I was all set Saturday night for UFC 162. It had a good card and it had Anderson Silva headlining the event. I didn’t know anything about his opponent, Chris Weidman, but it didn’t matter. It was a chance to see Silva fight. Anderson Silva is one of those once in a lifetime athletes. A Jordan or Ali if you will–they don’t come around often. So any time you get the chance to see them do their thing, you take it. We watch them because they do things that no other person in their profession can, so there is a certain magic in the air whenever it’s time to watch. Little did I know I was about to see something I totally didn’t expect.

The first round started off well enough. Some strikes were thrown but it ended up on the ground. Weidman was doing fine, he attempted a heel hook that Silva evaded but it made for interesting viewing. What didn’t make for interesting viewing was what happened shortly after they got up.

Silva likes to showboat sometimes. He’s not the only one guilty of it, there are plenty of examples of athletes and entertainers showboating and taunting their opponents/audiences. All of a sudden he starts dancing around and dropping his guard–he even slaps his face a few times telling Weidman to hit him. This continues into the second round, dancing around, taunting and the like when all of sudden, standing in a horse stance pretending to be injured from a previous blow, Silva gets caught slipping and gets rocked in the jaw by Weidman. With his eyes rolled snuggly back in his head, he careened towards the canvas, knocked out. Weidman follows up with a few more punches just to make sure and like that, it was over. Knocked out in the second round because he disrespected his opponent.

I’m not taking anything away from Weidman, after all, he’s done something that no person since 2006 has done, beat Anderson Silva. Not only that, but he knocked him out. Now granted, Silva did have his guard down, fooling around, but that’s his fault. Weidman did exactly what a trained professional fighter is supposed to do in a situation like that. Even after the fight Weidman was respectful to his opponent. It’s funny because during the break between the two rounds, you could hear Weidman’s corner man telling him to punch a hole in Silva’s chest because he was leaving his guard down. I guess he’ll take a knock out instead.

At first I was a little upset about Silva’s behavior but in the end, I think it was a good thing for the sport. From a technical aspect it teaches the importance of keeping your guards up and taking your opponent seriously. These are trained professionals, and anyone can get knocked out. It also teaches you that anyone can lose and that you should never count someone out, even if you haven’t heard of him. Just because I didn’t know his name before doesn’t mean he wasn’t doing his job. One things for sure, we all know his name now, and it will be interesting to see how he deals with the shark infested waters of his division. I overheard someone else in his corner after the match say that they needed to work on protecting from those leg kicks. That’s a good sign that he has on point trainers that are already looking at improvements.

On the other side I think it teaches an important lesson about the pressures of being on top, especially for so long like Silva has. At 38 years of age with no signs of slowing down, Silva has been at the top of the mountain for a long time. Many have tried to dethrone him and all have failed, even while taunting them in the same manor as Weidman. But with everyone telling you how awesome you are all the time and how you can’t lose, I’m sure that gets to you after a while. He is a proud Brazilian and carries the hopes of his country with him when he fights. He has a family with children that look up to and admire their legendary fighter father.  He has valuable sponsorships to adhere to, magazine interviews, training sessions…who knows what else, but he’s been dealing with it for awhile. Not to mention maybe he feels that there isn’t anymore challenge in it. What else does he have left to prove? Perhaps by getting knocked out and losing his title, a new fire will be lit under him and he’ll seek it again. That all depends on Vitor Belfort first, but that’s a whole other story.

None of this changes anything about Silva in my eyes. He will always be a legend. He’s just a legend who lost. And for whatever reasons he did what he did. Weidman came to fight and he won, whether or not he would have under different circumstances is irrelevant, we can only go by what we have seen. I think Weidman has a lot of potential and I can’t wait to see him have his first title defense. As far as Silva goes, I’d love to see him back in the octagon but it’s up to him on what he thinks is best for him and his family. Either way, I’m grateful for the awesome fights I’ve seen him in and if this is the end of his career we can all say it was a thing to see.