Thirteen months ago, Chris Weidman’s left knee snapped Anderson Silva’s left tibia in two. It’s not a unique injury in combat sports – just ask Corey Hill or a handful of nameless kickboxers and MMA fighters on Youtube – and while it’s gruesome even in a vacuum, our reaction was so visceral on account of it happening to the arguably the greatest fighter of our generation. This is 1998 Michael Jordan getting his arm caught in the rim, screaming in pain while he hangs with his humerus in two pieces, or 2006 Barry Bonds’ brain matter splattered over home plate after an errant fastball. We expect to see our heroes fall, but we don’t expect to see pa take them out back with a shotgun.
Years of watching MMA, both as a fan and as a fringe member of the media, has left me more or less immune to the overwhelming majority of fights I watch today, but I distinctly remember a feeling of dread inhabit my stomach as my guests filed out post-UFC 168. This was Anderson Silva’s last fight – I had no doubts, and what a terrible way for an athlete of his caliber and legacy to go out.
And yet here we are a short thirteen months later, and Anderson Silva is some 48 hours from fighting Nick Diaz at UFC 183. Even more incredibly, the UFC has stated Silva will earn another crack at the middleweight title with a win over a man who has never fought at the full middleweight limit. It seems awfully cynical considering Silva’s public reluctance to fight for the belt after the first fight with Chris Weidman and the now-swelling list of contenders at middleweight. It’s a fight Silva should win – sportsbooks list him as a -450 favorite, but I wonder if this UFC will reconsider should Silva put in an underwhelming performance against an undersized opponent.
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The UFC deserves a round of applause for their promotional efforts this month. It’s fair to say that Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier made things easy for the company heading into UFC 182, but the UFC could have distanced themselves from the “controversies” while doing their usual cookie-cutter promotion of the pay-per-view. Instead, they shoved all their chips in the middle, which included painting Jones in a less-than-favorable light, if not as a full villain. It worked.
They also did the right thing for Conor McGregor’s fight with Dennis Siver. Siver was nothing more than a placeholder for McGregor. Instead of trying to build up Siver as a credible threat, the UFC instead used the time to promote McGregor, ultimately using the bout as the beginning rounds of promotional work for the latter’s inevitable title fight against Jose Aldo. It worked.
The marketing for UFC 183 has been no less impressive. They’re focusing on Silva and Diaz as individuals with individual stories. This is not “Nick Diaz is an animal, can ‘the Spider’ catch him in his web?” (which, hey, wouldn’t be a bad tagline either!). This is not about genericizing two of the most unique talents and personalities in the sport. This is about Anderson Silva’s journey back from injury and Nick Diaz…being Nick Diaz. We’ll find out if it works (and Silva’s grown into enough of a draw that it should sell well regardless), but let’s hope the UFC’s work this month is less of a blip and more of a trend.
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Speaking of Diaz being Diaz, he “went missing” after “not boarding his scheduled flight” earlier in the week. This was such a spontaneous and organic series of events that the UFC had a film crew at the airport to catch his scheduled flight taxiing away (complete with audio of calls for “Nick Diaz” from the gate attendant) from the gate and Dana White tweeting a Photoshopped picture of Diaz on a milk carton.
I mean, sure, maybe this is all legitimate, and Dana White is being honest when he says he’s all chill about it because he’s used to it at this point and he knows Nick show up for fights. And if that’s the case, that’s great, because the UFC should have known what they were getting into when they got into the Nick Diaz business from the start.
But it all seems so phony, like when WWE coopts an organic catch phrase and turns it into a #movement. That’s not to say it isn’t smart, because part of Diaz’s charm is that he operates on his own wavelength, and it’s prudent to work with that instead of against it.
