Sherdog’s Top 10: Most Durable Fighters

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1. Nick Diaz

One man stands atop the rest as the most durable mixed martial artist of all-time, flipping a middle finger at the haters and welcoming his competitors to come get some. That man is Diaz.

The Stockton, Calif., native’s entire approach to fighting is predicated on that durability. He is a pressure fighter -- a swarmer, to be more precise -- who wants to walk down his opponent, push him to the cage and unload a stream of head-body combinations until he falls down unconscious, Diaz jumps on a submission or the final bell sounds. Eating a whole bunch of punches and kicks is a necessary adjunct to that approach. No matter how many shots you land on your opponent, working at a quick pace within arm’s reach effectively guarantees that you, too, are going to get hit.

That has never seemed to bother Diaz all that much. He was TKO’d once early in his career at the hands of the ridiculously powerful Jeremy Jackson -- a loss Diaz avenged twice afterward -- and he suffered a cut stoppage in his first bout against K.J. Noons. Other than that, nobody has come terribly close to finishing Diaz, and his resume includes some of the most lethal strikers in the history of the sport.

A young Robbie Lawler, one of the most devastating strikers the sport had seen to that point, failed to make even the slightest dent in Diaz’s iron jaw and went home with his first -- and, to date, only -- knockout loss in return. Takanori Gomi bombed away for all he was worth and managed to knock down Diaz, but he fell victim to a gogoplata shortly thereafter. “Hands of Steel” Scott Smith was a brick-fisted puncher, and Diaz pieced him up on the feet with combination after combination before putting him away with a rear-naked choke. Evangelista Santos is one of the hardest hitters in the sport’s history, and Diaz absorbed his low kicks like it was nothing before firing back in the second round and eventually snagging a slick armbar. Paul Daley is yet another all-timer of a knockout artist, and Diaz happily went toe-to-toe with him until “Semtex” could take no more. Diaz even withstood five rounds with Anderson Silva, perhaps the greatest striker in the sport’s history, and made it to the final bell despite the fact that his opponent popped for two different anabolic steroids.

That is the resume of the most durable fighter in the history of mixed martial arts. Absorbing damage is part of Diaz’s game, and he knows no other way to fight.

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HONORABLE MENTIONS: Kazuyuki Fujita, Mark Hunt, Quinton Jackson, B.J. Penn, Gilbert Melendez, Chris Lytle, Joe Lauzon, Junior dos Santos, Takanori Gomi, Fedor Emelianenko, Anderson Silva, Matt Brown

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