Anderson Silva: Is it better to burn out than to fade away?

E. Spencer Kyte

Anderson Silva: Is it better to burn out than to fade away? image

There is a scene early in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s terrific novel High Fidelty that provides a question I ask myself frequently about athletes in all sports.

Right after the self-described “middle-aged square guy” tells Jack Black’s elitist-slacker sales clerk Barry off and leaves the store, the proprietor of Championship Records, Rob Gordon, portrayed, by John Cusack, comes out of the back office and sarcastically praises his friend/employee for his handling of the situation.

This prompts Barry to ask a terrific and difficult-to-answer sub-question to his original inquiry about the Top 5 musical crimes perpetrated by Stevie Wonder in the ‘80s and ‘90s: is it better to burn out than to fade away?

(Warning: clip contains language that is NSFW; viewer discretion is advised)

 

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot as UFC 237 draws nearer because this weekend’s fight card features an athlete who fits the Stevie Wonder role in this thought exercise — Anderson “The Spider” Silva.

The long-time middleweight champion is now 44 years old and enters Saturday’s co-main event pairing with dangerous, but unheralded divisional newcomer Jared Cannonier. Silva currently has a 1-5 record with one No Contest result over the last five years and change — and that single victory was a unanimous decision win over Derek Brunson at UFC 209 a little over two years ago and felt very suspect at the time.

While some will argue that he beat Michael Bisping when the two clashed in London, dropping him at the close of the third round, only to have the fight continue and “The Count” rally to win a unanimous decision victory, or that losing to current champions Daniel Cormier (on short notice) or Israel Adesanya isn’t all that bad.

And they’re right on the latter front — Silva acquitted himself well in both instances, forcing younger, athletically superior athletes in their prime to fight cautiously, acutely aware of the threats he presents and wholly willing to win a safe decision rather than put themselves in harm’s way in order to chance a finish.

But it doesn’t change the fact that Silva still has more suspensions as a result of positive tests for banned performance-enhancing substances in the last five years (two) than he does victories (one) and the outlook for him experiencing some kind of grand turnaround isn’t great.

As ESPN’s Brett Okamoto argued earlier this week, it feels like everyone involved in mapping out this final chapter of Silva’s career seems like they’re doing so without a plan and that isn’t good because with each loss, with each tepid performance, the incomparable greatness that defined the Brazilian legend’s historic reign over the middleweight division moves further and further into the past and his place in the pantheon of all-time greats starts to get called into question.

That’s where the High Fidelity, Stevie Wonder question comes into play and seems quite apt.

For people of a certain age the only Stevie Wonder they know is the one who sang “I Just Called to Say I Love You” or “Part-Time Lover,” which were pop hits in the ‘80s, but departures from the dynamite music he put out throughout the ‘70s.

The same applies to Silva, who lost the middleweight title nearly six years ago and is a shadow of the electric showman who ruled the middleweight division for 2,457 days between UFC 64 to UFC 162. He’s in his “making pop records in the ‘80s” phase, where his name still carries weight, but the efforts aren’t nearly as good and it just makes you nostalgic for the good old days.

The trouble is those days are long gone, yet Silva is still hanging around and it forces you to start re-evaluating his legacy.

Nothing will ever diminish what he accomplished from the mid-aughts through his first meeting with Chris Weidman — a record 16-fight winning streak, 11 consecutive successful title defenses, the “Neo in The Matrix” performance against Forrest Griffin, and the comeback against Chael Sonnen are all woven into the fabric of this sport and moments that anyone who experienced them live or watched them play out in real time will forever recognize as unassailable.

But the longer he keeps going, the more losses that pile up, the further down the competitive ladder he slides, the more ground he loses in the “Greatest of All Time” conversation and the more potential there is for an athlete who was once universally regarded as one of the three best fighters of all-time to slip in the standings.

Fighters don’t necessarily have to care about the legacy they leave behind or take it into consideration when determining whether to continue competing or when to walk away, but we talk about legacy all the time and there is no way to dismiss the latter-day struggles of a legendary talent like Silva when trying to figure out his place in the historical hierarchy of mixed martial arts’ greatest fighters.

The greatest evidence of this comes when you compare Silva to his long-time historical rival, welterweight kingpin Georges St-Pierre.

The two dominated their respective divisions at the same time, racking up lengthy winning streaks and title reigns, but when St-Pierre went on sabbatical following his split decision win over Johny Hendricks at UFC 167, very few people would have had the French-Canadian superstar ahead of Silva in the “Greatest of All Time” race.

But it’s a different story now.

St-Pierre has fought just once since then, returning in November 2017 to extend his winning streak to 13 (and counting) while winning the middleweight title from Michael Bisping. Silva has six times during that span, going 1-4 with his No Contest result from UFC 183 and two suspensions and it has resulted in St-Pierre overtaking him in the GOAT discussion.

And if things keep going as they have for Silva, he’s at risk of becoming the prime example of an incredible talent who grossly overstayed his welcome and ends up going out on an ugly stretch of results that becomes a larger part of the narrative of his career.

He is still “Anderson Silva, the greatest middleweight in UFC history,” but his grip on that title isn’t as iron-clad and a few sentences down in the story of his martial times, there has to be a line about the string of losses, suspensions and otherwise forgettable showings that defined the end of his time in the Octagon.

There is no timetable for figuring out when it’s time to retire and every competitor who steps into the cage is going to make their decisions differently.

Some will exit at a certain age or when their results start slipping. Others will go when they decide the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. Others still will stick around, convinced that a return to form is right around the corner, even though each subsequent corner brings another setback.

And some will just keep fighting because they can’t fathom doing anything else, even if that means catching losses and ceding position in the pantheon.

Personally, I’m more of a fade away guy — let me get out before the skills go south, before opinions about me start to change and before the next generation comes along and renders me obsolete.

But the real answer to Barry’s Stevie Wonder sub-question is that there is no one true answer, although having watched St-Pierre and Silva try to navigate these waters in ships running parallel with one another, it’s certainly been harder watching Silva struggle than it was seeing his welterweight contemporary receded into the background.

E. Spencer Kyte