Matchup of the Year

By Josh Stein on Feb 25, 2008

It just doesn’t happen often enough; a fight where I am so uncertain about who is going to win that I am flip-flopping about my pick as I am starting to write. Honestly, I haven’t been this unsure about a pick since Fedor vs. CroCop. I’ve been wrong, but I haven’t been unsure.

The fact is, Anderson Silva and Dan Henderson make for a fight that we cannot, with any real certainty, call, and the odds are proof of that. The UFC and Pride Champions are locked even and I doubt that even Wanderlei Silva vs. Rampage Jackson would have been considered this tight of a matchup if it had happened instead of the Henderson fight at the end of last year.

I’ve already talked about why it is that Dan Henderson and Anderson Silva are forces to be reckoned with in the middleweight division, why it is they are both dominant and devastating, and why it is that I so rarely bet against either of them when they are competing in this weight class.

Still, I want to take a second to really look at the dimensions of this matchup, because it’s not until you really see how these guys matchup that you see how hard it is for me to make a pick.

Often, just a stylistic advantage can make a choice simple, but this fight offers no such luck.

After all, we have Anderson Silva, who has torn through opponents with mechanical efficiency in his striking, and we have Dan Henderson, who has a chin that has never failed him, even in his fights at 205 pounds and the open water of the heavyweight division. So the question takes us back to the ancient Zen parable: If you take the strongest weapon, and smack it against the hardest dome, what’s going to happen.

There’s the answer that we’ve seen from Mark Hunt in his fight with Mirko CroCop, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to compare Hunt’s chin to Henderson’s yet. (I’m aware that I’ve done it periodically, but only to illustrate that the man has a very hard head, the question is “how hard?”)

I’m certainly ready to call Anderson Silva the Peter Aerts of the UFC middleweight division. He seems to tear through everyone with that vicious set of combinations and tireless attack that I’ve only ever seen from top K-1 kickboxers like Aerts and his fellow Dutchman Ernesto Hoost. I’ll be honest and say that I think that even the guys that we consider aggressive in the MMA world aren’t as aggressive as Silva. Wanderlei wasn’t, because he had the patience to wait for an opening and bob and weave for minutes at a time. Sure, when he attacked he was devastating and finished every match, but I don’t think he’s been as aggressive as Anderson has been in Anderson’s MMA career.

That said, I think that if we see this fight stay standing through five rounds, it will end very much like the fights we’ve seen with Hunt in K-1 (namely the three bouts he dropped to Jerome LeBanner and the one he dropped to Hoost, which I certainly recommend to anyone interested in K-1), and not like Hunt’s MMA performances (which have been heavily focussed on his submission game).

What that means is that we will see Anderson Silva do serious damage to Dan Henderson, but we will not see the effect on Dan. There will be combinations landed by Silva throughout the fight and eventually the final bell will ring (something that has never happened with Silva in his UFC career).

If this fight hits the ground, this is a different world. We are looking at an incredible wrestler and a BJJ warrior. It is a classic matchups with the next generation spin: that neither of these men are new to each other’s world. Both are well versed in wrestling and both are skilled in submissions. The specialties are really only a slight advantage in the reality of things.

If this fight does hit the ground, I am still leaning towards Anderson, but less than I am with the standup, because I’m not sure how Anderson will compete with the freakish strength of Dan Henderson. We are, after all, talking about a guy who controlled Rampage for the first few rounds of their fight, and kept the much larger opponent planted flat on the canvas.

Still, I will give the edge to Silva for a few reasons. The first of which is that I think that his jiu-jitsu is aggressive and gets vastly underrated because people are so tied up with the visceral power of his muay thai. Every time I watch the tape of Anderson’s fights with Travis Lutter and Nate Marquardt (guys with very, very well established Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu backgrounds), I’m astounded by how well he makes his style work in mixed martial arts. The use of elbows on an opponent who’s resisting the triangle and his ability to just completely destroy Marquardt on the ground makes it hard to believe that Anderson is beatable.

The other is Dan Henderson’s history against great Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighters, and it is really my basis for making this prediction more than anything else.

Henderson has been twice submitted by opponents with superior jiu-jitsu backgrounds. While one of those wins is often attributed to the raw size of current UFC champion and former Pride champ Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, his skills are not dismissable.

It is also important to not that Henderson was caught in an armbar by Nogueira’s brother Antonio Rogerio (yes, they both have the same first name), who, while he competes at 205 pounds, cannot be attributed with a strength advantage, as that is clearly not the case.

It’s also worth noting that the Nogueira brothers gave Anderson Silva his blackbelt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. While I make it a point never to make the mistake of confusing the student and teacher (Kurt Pellegrino is, for example, not as good a submission fighter as his instructor, Hermes Franca, and he isn’t on ‘roids). Still, in this case I have a hard time letting this slip by, while Anderson Silva is a weight class below Rogerio and two below the current UFC champ, I think that this is really an advantage on the ground.

That said, Dan Henderson is very strong and a great wrestler. If he takes this fight to the ground and maintains top position, he may be able to power through Anderson’s submission attempts. He may even take a page out of ‘Page’s book and try some crazy power-bomb slam. I won’t call this one for Anderson and say that he has control of all the outs (this isn’t BJ Penn vs. Joe Stevenson), but I will say that I’m going with Anderson on this one.

The prediction: Anderson Silva by decision.

The reality: Anything can happen.

Filed Under: Opinion • UFC

Tags: Anderson Silva • Dan Henderson • UFC 82

About the Author: Joshua Stein is a writer and editor for MMA Opinion. He has worked as a photographer and journalist and has a number of print journalism credits. He also works as a moderator for MMAForum.com and a grappling columnist (covering judo, collegiate wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and submission grappling) for profighting-fans.com.