Doggy Bag: Just One of the Boys?

Fedor's loss to Werdum got me thinking about legacies in MMA. When it comes to most great fighters we've seen, like Fedor, Randy, Hughes and others, they have signature wins like Nogueira, Liddell and Penn. Anderson Silva and Georges St. Pierre are two of the best fighters we've ever seen but I feel like they lack that "signature" win. They have lots of great wins over great fighters, but neither of them have one fight that they're synonymous with.

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Do you think this hurts them in any way? It's obviously good to beat lots of great fighters, but it always seems great boxers are remembered for one great win that cements their legacy. Do GSP and Silva lack this, and is this why they need to fight each other?
-- Aron from Detroit

Jordan Breen, FightFinder Czar It is an interesting thought: both Silva and St. Pierre have beaten streams of top-10 guys in their weight classes, and have multiple pound-for-pound quality wins. Yet, neither guy really has a particular victory or foil that stands out above the rest.

Sure, Anderson has two great destructions of Rich Franklin on his resume, but neither seem like "signature" wins in that greatest sense. Hell, “The Spider” has elite wins at welterweight and light heavyweight as well, but his win over Hayato Sakurai certainly doesn't take that mantle, and as beautifully violent as it was, his bout with Forrest Griffin again doesn't seem to have that intangible "it" factor.

St. Pierre is a bit closer perhaps, due to his trilogy of bouts with Matt Hughes and rivalry with B.J. Penn. However, again, none of those five fights seems to have that abstract magic that puts a fighter's career in perspective.

I don't necessarily think that's a fault, though. If anything, it's a testament to the fact that fight in, fight out, Silva and St. Pierre are mashing elite level competition with a consistency previously unseen in MMA. A win over a top-10 fighter every four months or so for a period of years is mind-blowing in a sport where even the greatest slip up from time to time and the margin for error is so small.

So, no, Silva and St. Pierre don't necessarily need each other. However, in a bizarre way, that's exactly why they need one another. Both fighters will go down as two of the absolute greatest ever regardless of a token "signature" win. However, the fact that their dominance transcends that categorization speaks to the fact that we've never had two dominant pound-for-pound stars like this before, let alone two so close in weight, making a superfight actually feasible. While both have already secured places in the history books, it seems cruel that we'd never get to see them square off given their unique and truly special dominance.