One of the refrains we’ve been seeing lately has been about Wanderlai Silva. After being knocked out in stunning fashion by Chris Leben, the call for him to walk away from MMA has increased substantially including from UFC President Dana White. Should he do so he’d follow in the footsteps of fellow legends Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell, who in the past eighteen months walked away from the sport, both the victims of violent knockouts.
And yet some fighters find it difficult to let ago. One such example is pioneer Ken Shamrock. In an interview with FightHype.com he had some interesting words about the situation.
“You’re talking about competitors, guys that challenge themselves every single day in the gym. They get up in the morning and they live and breathe this stuff. And you’ve got writers sitting on the sidelines, criticizing warriors. How does that pan out? I’d like to grab a pen and poke them in the eye.”
And while Shamrock does have a point, as most fans of the sport have never been at the same level Shamrock has and their advice can sometimes ring hollow, there is something that Shamrock doesn’t understand – no one wants to see their heroes on a stretcher, broken.
One of the things that make MMA such a great sport is that fights can end anytime, anywhere and through a variety of reasons. On the same card you can have a Silva getting knocked out, Tito Ortiz pulling off a brilliant guillotine choke to finish Ryan Bader and an absolute clinic between Urijah Faber and Dominick Cruz. But when a fighter loses that ability to be elite, to go through a war with another man and walk away the victor, it’s as hard to swallow as a fan as it must be for a fighter. Why?
Because we’re admitting that part of our lives has passed us by.
We’re all fans of the sport, to begin with, and seeing the same people after a career of being on the rise is a nod to our own passing mortality. It reminds us that we too are getting older, that the bright lights behind us are growing dimmer. We don’t want to be reminded that the former pillars of something have been replaced with newer, younger models. It’s the same in MMA as it is in other sports … just more violently.
The one thing about the nature of sport that is universal is that it allows us to remember that time in our lives when something or someone was dominant. We want to remember the days of Silva being the most feared fighter in the world, of brutalizing anyone in his path and having perhaps the most appropriate nickname for his style in the short history of MMA. We don’t want to remember Silva being on the receiving end of violent knockouts from strikes he used to walk through in his prime in the same way we don’t want to remember Willie Mays unable to track down fly balls or Johnny Unitas short-arming passes he used to make without a problem.
It’s hard to watch our heroes lose the skill-set that once made them famous. It’s even harder to see guys like Liddell and Silva, whom used to take untold amounts of punishment without flinching, dropping unconscious at things they used to shrug off.
The part that makes it hard in combat sports is that an athlete can’t be relegated to a minor or role, or be a sixth man off the bench, like you can in other sports. Fighting takes place front and center; there’s no way to hide a decline in ability once you step into that cage. Seeing Shamrock reduced to fighting in freak-show fights, like the one he has with James Toney, takes away from the memories of him fighting in the early days of the sport. If Ken Shamrock had been in the NFL, he’d be the equivalent of having had the career of Brian Urlacher and trying to play in the Arena League poorly.
Part of seeing heroes of old in any sport is acknowledging their place and time. We don’t want to admit that their time in the limelight, to be the best, has passed. We don’t want to see Urlacher riding the pine for the Kansas City Command, still hanging on to a dream that has long since passed, in the same way we don’t want to see fighters like Shamrock hanging on when by all accounts they ought to consider retirement.
