, hit me in the face, playboy.”
The uproar over the Maia fight seemed to dampen Silva’s instincts to tantalize and taunt his overmatched foes. He focused on business in his next few bouts, saving the shenanigans for before and after the fight.
He seemingly delighted in pretending that washed-up action star Steven Seagal was teaching him special techniques for his fights, and had a glint in his eye while inviting arch nemesis Chael Sonnen to a post-fight barbecue. Silva was still having fun, but in the cage he was as serious as anyone could ask him to be.
That mask slipped a little against Stephan Bonnar in Brazil. Bonnar, who had never beaten a top-10 opponent and was given the fight as kind of a gold watch, commemorating a career that helped kick off the UFC’s golden era, was in deep waters and treading hard from the very beginning.
Bonnar’s game plan was to push Silva into the cage, using his bulk to try to get the better of the champion in a war of attrition—trench tactics. Silva made that easy, pointedly planting his back into the cage and daring Bonnar to come forward. The champion fought his opponent using the absolute worst strategy, giving the underdog every possible chance at beating him.
In many ways that was worse than even the most cutting trash talk. Silva’s opinion of Bonnar as an athlete were made stark right there in the cage. He would give his opponent exactly what he wanted—and still destroy him.
When I see moments like that, I always smile. It’s what makes sports fun. Essentially, anything that would make Bob Costas deliver a long rant at halftime on Sunday Night Football, or that would make aging newspaper columnists decry a generation’s lack of civility and class, makes me enormously happy.
Anderson Silva, for all the time he spends in pre-fight workouts doing kata or bowing, complete with traditional gi, is the anti-martial artist. Silva’s instincts are to taunt, to trash talk, to show everyone how much better he is than his opponent. The tenets of respect, integrity and discipline? Not really a part of his game.
Anderson Silva is an amazing fighter, but he’s a lousy traditional martial artist. If you’re looking for elaborate displays of respect, even a hint of humility, or anything that resembles the traditional fighter’s code, you’ll find none of it here. Anderson Silva doesn’t respect his opponents. He wants to humiliate and embarrass them before separating them from their senses.
None of this makes Anderson Silva a bad person. He’s an entertainer and a cage fighter, not a choir boy or McDojo sensei. His job is to make fans happy and beat people up. He’s great at it. The best of all time. But as a role model, he fits squarely in the Charles Barkley camp; an athlete to marvel at and admire, but not one to emulate.
For some months now, Glover Teixeira has been the most hyped fighter in the UFC. At