Being Anderson Silva certainly has its privileges.
Silva leaned heavily on those privileges at Saturday's UFC 208, coasting through a monotonous three-round fight against the overawed Derek Brunson en route to a controversial unanimous-decision win.
Neither Brunson's strange timidity nor the inexplicable judges' verdict (29-28, 29-28, 30-27) would likely have happened if that wasn't Silva out there in the Octagon at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
But maybe that comes with the territory.
After holding the UFC middleweight division in his terrifying sway for seven years from 2006 through 2013 and becoming recognized as the greatest MMA fighter of all time, the 41-year-old Silva has earned the right to phase out of the sport any way he chooses.
It just so happens that Silva's choice involves sticking around long past his prime. Nobody's going to tell him he can't do it, even after grinding to a 1-4-1 record in his past six fights and testing positive for PEDs in 2015.
Even in the wake of this latest clunker, Silva showed no sign of letting up.
"I know I'm too old for fighting,” he told the crowd during his post-fight interview with UFC analyst Joe Rogan. "The guys in here are too fast for me, [too] strong. But I put my heart [into it] because fighting is my life."
Things haven't been the same for Silva since he lost his 185-pound title to Chris Weidman via a second-round knockout at UFC 162 in July 2013. In their rematch six months later, he suffered a gruesome and potentially career-ending broken leg.
By the time he returned to the cage 13 months thereafter, it was to a different UFC landscape and in a different role.
Counting Silva's initial loss to Weidman, the once-stable 185-pound title has changed hands three times, going from Weidman to Luke Rockhold to Michael Bisping. Despite being No. 7 on the promotion's official middleweight rankings, Silva is rarely mentioned among the serious title contenders.
These days, matchmakers pick their spots with him, booking him against other big names like Nick Diaz and a pre-title Bisping or using him to bolster flagging fight cards, as it did at UFC 200 in July 2016 and again at UFC 208.
Saturday's event had already faced considerable promotional hardship. It was set for Anaheim's Honda Center on January 21 but had to be rescheduled for Brooklyn because of "a lack of a suitable headliners," according to MMA Fighting's Dave Doyle.
Despite the delay and change of venue, the lineup remained shockingly thin, with an oddball fight for the new UFC women's featherweight title between Holly Holm and Germaine de Randamie as its main event. So UFC brass called in Silva and No. 8 Brunson to serve as the co-main attraction on just three weeks' notice.
Even by the relatively low standards of Silva's last few years, it was a surprising matchup. Brunson had put up a 7-2 record since coming to the Octagon in 2012 but shaped up as a strangely low-profile opponent for the superstar former champ.
Brunson came in on the heels of a wild and sloppy loss to Robert Whittaker in November, but prior to that, he had put together a streak of four consecutive first-round KO victories. At 33 years old and still in his prime, it was unclear whether the UFC saw this as a chance for him to get over against a big-name opponent or for Silva to reassert himself against a legitimate contender.
Unfortunately, we still don’t really know since the bout didn't deliver much action.
Brunson spent much of his 15 minutes in the cage with Silva looking uncharacteristically cautious.
He did his best work when he managed to clinch, peppering Silva with uppercuts and pawing overhand shots. Mostly, though, the three-time Division II All-American wrestler seemed content to stay on the outside, throwing the occasional leg kick and diving in on takedown attempts from too far out to be effective at anything beside forcing more clinches.
As he has in his recent fights, Silva showed flashes of his old self. When he managed to land counters off Brunson's sporadic attacks, he earned the younger fighter's attention. Silva threw some flashy kicks and a spinning backfist but mostly looked to be on autopilot.
A partisan crowd of an announced 15,628 cheered Silva's every move, but Brunson dictated the pace and crafted a slight edge in most areas, according to the official FightMetric statistics. When he finally scored a meaningful takedown during the last minute of the bout, it appeared to salt away his victory.
When the decision came down in Silva's favor, Barclays Center and Silva's corner men went wild. Many other observers had questions:
Count Brunson among those shocked by the outcome.
"Everyone is telling me that I won," he said afterward, per a UFC press release. "I feel terrible. It's not Anderson's fault or the UFC's fault. I took this fight on short notice and, to have this happen, is just crazy to me. I take this seriously. This is my job. I put everything into this, and I got robbed. It sucks."
After his unanimous-decision win over Diaz at UFC 183 was overturned because of his positive steroid test, Saturday's was Silva's first official victory since October 2012.
With Bisping staring down the barrel of a future title fight with No. 1 contender Yoel Romero and fielding offers from a possibly returning Georges St-Pierre, Silva won't force his way back among the elite of the division anytime soon. But there are enough other aging middleweights out there to keep him busy as long as he wants to keep accepting fights.
If this bout against Brunson proved anything, it's that his glory days are squarely behind him. Because of the dominating force he was for so many years, however, most fans seem to have made peace with letting Silva find his own way to the exit.
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