Issue 113

April 2014

It’s one thing to defeat a legend once, but to do it twice inside six months is something truly special. In 2013, the seven-year reign of pound-for-pound great Anderson Silva was ended. The Chris Weidman era has now begun. 

How many people actually believed Chris Weidman last spring, when he said he was going to defeat Anderson Silva? Not many. How could they? He was facing unequivocally the greatest mixed martial artist the world had ever known, and Weidman had fewer than 10 fights to his name, hadn’t fought in a year due to a shoulder injury and was still pretty much homeless after his neighborhood was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Yet when the final bells tolled on New Year’s Eve, Weidman stood atop of the middleweight mountain with the UFC belt wrapped around his waist after defying the odds not once, but twice in just six months.

It took Weidman four years to get himself into position for a title shot, defeating a series of top-ranked contenders in the process. He sent Tom Lawlor to sleep with a D’arce choke, battered former middleweight contender Demian Maia on just 11 days’ notice and knocked out Mark Munoz with a standing elbow so devastating it left a forehead scar still visible to this day.

Yet, while all those wins were impressive, stepping up to face the champion was a completely different prospect. Up to that point, 16 men had attempted to defeat ‘The Spider’ since his arrival in the UFC in 2006, and each and every one had failed, as if the task was simply not possible. But history didn’t faze Weidman as July’s UFC 162 main event approached. 

“Obviously I was fighting the greatest of all time so people thought I was going to lose the fight, but that got me excited to prove them wrong, you know. This was a matchup I’d wanted for a long time and I finally got it,” explained Weidman, who was a 2-1 underdog last summer.

“(In the Silva vs. Sonnen fight) he was taken down a bunch of times and that’s something I wanted to try and do. However, I watched that fight live and watched it another time and I wasn’t trying to do exactly what Chael did. I wanted to be Chris Weidman, not Chael Sonnen, because I think that’s a more devastating matchup for Silva than Chael Sonnen was.” 

And it most certainly was a devastating pairing for the former middleweight great, as he was taken down by Weidman in the opening round, just narrowly escaping a kneebar attempt. However, it wasn’t a submission hold that eventually took Silva out – incredibly the Brazilian was defeated in the stand-up, an area in which no man in the world had ever previously looked close to challenging him.  

Relying on his speed and fantastic head movement, Silva tried to duck and dodge Weidman’s punches before being caught with a knockout left hook. Weidman had done the unthinkable.

“We expected him to do things like that (drop his hands during the fight). He’s done it plenty of times in a lot of fights. I don’t see him as being cocky, I see it as him trying to mentally defeat you and that’s just part of the warfare; it’s like any type of style and it works for him,” Weidman said of Silva’s apparent lack of any defense, following the fight.

“I tried to not let it get in my head and I was trying to walk forward and keep     throwing my punches, and then it got to the point where he was still doing it and I said to myself, ‘Screw this, I’m going to hit him.’ I believed in my power and I work with Ray Longo for my striking. We brought in all these national champion boxers and they never came back for sparring.” 

Even though his performance in the first fight was devastating, it was quickly announced the pair would rematch five months later at UFC 168. However, Weidman showing the maturity of a champion took it all in his stride. After all, he’d predicted he would beat Silva and then have to rematch him, long before his hand was raised at UFC 162. 

He adds: “I always knew that this would be a two-fight deal. I knew there would be a rematch, because I always knew I would beat him. But when you beat a guy everyone considers the greatest, and after a win streak like his, then you have to be ready for an immediate rematch. We were well prepared for that.”

And why wouldn’t they be? After all, Longo and his former world champion upsetter Matt Serra was forced to jump back in with Georges St Pierre, having first been matched with Matt Hughes, after he KO’d the Canadian to claim the UFC welterweight title back at UFC 69. 

So this time, the Longo-Serra and now Weidman team were well prepared for the post-fight press conference calls for a second fight. And for head coach Longo, any previous doubts in the mind of the new champion regarding his ability to defeat Silva had now vanished, and he predicted the second fight outcome last summer.

“Chris will walk into the rematch in December even more confident than he was in the first fight. He knows what to expect now with all the mugging and showboating,” Longo stated. “I think Anderson’s fans are going to have to come to terms with the fact it’s over, and their guy is going to get bashed up once again.”

The rematch

By the time UFC 168 swung around, Team Weidman was truly blossoming. “There are always pressures in every camp, but for the second fight with Anderson, it was actually a whole lot less. I had a lot less on my plate for that camp, and a lot more things were going my way compared to the last fight,” Weidman recalled. “Then, I was coming off a year-long lay-off and Hurricane Sandy, plus there were also question marks in the back of my head. 

“But for my last camp there were no question marks and zero reasons as to why I should lose the fight. I didn’t even have to work on closing those doubts: there just weren’t any at all.”

And that lack of pressure clearly shone through as Weidman once again knocked the Brazilian down, before the fight ended rather freakishly in the second round when Silva snapped his left tibia and fibula bones after launching a leg kick at Weidman’s thigh, only for it to connect with the New Yorker’s knee.

Weidman recalls: “In the first fight, the one thing he really capitalized on was the leg kicks and probably the most important thing we focused on for the camp was stopping his leg kicks.

“Ray Longo has actually broke a guy’s leg using what he calls ‘The Destruction’ – which is when your opponent goes to kick you but you put your knee on his shin. I did it a couple times in sparring and guys take about a minute off, walk around and then they’re OK; and at least it stops them from kicking you.

“However, to break someone’s leg, I’ve never done that before and I didn’t want to see Anderson Silva get hurt like that.”

Longo meanwhile, is just happy his latest superstar is beginning to get the respect he deserves. Being crowned ‘Fighter of the Year’ legitimizes Weidman’s achievements thus far, according to Longo, who is excited by the real potential the champion possesses.

“Everybody Chris fights he beats,” he says simply. “How can you complain about that? But they did, for a very long time. He beats Mark Munoz, and all of a sudden Munoz is an old fat guy. He beats up Demian Maia, then Demian Maia is just a 170lb’er. They keep coming up with s**t. 

“Nobody wanted to face the fact of how good this kid is. And it actually became quite annoying. Not annoying enough to take me off of anything or distract me, but if you’re asking the question: yeah, it was annoying. And it’s still happening.

“After the first fight, we heard the victory was just because Anderson Silva was clowning around. When he was clowning around with Forrest Griffin it was OK. When he was clowning around with Stephan Bonnar it was OK. When he was clowning around with everybody else, that’s OK. But when he clowns around with Chris, and Chris beat the crap out of him, it’s not OK anymore? Does that make sense to you?

“And following the rematch they are now saying it was a freak accident. It was no accident. We trained on checking that kick after the first fight. That was no accident. Anderson kicked Chris’ knee because Chris worked on that defense. But yet we’re still being told it was a freak ending.

“It’s frustrating but there’s nothing we can do, except keeping winning and that’s all we plan to do. Thankfully the fans can see past the bulls**t and have voted for Chris as the (Fighters Only) World MMA Awards ‘Fighter of the Year.’ He’s the best 185lb fighter in the world, and in 2014 he’ll prove it all over again.”

Having finally taken one Brazilian off his radar, although Anderson has actually talked up a third fight despite still currently being in rehab, Weidman has another South American prepared and ready to challenge for his belt, this time in the form of ‘Knockout of the Year’ award winner Vitor Belfort.

And despite a whole load of testosterone replacement therapy and therapeutic-use exemption paperwork, plus, surely, half a dozen or so media squabbles to confront in the run-up, the pair will clash at UFC 173 on May 24th in Las Vegas. Only this time, Weidman will likely start as betting favorite for the first time in his title fight campaign.

A champion ‘nurtured over decades’

Alongside Longo and Serra, Weidman also has his jiu-jitsu mentor John Danaher, one of the most respected grappling coaches in the business and a man also famed for solidifying the ground game of former welterweight champion Georges St Pierre. While delighted with Weidman’s ‘Fighter of the Year’ accolade, Danaher believes the world still hasn’t grasped just how good a champion the New Yorker really is, given the obstacles he’s had to surmount.

He explains: “People don’t quite realize how short a space of time Chris has actually been fighting for us. Although he’s been fighting for five years, for almost two years of that he was out with injury. Really, 90% of what he has achieved has been done in two years – a very, very short period of time.

“Even though publicly Chris was fairly unknown – and that’s fair enough after really only two years in martial arts – I’ve had the opportunity as a coach, along with Ray Longo and Matt Serra, to witness what he can do in the training hall and I’ve seen what he’s done with other people that are highly placed in the sport. 

“I’ve seen him run people over like a truck. So we were in this privileged position that we knew how good he was while the world didn’t know. And so we were very, very confident leading up to the fight. 

“On paper Chris is experienced, but don’t forget he’s been in competitive sports basically all his life. He’s competed in the highest levels of wrestling and within six months he fought at the unofficial world championships of grappling in Abu Dhabi and did incredibly well with minimal training. 

“Most people are unaware of these accomplishments, but believe me, he may look like he’s come out of nowhere, but as with any great person, it’s been nurtured over decades.”

Vitor Belfort on Weidman's "Fighter of the Year" award

“Not that it should be me, but he wins because of just one fight? It was shameful. He won one fight. The other he didn’t win, it was an accident. The ceremony in Las Vegas was pretty cool, but the votes are from the fans, not always they are right.”