Silva, Leben ready to go toe-to-toe
LAS VEGAS – Job security is virtually non-existent in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Jobs are at a premium since the UFC and the World Extreme Cagefighting merged earlier this year and matchmakers Joe Silva and Sean Shelby had to thin the ranks – reducing the number of fighters in each class – in order to add two additional divisions.
The smaller available number of jobs means there is more competition for them, which means that one loss can mean a quick pink slip.
Wanderlei Silva has lost five of his last seven and might lose 10 of his next 12. But he won’t only avoid a pink slip, he’ll continue to remain one of the sport’s most revered stars.
That’s what happens when a fighter exorcises the phrase “game plan” from his vocabulary and fights to make the crowd stand and roar rather than fighting conservatively to win. Silva is beloved not only by mixed martial arts fans, but by UFC president Dana White as well for his showstopper style.
Silva, who fights a similar-minded Chris Leben on Saturday in a key middleweight bout on the main card of UFC 132 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, would honestly much rather lose a wild slugfest than win a boring decision.
Silva and Leben often infuriate their coaches by abandoning carefully prepared game plans just seconds into the fight and turning it into a wild brawl.
“We are not machines,” Silva said. “We have a lot of things inside us. My coaches will say, ‘You need to fight smart. Do this. Do that.’ But when the fight starts, something comes over me. I go crazy. I want to kill the guy. A lot of times, my coach says, ‘Calm! Calm! Calm!’ But I can’t.”
He’s beloved for precisely that reason. The former longtime PRIDE champion can’t resist a toe-to-toe slugfest in which he’s exchanging powerful punches, elbows and kicks with the likes of Chuck Liddell, Dan Henderson and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. It’s not always the smartest strategy in terms of piling up wins – He’s a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and probably could have won many fights he lost simply by getting it to the ground – but it has paid off in other ways.
He’s clearly established himself as an icon and a guy who is a can’t-miss person on the card. He may lose, but no one remotely connected with Zuffa management has for even a split second considered cutting him precisely because of how he loses.
Leben isn’t quite as well known and isn’t nearly as beloved, but he’s from the same mold. He’s a guy who abhors the word boring.
“At this point in my career, I just want to have epic fights, fights that go down in the history books,” Leben said. “I want to put on a show. I want people to think, ‘Hey, Chris Leben’s on this card. I’m buying that pay-per-view.’ When my career is over, I want people to go, ‘You had one of the most amazing careers. Your career is literally a highlight reel.’ That’s where I’m at. I want to go out and fight the best fights, the most exciting fights.”
Leben’s last fight will undoubtedly wind up on a highlight reel somewhere, but it won’t be showcasing him. Notorious in mixed martial arts for having one of the sport’s best chins, he was knocked out in just 3:37 at UFC 125 by Brian Stann, the one-time Marine captain/war hero turned middleweight contender.
Leben offered an unusual explanation for his less-than-stellar performance. The match seemed to be exactly the kind he’d want, but he was hammered from start to finish by Stann and never was in it.
Leben said his problem began by how seriously he took his diet leading up to that match.
“I don’t want to take anything away from Brian Stann,” Leben said. “He’s an amazing athlete and he’s done a ton for the country and this sport. I ate a bunch of candy, dude. I’m not lying. I didn’t eat sugar for, like, two months (during training camp). After I made weight, I went and I had gummy bears, jawbreakers, ice cream. I ate that, and my body hadn’t had sugar.”
After having deprived his body of sugar for so long, it didn’t react so well. Just before he was to go out to fight Stann, he was violently ill in the back, vomiting with a bad case of diarrhea.
It’s not easy to cope with for someone working a desk job, let alone for a professional athlete about to go out in front of thousands of people to fight.
“I was back stage and I was puking,” Leben said. “I was [expletive] and puking between my legs when I was on deck for that fight. That’s not a lie. That’s the truth. I’ll be honest with you: Brian Stann fought an amazing fight. But hindsight being 20/20, no gummy bears for me this fight.”
Gummy bears or no, Leben knows he’ll have his hands full with Silva on Saturday. Silva hasn’t fought for 16 months after having had knee surgery and calls the bout with Leben “the most important of my career.”
That’s debatable, given he’s faced nearly all of the iconic names in the sport’s history in epic battles, but despite his desire to please the fans, he’s a competitor who hates to lose.
And he wants to continue an upward ascent and knows that a win over Leben will do just that. He’ll go about getting it, though, in typical Silva style.
“People love to see knockouts,” Silva said. “That’s why the come. That’s what makes them happy. And so that’s what I try to do. Every time, it’s what I'll try to do.”
Given that Leben has the same approach, it’s almost a given that the bout will be the Fight of the Night on Saturday.
MMA is an entertainment business and while wins and losses are important, they’re not the bottom line like they are in a team sport such as baseball, where all that matters at the end of the season is having one more victory than the other teams in the division.
In MMA, it’s not just about winning, but about how you win and how you can sell yourselves to the ticket-buying public.
In that regard, Leben correctly noted that he and Silva are kind of throwbacks, more fixated on entertainment rather than the result.
“Yes I do [feel that way],” Leben said. “That’s why I want to fight him so much. I want to see guys fight to win, not see guys fight not to lose. I would rather have five great fights than have had the title for five fights that sucked and I won the belt at every one of them.”
He’s going to get his wish on Saturday. Wanderlei Silva wouldn’t have it any other way.
