The Last Half-Hour
Dan Henderson puts up one last fight, and says goodbye.
Dan Henderson is not thirty-six years old in Las Vegas. He’s not jumping in the arms of his cornermen, howling in victory while Wanderlei Silva lies limp behind him. He’s not leaning against the ropes while confetti rains down from the ceiling, while he’s crowned champion of an organization that exists only in the history books.
He isn’t twenty-nine in Japan, winning the King of Kings tournament at the end of a long winter night. He isn’t sighing in sweet satisfaction and fatigue after beating his third opponent in the same night.
He’s not thirty-nine in Las Vegas, an unconscious Michael Bisping beneath him, hovering iconically in the air as he prepares to deliver the final, brutal blow. A Vegas crowd is not erupting as he sits atop the cage, his chest heaving with pride and adrenaline, chants of U-S-A shaking his eardrums.
He isn’t forty-one in Illinois, racing around the cage like a wound-up bull while spectators stand and hold their hands to their mouths, watching the legend Fedor Emelianenko regain his senses Hendo suddenly knocked out of him.
He’s not the relative youth he so desperately clings to. He’s forty-six in Manchester, a foreigner booed as the hometown hero tries to send him into retirement with an old man’s headache. He moves in labored bursts, his reflexes dulled by the unforgiving fists of time. He’s thousands of miles from home and worlds away from his glory days. To be a fighter at thirty-six, thirty-nine, forty-one is a rare feat. Forty-six seems nothing more than a stubborn man’s dream.
As he circles the cage on this early Manchester morning, that pesky Bisping circling with him, he’s not the the same man he was. But he has that man’s stubborn heart, and as he smiles knowingly, he has that same right hand.
Back in June, Henderson seemed to have pulled one last brutal trick from his dusty bag when he knocked out Hector Lombard in California. It wasn’t the infamous H-Bomb of a right hand that did the job, but a rare head-kick — “He was short enough, I could get my leg up that far”— and a snapping elbow that struck the light switch on Lombard’s temple and sent him crumbling to the canvas.
After the fight, in which Henderson had been staggered multiple times, he flirted with the stinging notion of retirement.
“I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” he said in the cage. It was as if he had no say in the matter, as if the answer would be so simple if it were up to him rather than the ticking clock. “But that could have been the last one of my career.”
While the crowd showered him in the applause he’d earned for decades, he looked for a moment to be lost. He glanced around the cage, the crowd, the lights. Then he noticed the camera invading his space, so he held up a fist and smiled. It seemed like this would be the lasting image we would have of the man that weathered so many changing tides. A smile full of artificial teeth, his right hand raised like it was his last friend left. A fitting way for the old gunslinger to finally let the battles pass him by.
Then, a mere hour and change later, something peculiar happened.
Michael Bisping, that pesky thorn that once nagged at Henderson’s side until he knocked it stiff, won the middleweight world title. On two weeks notice, he knocked out a man who had dominated him two years back. It was one of the biggest upsets in the sport’s history, and it probably gave Dan Henderson the kind of chuckle that is always followed by a grumbled curse.
Bisping sat in the center of the post-fight press conference, the gold belt at his chest, kicking back beers like the giddiest man in the world. While the Brit bickered back and forth with the man he’d just beaten, Henderson sat tucked away at the end of the table, watching, slightly amused. Surely that night in 2009 lingered in his mind, hovering over Bisping’s stone-limp frame, landing that last blow on the mouth that had given him so many headaches.
That night lingered in Bisping’s mind as well. So when the new champion learned what fight the bosses wanted to make for him, he did not hesitate.
It would have made no sense if it didn’t seem so fated to happen. Michael Bisping, middleweight champion after all these long and weary years, would defend his title against Dan Henderson. For Henderson, it meant the chance to truly ride off into the sunset, the last prize that had alluded him strapped around his waist. And for Bisping, it meant retribution, his last shot at avenging that infamous knockout that follows him around like a heavy-handed ghost. If this was Henderson’s last fight, Bisping cherished the opportunity to send him sore into retirement. It shouldn’t be too hard, beating up on an old man.
It’s fitting that a fight between two rivals, one aging and the other aged, plays out like a Greatest Hits album. Bisping, with his precise punching, feints and perpetual footwork, low-impact but high-volume kicks, and the momentary susceptibility to the right hand haymaker. Henderson, coiled up like a rubber-band that had been twisted too tight and could at any moment unravel in one explosive burst.
Henderson looks every bit the old man until suddenly he doesn’t. At the end of the first round he blasts Bisping with an overhand right. The clock ticks nearly a decade into the past as he flies to the floor, and a Henderson younger than his days follows him with violent intent. His follow-up elbows turn Bisping’s face into a bubbling mountain of swelling, but the finish never materializes. Nor does it in the second round, where Bisping picks Hendo apart until he eats another roaring right overhand. The Brit may not be seen as the true top middleweight, but he rebounds with every ounce of a champion’s heart. Henderson is unable to separate him from his consciousness, and a bloodied Bisping takes the next two rounds with relative ease.
On his stool before the final round of his fighting career, Dan Henderson gasps for air like every bit of forty-six. The heart and the H-bomb can only get him so far before the cruel clock catches up to him again.
Yet in that fifth round he seems hungry as a foolish young contender. He mounts all the offense his thundering heart will allow, and takes Bisping’s best shots before taking him to the canvas. When the final bell sounds, Hendo’s story remains unwritten. The fight was close, much closer than a championship fight featuring a grizzled veteran has any right to be.
In the end, it was not enough. Bisping’s hand is raised, and that ever elusive belt gets wrapped around his waist once again. Hendo sighs in disappointment, struggling with the end of it all.
When he speaks to the Manchester crowd that now applauds him like one of their own, there is no indecisiveness in his message. He thanks the fans in attendance despite their support of his rival, he thanks his family from thousands of miles away. And he thanks the fight game, his second family, for giving him a home all these memorable years. And then with a few knowing nods he leaves the cage.
His last fight brought him inches from the dream he’d so long chased, and in a sense that was fitting. Dan Henderson was a PRIDE two-division champion, a Strikeforce champion, a fan-favorite who will live forever young in the stunning highlights he’d created. But he was always chasing something, always refusing to be defined by the miles on his engine. Behind him he leaves another opponent bloodied and busted, the fight’s outcome insignificant compared to the heart-emptying performance of both men. The crowd begins to chant — Hendo, Hendo— and for a fleeting moment he’s as young as he ever was.
At forty-six, Dan Henderson says goodbye.
