7 August 2010

Oakland, California, USA

UFC 117: Silva vs. Sonnen

By Ray Klerck

Anderson Silva makes the mountain top of many experts’ MMA Mount Rushmore. He won 16 consecutive fights when he joined the UFC, but he then almost set the trend of a champ losing big after his first loss, going 1-8 in his next 9 bouts. When he was 11 fights deep into his then-unparalleled win streak, he was Makhachev-level unstoppable. By 2010, he’d spent years making extremely dangerous men look like fluffy bunnies. Then Chael Sonnen arrived and told everyone that Silva’s rep actually wasn’t all that flashy. In his typical fashion, Sonnen said this to every microphone and even mocked Silva, along with everyone in his orbit. Did Sonnen’s manufactured confidence deserve the fight? Maybe, since he’d won his previous three, but there was no doubt he’d used Silva as a platform to become MMA’s first hype-man. It worked, and the pre-fight theatrics were perfect, but all he had to do was fight Silva to make good on his months of promises. 

ROUND 1: THE GAME PLAN

Sonnen had a game plan. It was to impose his elite wrestling skills and create the suffocating pressure needed to smother Silva’s striking. But he initially deployed a decoy in the form of his left hand. Sonnen cracked Silva multiple times, and suddenly the supposedly untouchable striker was wobbling. Within 2 minutes, Sonnen turned the fight into the messy wrestling match he’d clearly planned. He drove forward, completed the takedown, and settled into Silva's guard. Then he went to work. Chael was one of the best in the world at grinding and beating people into submission from the top position. The punches to Silva were constant. Some were hard, some were short, some appeared designed primarily to prevent Silva from having a comfortable second to think. Sonnen wasn't hunting for one spectacular KO shot. He was producing volume and irritation in industrial quantities. Silva attacked from his back, looking for submissions and throwing elbows, but the geography of the fight belonged entirely to Sonnen, who seemed like a man who’d turned up to repossess furniture. Joe Rogan said that Silva took more shots than he’d probably taken in his entire career. One round to Sonnen, but surely Silva would come good. 

ROUND TWO: APPARENTLY NOT

Silva came out looking more aggressive with a strong leg kick, but Sonnen wasn't interested in participating in the comeback story. He pressured forward again and put Silva back on the floor to the crowd’s chants of ‘USA!” Sonnen battered Silva with unconventional shots, including striking his hands against either side of his ears like a chimp with cymbals. This became the rhythm of the fight. Silva would find enough space to remind everyone that he remained dangerous, then Sonnen would close the distance, grab hold of him and drag proceedings back into his preferred world. Sonnen did seem to slow down, and even though it wasn’t glamorous, it was effective. From inside Silva's guard, Sonnen kept punching. He attacked the body, targeted the head, and refused to give the champion enough room to create anything meaningful. After all, this was Anderson Silva, the man who had turned UFC title fights into demonstrations. Yet Sonnen was sitting in his guard, hitting him with the stubborn regularity of somebody hammering together flat-pack furniture without any regard for the instructions.

ROUND THREE: SILVA BITES BACK

The third round offered Silva his best moments, possibly due to Sonnen exhausting himself in the opening minutes. The champ finally found more success standing, landing a few sharper strikes and briefly showing the timing that had terrorized the division. Sonnen was cut, and for the first time there were glimpses of the fight everyone had expected. The problem was that Sonnen kept coming, and although he didn’t hit him with the biggest shots in the world, the annoying little rabbit punches kept coming. Silva could have all the feints, knees, elbows, and matrix-like head movement he wanted. None of it was particularly useful while staring at the arena lights with Chael Sonnen sitting on his chest. Three rounds had passed. The champion's unbeaten UFC record was suddenly ten minutes away from disappearing.

ROUND FOUR: THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING

Silva opened the round with an electric charge, landing multiple strikes and kicks, but there was a swing and a miss by both men. Eventually Sonnen took down Silva, but the challenger’s wrestling skills got him to the top position. Midway through the fourth, disbelief had given way to a weird kind of acceptance. Chael Sonnen was comprehensively winning. He wasn’t secretly stealing rounds or benefiting from a questionable scorecard. Instead, he was smashing him. More chants of “USA” echoed around the stadium. The challenger continued doing what he'd been doing all night. Punch. Elbow. Pressure. Repeat. The post-fight statistics would underline just how extraordinary the performance had been. Sonnen landed hundreds of strikes across the fight and controlled enormous stretches of the action on the ground. The man who had spent months telling everybody exactly what he intended to do was now doing it. After four rounds, Silva had never been dominated like this before. 

ROUND FIVE: JUST DON'T GET SUBMITTED

Sometimes instructions that sound easy, especially when you're sitting on a sofa. All Sonnen needed to do was to keep doing what he’d been doing. Sonnen threw a punch, and Silva slipped to the canvas, and within moments Sonnen had returned to top position. The clock continued to bleed. Four minutes remained. Then three. Every passing second made the impossible slightly more real. Commentators asked if it was too early for Chael to start celebrating. After all the insults, predictions and theatrical promises, he was minutes away from completing one of the great championship performances in MMA history. Anderson Silva, meanwhile, was on his back with a body that had absorbed nearly five rounds of pressure. There was no scorecard capable of rescuing him, and he needed a finish. Rogan told the world that you can never count out a guy like Anderson Silva. With a little over two minutes remaining, Silva began working his legs higher around Sonnen's shoulders. At first, it didn't look especially dramatic. Then his left leg slipped over Sonnen's neck. Anyone familiar with Sonnen's career knew the danger immediately. Submission defense had haunted him before, and Silva was a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt under the Nogueira brothers. Timing is everything. Silva locked the triangle. Sonnen tried to posture. Silva controlled the arm and tightened the position, turning the choke into a triangle-armbar combination. Suddenly, after more than 20 minutes of Sonnen dictating almost everything, there was nowhere to go. Sonnen let out the gentlest of taps. Just one. For a moment, there was massive confusion over whether it could be considered a tap. Silva released the hold, and the ref stepped in. The official time was 3:10 of the fifth round. Anderson Silva was still champion. Chael Sonnen had been 110 seconds away from glory.

110 SECONDS FROM IMMORTALITY

That is what makes this fight so enduring. There have been bigger knockouts. There have been more technically polished title fights. There have even been other miraculous comebacks. Few have required one fighter to be so comprehensively in control for so long before losing everything in a few seconds. Sonnen had done almost exactly what he promised. He had walked through Silva's indomitable aura. He had taken him down repeatedly. He had hit him, controlled him, and dragged one of the greatest fighters ever into a kind of fight nobody had previously been able to sustain against him. He had solved Anderson Silva for 23 minutes. Unfortunately, UFC title fights last 25. Watch it here.