Anderson Silva is the greatest fighter in UFC history, but he is now 0-3 with one NC, in his last four. Silva did get a win over Nick Diaz, but the decision was overturned after Silva tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. It would have gone down as a win for Diaz, but the Stockton native tested positive as well, for the demon weed marijuana, so both fighters got an NC.
The fighter is now 40, far past the prime for every middleweight in the sport’s history. But Silva himself has contributed to fights that did not live up to his potential.
Back in 2010, Silva clowned and taunted his way through a fight with Demian Maia. Afterwards, an irate UFC president Dana White threatened to fire him if there was a repeat of the antics.
“Anderson Silva absolutely demolished Rich Franklin twice, destroyed Dan Henderson, destroyed Nate Marquardt, then moved up to 205 and destroyed the guys he fought there,” said White. “Then you see fights like this and it’s just unexplainable.”
“Maybe he had a mental breakdown — I don’t know what happened in the ring. … Hopefully we never see that again. If we do, I’ll tell you this: If he ever acts like that again in the ring, I will cut him. I don’t care if he’s the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, I don’t care if he is the middleweight champion. I will cut him, absolutely.”
At UFC Fight Night 84 Silva knocked out Michael Bisping’s mouthpiece. When ‘The Count’ gestured to referee Herb Dean that he needed his mouthpiece back, Silva launched a flying knee, and Bisping crumpled to the mat.
Can we go back to the end of round 3?! #WhatHadHappenedWas https://t.co/VqquhAt4Gn
— UFC (@ufc) February 27, 2016
“>February 27, 2016
Silva declared victory as the bell rang signaling the end of the round. He jumped up on the fence and threw his arms in the air. But the fight was not over. Dean gave Bisping a chance to see if he could fight back as Silva followed up, and it never happened.
Bisping came back to win the fourth round on all three judges scorecards, and that won him the fight.
Dean appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, and said he didn’t stop the fight because Silva did not follow up successfully.
“Well, [Silva] hit him with the knee and dropped him, and then he walked off and started to celebrate,” said Dean, as transcribed by Chuck Mindenhall for MMA Fighting. “He had been dropped, but you know, in MMA we don’t stop the match just because someone gets dropped. I saw that when he fell he was not unconscious. He was facing Anderson. Anderson didn’t give him a threat to protect himself from, but — I don’t want to start playing what if, what if he attacked and whatnot — the bottom line is he didn’t attack. The round ended and, because Anderson was celebrating, there was some confusion as to what was going on.
“But I never had any confusion. I knew that I hadn’t stopped the match and that the match was going to continue.”
“It was pandemonium and of course I can’t run around and start yelling at everyone to get out of the cage, there was just too many people. But, what I did do is I let people know that the fight wasn’t over. And eventually, once I started expressing that it wasn’t over to the right people — the inspectors, the fighters — that order was going to be restored and we’d continue with the match.
Bisping initially expressed frustration that Dean had not put the mouthpiece back in earlier, but Dean explained that that was based on a less than full understanding of the rules.
“That’s the way the mechanic works, is that you replace the mouthpiece during a lull in the action,” said Dean. “And [Bisping] signaled once, and Anderson was actually in the process of attacking him. For a lot of reasons that are pretty evident you can’t stop to replace the mouthpiece during a heated exchange, and that qualified as a heated exchange.
“If we were doing that, we’d have guys getting their bell rung, spitting out the mouthpiece to get a little extra time or sometimes you’re feeling a little tired, just spit your mouthpiece out. So obviously we can’t do that in the middle of an exchange.”
“That instruction was given [Bisping] him in the dressing room, and that instruction was also given to him again…right before the match started. I told him, protect yourself at all times, that’s what I told both the fighters. And they know that that’s their responsibility.
“At the same time, an MMA match is very stressful and a lot weird things happen. People do a lot of strange things, it’s a stressful situation, and you do things that you look back on and think, ‘why did I do that?’ So I don’t know why he did that. But it’s in the rules, it’s actually a written mechanic that was added to the rules, I don’t know, maybe six years ago. So we’ve been doing it, but it’s actually also in writing in the Unified Rules, that the referee is to wait for a lull in the action to replace the mouthpiece.”
“Maybe he’s not aware of the rules. A lot of fighters, most of them real the fouls but they don’t read all the rules on the mechanics. Maybe he wasn’t aware of that. But the rule is to replace the mouthpiece during a lull in the action.”
