Saying that Jose “Junior” Aldo is your favorite fighter isn’t really a noteworthy opinion in mixed martial arts. In terms of public regard, especially among more hardcore fans, his star remains wonderfully brilliant even as age and an almost two-decade long career ensure that it weathers with time, same as the rest of us. I suppose that my feelings on the matter are a little more complicated though. My favorite fighters are often not my favorites because their records produce incredible numbers. I don’t really care about how many times phrases like “the most” and “undefeated” crop up in their own legend.
My true desire is not just for the highlight reel knockouts and tale of the tape accolades, but for a fighter’s every aspect to build a picture of themselves which can appreciate in value with every year that goes by. Numbers will always be superceded, records will always be broken. But the nuances, the anecdotes, and the apocryphal nature of a legendary fighter can persist so far beyond their peak years that they become truly special. For me, Aldo has now cemented himself in that way. The stories and the images we associate with Aldo will persist longer, and in much more memorable ways than his current 30–7 record, much like the lasting damage he has inflicted upon the bodies of his opponents over his 17 years in the sport. If a guy kicks your leg so hard that it never feels the same again years later, is it any consolation that his record lacks a zero in the right place?
It really is the small details in which a truly defining sense of personality and style are found. Some fighters are so mesmerizing, so pleasing to watch in motion, that you can pick them out immediately even if you are shown only a few frames of their obscured silhouette in motion. I can recognize Aldo’s movements at a thousand paces — with my glasses on, that is. It’s the way he moves his head, bobbing just enough to make him a moving target, but not so much that he opens himself up to being caught weaving into a kick or punch. It’s the modest, workmanlike Muay Thai stance, from which he will spontaneously torque his entire body in a violent eruption from plodding, flat footed foundation to a lightning-fast kick, switching or otherwise, sacrificing no amount of hip rotation or harmful intent to land on target in the shortest time possible. It’s these things and so many more which form the building blocks of a terrifying octagon presence.
Especially noticeable in his current career in the UFC’s 135 pound division is the commitment a smaller fighter must make to be a power puncher or a knockout artist. Putting your entire body into a strike becomes a necessity to hit hard enough to make an impact in these lower weight classes, while fighters in heavier divisions will find that they may be able to commit less due to the sheer mass they are capable of moving. These lower weight classes also seem to give birth to some truly repugnant pig-iron chins, à la Pedro Munhoz.
It’s this combination of lower body weight, a higher skill floor, and the increased ability of some chins to withstand impacts from the men in the 125, 135, and 145 pound divisions that makes for such an electrifying playing field filled to the brim with chaotically athletic short kings able to move in ways bigger men are simply incapable of. Aldo’s second fight against fellow 135 pounder Chad Mendes provides just one of many comedic examples of this, as Mendes fakes a level change and comes up with an uppercut originating from what may as well be the Australian continent, so far below Aldo’s field of vision that it catches the Brazilian fighter dead to rights, stunning him but failing to put him down for good.
“I talked about it to a lot of people after, especially my coaches, and it blows my mind how… I mean, I hit that guy with everything I had. There was an uppercut where I faked a shot and threw that thing from the floor, landed it flush on his chin, and the guy just kept coming.” — Chad Mendes, “The Night we Fought Aldo” by Shaun Al-Shatti
The most enthralling attribute that a fighter can have is, in my opinion, an aesthetic. This is a visual sport, after all. If you close your eyes during a UFC event, you’re just listening to a podcast — and a bad one at that. I don’t necessarily care what result a fighter achieves in a match. I care very much and respond with large amounts of enthusiasm to just how they go about it. A fight which hammered home this realization for me was Zabit Magomedsharipov vs. Kyle Bochniak at UFC 223. A fight which elicits audible uhm-ing and ah-ing from me as Bochniak beautifully bobs and weaves his way like a man possessed to, you guessed it, a loss via decision. An incredible display of heart tempered by a cast-iron grip to learned banging technique and an absolute adherence to a style befitting (though not optimal) of the shorter man in a David vs Goliath matchup between 5 foot 7 Bochniak and 6 foot 1 Zabit.
And his opposing dance partner is no slouch: Magomedsharipov, a lanky fighter who uses and abuses his absurd height and reach advantage at 145 pounds to throw spinning shit and pick apart his opponents at range when he’s not using his Dagestani grappling prowess to dominate them. Visually, this matchup is so distinctive and aesthetically pleasing that it could be a pro wrestling storyline, or the kind of fight that gets put into a sports movie about MMA. But if this were one of those movies, Bochniak would have won. I wonder how much it would console him to know that for some people, to lose beautifully is better than winning sloppily.
Returning to the subject of this article, allow me to share this little days-old nugget which I found myself contemplating while lying awake at some time in the AM, well after midnight. Thinking of ways to justify my appreciation for Jose Aldo, I realised something. The best way I can really put it is this — I’d love for Aldo to kill me. You know, in kind of an abstract, trolley problem kind of way. Let’s say I was found guilty of some horrible crime by a jury of my peers, and summarily sentenced to death by a judge who, seeking to afford me even a tiny piece of humanitarian agency in my final moments, lets me pick the method via which I am executed by the state. What would I pick? Nobody wants to go out like the guy in the Green Mile, so the electric chair is out of the question. The only other viable option I know of is the lethal injection, which I feel confident in saying is a choice most people would happily make when compared to the alternatives.
But think about it. It seems like the safe option, but consider this — how many lethal injections have you watched? I’d hope the answer is zero, but even if it’s not, let’s continue with my argument. Did you know that lethal injections have a comparatively bountiful number of horrible ways they can go wrong? Compared to methods such as hanging, electrocution, gas chambers, and the firing squad (!), lethal injections have the highest rate of botched executions. All it takes is for the dipshit executioners to put the needle in the wrong way (pointing away from your heart) and your suffering could be extended to nearly an hour’s worth of excruciating pain, during which time they will use your entire body as a pincushion as they attempt to find a new site to insert the IV, all while reporters in the observation room next door hurriedly scrawl notes on spiral notebooks tallying exactly how many times you moan and writhe in pain before finally, mercifully expiring.
The point here is, you can never really be certain. That’s one of the scariest things about dying. You never really know how you’re gonna go. But I’m pretty certain of the outcome that would emerge from a possible execution by Jose Aldo. I’ve watched the potential first part of that execution plenty of times, from his earlier career in WEC to his current run in the UFC. It’s painfully pedestrian to point out, but it becomes relevant in this situation: in many cases, if the referee wasn’t there to stop the fight, someone would die if murder happened to be on the winning fighter’s mind. Here’s how I imagine it playing out if Aldo was my executioner.
Firstly, I’d want to be locked in the room, because there is still a possibility that’d I’d change my mind and start begging for the electric chair as soon as he started to begin the process of murdering me. Secondly, I’m a striking enthusiast, not a grappling expert. So, the judge is going to have to make sure that he doesn’t end my life via submission. Otherwise there’s really no point, because he’d just get me in a rear naked choke and snuff me out within seconds, relatively pain free. No good.
Once the execution started though, I feel like things would start to click together and make sense. It wouldn’t take long for me to die — I’m sure that even if my inevitable assumption of the fetal position bought me more time in the land of the living, his blistering kicks would just as easily shatter my forearms if I tried to cover up on the ground. And if I didn’t, well, I’m doubly fucked. Ever seen Jose Aldo soccer kick somebody? How about a old-school, PRIDE-style head stomp?
I’ll make sure things go smoothly, ensuring that I make things as easy for my executioner as Marie Antoinette did, assuming a bladed stance to make sure I can get an Aldo special the way it was intended : a crippling left hook to the body, followed by a straight right hand and a right leg kick straight from the pits of Tartarus. Odds are that the first punch in that combination will have me in the aforementioned fetal position, and I suppose the real tragedy here is that Aldo’s best work is done standing — and I just don’t know that I could stay even vaguely vertically orientated after he starts beating on me.
At some point after I’ve stopped breathing, I have a feeling that disposing of my body is also going to be a relatively short affair. With enough time and maybe a UFC affiliated electrolyte drink or two, I reckon that every bone in my body could be pulverized into an array of fragments the size and consistency of particularly jagged, stale Rice Krispies. I do think that my skull casing would take the most work by far, but I’m sure he could find a way to completely collapse it somehow, not just crack it or fracture it as is wont to happen occasionally in MMA already. Maybe he could try and get some airtime and bring his entire bodyweight plus a bit of gravity into a stomp or two.
After the bones are taken care of, the true work on the soft tissues and organs can begin. At this stage, I like to imagine that my limp body would become truly floppy, kind of like a cheap sausage casing filled with raw meat. Further extrapolating, I arrive at the final step : enough time and force generated by his strikes will begin to unravel the cellular bonds between the building blocks of my meaty, crime-scene-outline-shaped sac, and it will all begin to dissolve into some kind of plasmic goop. This human slurry will probably still have those small Rice Krispies we mentioned earlier floating in it, but all anyone will have to do is flush me down the drain with a hose and let the people at the waste disposal plant take care of any problems that come up. People have flushed worse things down worse places.
Conclusion
MMA being the young sport that it is, I think it’s a fun exercise to compare the legacy of a fighter in our own sport to the legacy of another in boxing. To me, Aldo is closest to a figure like Manny Pacquiao. His incredible resume and continued longevity make him, in my opinion, the closest man in the MMA world to approach the near-mythical status of Pacquiao. Though it must be noted that Pacquiao’s career is essentially peerless, even in boxing.
Both Aldo and Pacquiao possess incredible physical gifts which decline with age, and both men find themselves able to adjust to remain competitive against younger fighters in a constantly evolving sport. The cumulative effect that results from decades of fighting experience held within a body still able to put all that experience to good use is a truly formidable one. While not as dramatic as the late career resurgence of TRT wrecking ball Vitor Belfort, Jose Aldo’s current stint at 135 is still well worth studying for fans and fighters alike. Aldo is obviously still human and subject to the wear and tear of time’s forward march, but his performances continue to be absolute masterclasses in striking and counter-wrestling. Even though physical decline and eventual collapse is inevitable, I remain grateful for the fact that we can still watch Aldo fight without having to feel guilty for encouraging a man’s attempt to continue long past the point when he should have stopped. Aldo has not reached that point yet. And thank god for that.
