In the purgatory between totally finished and all the way back, there's Mirko Filipovic

Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic

Don’t call it a comeback for Mirko Filipovic. Seriously, don’t. That would be inaccurate, not to mention lazy.

I know, it’s what we love to do in MMA, the world where a loss means you’re done – right up until you win a fight, at which point you are officially “back.”

But if his win over Gabriel Gonzaga (16-10 MMA, 11-9 UFC) in the main event of UFC Fight Night 64 taught us anything about Filipovic (31-11-2 MMA, 5-6 UFC), it’s that neither of those terms apply to him right now. He’s not done. Neither is he back. He’s somewhere in between, in that career twilight zone between dream and nightmare.

The nightmare is what we seemed to be headed for after the first two rounds. The man who showed up for those opening 10 minutes resembled “Cro Cop” only faintly. This guy had the same haircut, maybe. He had the vague outline of that old physique hidden somewhere inside the winter coat of his now 40-year-old body.

But as he drifted away from Gonzaga’s attacks without offering many of his own, it was like watching a man caught in the slow current of his former life. He seemed to be here more out of habit than passion. When Gonzaga hauled him to the mat and lay in his half-guard, tendering his ribs with right hands, Filipovic wrapped his arms around Gonzaga’s head and locked his hands, as if waiting for the search and rescue team to realize he was missing.

Here’s where anyone who loved watching that old “Cro Cop,” couldn’t help but get that sinking feeling. He wasn’t doing terribly. He wasn’t doing much of anything. Was Filipovic going to make us sad? Even worse, was he going to use all five rounds to do it?

Then in the third, without warning, this outburst of elbows. One shuddering explosion of short, swift violence, and suddenly Gonzaga’s legs were failing him. You could almost feel his confusion. How did this happen? Where did it come from?

He recovered his senses just long enough to regain his guard and take a breath. There now, maybe it was over. Maybe that was all the old man had. Soon he discovered that Filipovic was just focusing his energy, which he would then direct with great force and efficiency through the point of his elbow and straight into Gonzaga’s skull.

By the time referee Leon Roberts finally stopped it, Gonzaga had rolled to his side and wrapped his arms around the leaking hole in his head, all thought of fighting back now vanished. The blood poured down his forearms and onto the canvas. Filipovic was so happy, he seemed to almost forget about the deep, dark hole on the side of his own head.

A win like this, I suppose it’s redemption. It’s a nice story, is what it is, or at least it would be if it ended right this instant, which it won’t.

Perhaps no single person symbolizes Filipovic’s underachieving UFC years better than Gonzaga. He was the opponent the first time they met, there to help sell Filipovic’s impending UFC title shot. He’s the guy we started paying attention to only after he Cro Cop’d “Cro Cop.” That knockout loss to Gonzaga marked, if not the beginning of Filipovic’s decline, then at least the end of his ascent.

To come back and beat him now, at this late stage in his career, how could it not feel a little like exorcising a demon? It’s just, if you cared about Filipovic’s long-term health, you might be tempted not to read too much more into it than that.

That’s not to say he has to quit. You look around the UFC’s heavyweight division these days, and you see some guys Filipovic can beat. You even see some guys in his age bracket, which is more a commentary on the state of the division than anything else.

He can still do this, and clearly he can still attract some interest. He got us to labor through this very unstar-studded fight card just so we could find out what he had left, so that’s saying something.

But while what he has left might have been enough to win on Saturday, it did not seem to be springing from an endless well. It seemed, in fact, to be in pretty short supply. Against Gonzaga, Filipovic managed to ration it out almost perfectly. It just makes you wonder how much is left, and whether he’ll insist on using every last drop.

For more on UFC Fight Night 64, check out the UFC Events section of the site.

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