Fedor is in the world of MMA again (not officially) and wants to come back and fight and for the life of me I can’t find any reason I would want to see that. Here is the best possible scenario.
He steps back into the octagon, crushes 4 people by the names of Werdum, Valesquez, Dos Antos and…Jon Jones. He walks in with his cross necklace that took 3 two thousand year old tree’s from Jerusalem to make, then he has a vision from God that tells him it’s officially okay to retire and he does and he hangs out with Igor Vovchancyn and eats cookies until he dies at 100 weighing 400 pounds and dies only because he was fighting with a giant bear and winning the fight until five other giant bears and a lion and a great white shark teamed up against him and he was sick that day and his shoulder hurt a little because he was chopping down tree’s all day with his bare hands with one swing and rebuilding Russian Castles. That would be the ideal situation for me. But I don’t see that being the actual situation. Maybe the bear, but that’s because it’s Russia man, that’s as common to them as getting shot is to me here in America. It happens, its inconvenient, but like, if I had plans I’m still going to do them.
In my heart, I don’t think anyone wants to see him come back as he is.
We want him to come back for the same reasons we like movies that we grew up loving and music that we loved. We see or hear those things now and think, wow, that’s so great I love it. But if we hear music exactly like it or movies just like that now, they are exact we say, I don’t like that, it’s a rip off or it’s just not as good as it was. I like to think of Fedor as the extremely polite outrageously dangerous unbeatable fighter that is similar to Wolverine and proof that Russia experimented on their people. Once when I saw him cut I was surprised he didn’t start leaking oil and his organs didn’t mechanically rearranged themselves to seal the wound. The guy isn’t normal, if I found out he’s killed men I’d say, probably. People, he’s Russian, and I love him. Americans are born with the capacity to love everyone, except the Russians. They are the only people that if you say you don’t like, no 20 year old hippie says how you are closed minding and intolerant, we all just say, yeah… Russian. There has never been a hero Russian in any of our culture except for the Kasparov guy and whoever invented Tetris. That’s the end of the list. Fedor as an athlete, he is the list. If there were another person on the list it would be Aleksandr Karelin who is the scariest man ever. But he was beat by a tubby American so he is not a hero to us. (watch his highlights, wrestled for years… YEARS without even giving up point)
When Fedor lost to Werdum I thought, well, it had to happen at some point.
The guy made a career of leaving one arm in the party and not getting caught but like all parties if you stay to long and party that way too much, eventually you’re going to get choked by a Brazilian. It’s just how it goes. When he lost to Bigfoot I thought, well, that guys is a million times bigger and was losing and Fedor was thinking about something else like saving the rain forest. When he got knocked out by Henderson, in front of me by the way, I thought. Okay. It was a good ten years, but it’s time to pass the torch.
I want Fedor to fight in the same way I want Liddell or Sakuraba or Rickson to fight. I want them to fight so long as there is a time machine involved, gas prices are still lower and my girlfriend from then looked the way she did then, but now. Luckily her and I broke up but yesh, time hasn’t been kind to her or Fedor. So to wheel him back into the octagon just because the fans miss him and want to see how he’d do is selfish and a little strange to me. I want to see him too, I idolize the guy. But at the same time, look at any fighter who was peaking then and look at them now and tell me how their doing. (don’t say Arlvoski or Mir for the love of the stars, don’t use them as examples) The game has not moved past Fedor, the game caught up to Fedor and then it moved on. Like any great fighter Fedor was a level above everyone in the world. This is the way competition goes. There is this great image of an Olympic Sprinter from 50 years ago versus the guys now. It’s so odd to see that the best in the world then is twenty meters behind the best in the world now. And that’s Fedor, he was twenty meters ahead of everyone for ten years. But then everyone looked at him and thought, oh, that’s what we should be doing. It’s the same thing people are doing with Jones or McGregor or Ronda. We are looking and saying, so it’s okay to do that, well I was reaching for the stars now it seems as if I should have been reaching for Jupiter.
In the best case scenario, Fedor comes back and wins a few fights and then struggles in an epic match.
But him coming back as heavy weight is a different world now. Him losing some weight and fighting at Light Heavy is a different world too. And there is nothing wrong with that, it’s the world that he built. But I don’t want to see some hulking cardio monster tackle him and punch him for twenty five minutes. The real reason we want to see him is because people are obsessed with stopping or reversing time. To quote one of my favorite books, -The Great Gatsby.- “Can’t repeat the past, well of course you can old sport.” Or, -The catcher in the rye- “The best thing though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was.” We as people crave that because it makes us feel comfortable as if things were better then and if we could just go back to then everything would be perfect, again. But it’s not true, the cake is a lie, things are perfect now. That’s why Gatsby died, because the past is not what you remember, it’s what you wish it was.
If you guys know who Elvis is, Fedor right now is the old Elvis. I mean, it’s Elvis, so whatever and sure he’s fat and wearing a cape that glows and can still sing. But that young Elvis, that was the one to see. That was the real Elvis. And just like seeing Elvis in a cape and singing his old songs, it makes our hearts happy, but we all knew that he was no longer the king.
