League of Legends – a more serious take

In a recent post, I was rather dismissive of Vitor Belfort’s League of Legends: a special league that he proposed the UFC to create, where older Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters past their physical prime can face each other under a modified rule set. While Belfort’s idea is not likely to ever come to fruition, the fact remains that as long as there are aging fighters who are still willing to step in the cage and fans who still want to see them compete, these fighters will continue to fight – despite the fact that accumulating additional traumatic brain injury is very detrimental to their future health.

When the UFC was owned by Zuffa and Dana White wielded much greater power in the company than he does under the current WME-IMG ownership, there were a few select fighters who were offered an executive position with the UFC, essentially as a way to force them to retire from active competition while at the same time preventing them from lending their name value to a rival promotion. To my knowledge, only four fighters have been offered this deal: former UFC champions Chuck Liddell, Matt Hughes, Forrest Griffin, and Antonio ‘Big Nog’ Nogueira. When the UFC was sold, Hughes and Liddell were soon released from their jobs in a cost-cutting measure. Griffin and Nogueira remained on board (rumor has it that these two actually took their new jobs seriously, whereas Liddell and Hughes did not do much to earn their paycheck besides an occassional promotional appearance). It’s clear that WME-IMG has no intentions of paying former fighters a lucrative salary to prevent them from fighting. Just a few months after Matt Hughes’ UFC executive job has been terminated, he is already talking about potentially returning to MMA competition. There are talks of a Hughes vs Royce Gracie rematch taking place in Bellator, while another UFC veteran Mike Swick is campaigning to be the one to welcome Matt back to the combat arena.

The urge for older combat sports athletes to keep competing well into the middle age is not limited to MMA fighters. Last year, Bernard Hopkins strapped on his boxing gloves for the final time at the age of 51. In a couple of months, 48-year-old James Toney will also return to the ring for one last time. It seems absurd that both of these boxers’ final bouts will be for a world title (granted this doesn’t mean much in the alphabet soup of boxing promotions). On the other hand, George Foreman won the ‘real deal’ lineal world heavyweight boxing title at 45 and continued to compete until he was 48. Meanwhile back in the MMA domain, Randy Couture holds the records for being the oldest to win and defend a UFC title (at ages 43 and 44 respectively), and the oldest to win a bout in the UFC (at 47, against aforementioned James Toney). More recently, 46-year-old Dan Henderson was granted a middleweight title shot against Michael Bisping in what was supposed to be Henderson’s retirement bout – and came very close to beating Couture’s record as he knocked down Bisping several times before eventually tiring and losing a decision.

This of course is the biggest problem with the ‘League of Legends’ concept. Some fighters can still compete with the best in the world well into their forties, while others quickly fall off in mid-thirties if not sooner. Vitor Belfort and Yoel Romero are both 39 and are in the same weight class – yet Romero is the top contender in the division, while Belfort despite still being ranked in the Top 10 is well aware that he should not be facing elite competition, as evident by his most recent outings. Imagine how a fight between Belfort and Romero would look today? I’d rather not even imagine, but it would defintely not be a good outcome for Vitor. There are many factors that determine a fighters physical prime – the length of their career and frequency of competition, the amount of damage absorbed in fights as well as in training, and plain old genetics. Here at FightMatrix, we’ve come up with a formula for determining a fighter’s combat age, which takes into consideration biological age, number and duration of fights, number of losses and stoppage losses. According to this formula, while Belfort and Romero are the same age, Yoel Romero is 40 in fight years, only one year above his biological age. Vitor Belfort on the other hand is 59 – two full decades older in fight years than physical years!

This makes it nearly impossible to define the criteria for being included in the League of Legends… unless you only allow fighters who are coming off a string of brutal losses. The state athletic comissions and other sanctioning bodies are the ultimate arbiter of whether a fighter is fit to compete, but it’s extremely rare for someone to be denied a license, and even then an unscrupulous promoter could hold the fight in a location without a legitimate sanctioning body which would step in to protect fighters from themselves.

To sum up all my musings on this subject… some fans still enjoy watching over-the-hill legends compete, if for nothing but nostalgia value, and as long as this remains true we will continue seeing fights that probably should not be happening for the contestants own welfare. And as of late this has become a more frequent thing in MMA. Of the major leagues, Bellator is by far the worst offender, putting together fights like Royce Gracie vs Ken Shamrock, or headlining an upcoming Pay-Per-View event with Chael Sonnen vs Wanderlei Silva. However UFC has also been guilty of making a quick buck off older athletes: Belfort has been absolutely destroyed in his last three fights, yet still has one more left on his contract, and it’s not likely that he will be released before taking another unnecessary beating. BJ Penn has four consecutive losses, and not only was brutally finished in his last two fights but didn’t even look like he belongs anywhere near a professional MMA league – yet he is still getting another fight in the UFC. Kelvin Gastelum is being build up as a legend killer of sorts; after effortlessly decimating Belfort, he is now matched up with Anderson Silva. It makes me sad watching legends fed to young lions. But I don’t think matching them up against each other is the answer either.

Perhaps they should bring back therapeutic use exemptions for testosterone replacement therapy (TRT). A few years ago, before USADA came into the picture, we saw quite a few late career resurrections fueled by TRT; no one stands out as a better example of this than Belfort himself. However this is very unlikely to fly in the current MMA climate.