At age 33, the perception of
Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira is as the sport’s most deflated young old man, an athlete who has often failed to display some of the defensive posturing of jiu-jitsu and now appears to be paying the price.
He is one year younger than
Randy Couture when Couture made his fighting debut in 1997.
If styles make fights, they can also make or break careers. Couture’s longevity in a job that grinds athletes into pulled meat is -- like
Lyoto Machida’s karate efficacy and
Anderson Silva’s faultless weaving -- a story that is unlikely to ever be duplicated. It is not a sport with a mortality rate, but it is a series of minor car accidents: Athletes come in looking healthy and exit as bloody, bruised and wobbly as if they had punctured a windshield. Give their bodies five years and they’ll grow haggard; 10 and you’ll begin hearing things like, “I don’t have an ACL,” and, “I need to drain this before dinner.”
Forty-six years old, Couture has outlasted most of his contemporaries and many of the men who followed after him. In 1997,
Mark Kerr was king of the world. He’s now a regional attraction with the physique of a melted candle;
Maurice Smith is gone.
Ken Shamrock, run out of town.
Chuck Liddell debuted, surged, became the most famous man in MMA, and then wilted, all during Couture’s tenure. And somehow, Couture remains a formidable headlining attraction, based in part on his skill and the seeming improbability he should be walking upright at his age, much less fighting.
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