It took UFC light heavyweight Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell no less than eight years to reach the summit of mixed martial arts, and when he stood supreme on that mountaintop as the light-heavyweight champion and the UFC’s biggest star in July 2006, the entire MMA world called for a fight between him and the legendary Wanderlei “Axe Murderer” Silva, a light heavyweight from Brazil.
It only took four months, however, for Liddell to fall. In May he lost his championship belt to Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, and then his star power slid when he lost to Keith Jardine last September.
“After the Jardine fight,” Liddell says, “I thought I wasn’t ever gonna get the Silva fight.”
But now the clash is on, set for the UFC 79: Nemesis card on December 29 at the Mandalay Bay Events Center, and it has regained its intrigue because Silva himself has lost two fights in a row, and, like Liddell, needs a big win now if he’s ever to climb back up the sport’s steep mountain.
Liddell has become accustomed to huge events, but the stakes for this do-or-die fight against Silva are immense. “You just gotta take it like another day at the office,” Liddell says of the pressure. “That’s how you have to approach it.”
Silva, who’s been training for this fight for four months, including at the Extreme Couture facility in Las Vegas, says his preparation in town has been crucial.
“Now, I have my best condition ever,” he says.
The headline bout on the UFC 79 card, between former welterweight champions Matt Hughes and Georges St-Pierre, who each hold one win over the other, will be a five-rounder, even though neither of the contestants is the division’s reigning champion. That man, Matt Serra, was scheduled to fight Hughes but had to pull out last month when he suffered a herniated disk in his back. And yet, instead of a three-round fight between contenders, the UFC made the match-up an interim title bout, thus warranting two more rounds.
“I was all for it; I got so used to five-round fights,” says Hughes, who defended the championship nine times before losing against St-Pierre 13 months ago.
The real winners of the move, of course, are the fans.