Cain Velasquez is the most destructive, impetuous and potent heavyweight mixed martial artist I have ever seen. One-on-one in the Thunderdome, against any MMA fighter past or present, with my own life hypothetically hinging on picking the victor, I would bet my mortal coil on Velasquez. He is so far ahead of his own heavyweight peers that it is almost silly. This is why it confounds me so deeply that I can't simply call him the greatest heavyweight ever.
Consider the time period. It's late 2010, Strikeforce is springing leaks and less than five months away from selling to Zuffa. Bellator isn't even on MTV2 yet; it's mired in its Fox Sports Net nightmare, constantly being regionally pre-empted or blacked out for baseball. Velasquez is 28 years old and has inherited the strongest UFC heavyweight division in ages, on the doorstep of obvious further consolidation. He is poised to be the most dominant heavyweight ever while being afforded the luxury of the best, self-contained heavyweight division an MMA promotion had ever had. It seemed like a lock.
Nearly five years on, Junior dos Santos is not Cain Velasquez's greatest rival, it's physical infirmity. Injuries might be an expected rite of passage at the highest levels of this sport, but we can seldom predict their frequency and severity for any athlete. Who would suspect (or want to suspect) that the heavyweight division's most high-powered battle tank would be so injury-prone? In 32 years, Velasquez has now had eight surgeries: three knee surgeries, two on his left shoulder and one on his elbow, his foot and his hand respectively. The only missteps of his career have been injury-related and that even includes his lone career loss to the aforementioned dos Santos.
I hate to impugn the accomplishments of any great fighter, but in hindsight, the Brazilian's 64-second knockout of Velasquez to win the UFC heavyweight title in November 2011 is as big of a red herring as there is in MMA history. Both fighters entered the Octagon with serious knee injuries that would have forced either to pull out under traditional circumstances, but this was the lone fight to be broadcast on the UFC's debut on Fox. Dos Santos and Velasquez were essentially forced to fight by the stakes of the event, reducing the epic clash into a Pride-style crapshoot with two injured athletes gloving up and rolling the dice because it was best for business. When they rematched in fitter, healthier form, Velasquez twice savaged dos Santos so badly that their second and third bouts are now touchstones for horrific beatdowns in modern MMA. Many now view dos Santos, one of the best athletes the division has ever seen, as damaged goods, largely because of the brutal cost Velasquez extracted from him. Only injuries have stopped Velasquez.
Injuries conspire against Velasquez in another fashion, as well. It's been almost half a decade since he smashed Lesnar and yet in that time span, he has fought only two men, dos Santos and Antonio Silva, in rotation fashion. While all four outings since the initial dos Santos loss have been haunting demolitions, the fact we haven't seen the sport's heavyweight king face a unique challenge in three years casts Velasquez in the most upsetting version of MMA “Groundhog Day” ever. Velasquez has been stuck in injury hell and competitive purgatory; the flames are brutally hot and we all burn with him.
As stated off the top, I reflexively take Velasquez over any fighter ever in a hypothetical head-to-head, including his fellow Iowa Central Community College alum Jon Jones and yes, former heavyweight overlord Fedor Emelianenko. However, this is the pernicious nature of any “greatest ever” conversation. As cocksure as I am that Velasquez smashes up fighter ever, sports, like anything, are about accomplishments. Sartre wrote, “The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write?” Who you beat and how you beat them is the only reality in MMA, you are what you do. It's why we lionize Randy Couture and B.J. Penn in spite of their losses, appreciating the magnitude of their actual accomplishments. Reality is the only world where Matt Serra beats Georges St. Pierre, so it is the only one that really matters.
All this philosophical garbage to say, the startlingly stagnant nature of Velasquez's championship tenure has left his résumé incomplete in comparison to what we anticipated for him and for now, still falling short of Emelianenko, whose heavyweight campaign still represents the highest degree of long-term success against the best array of heavies. It's why Fabricio Werdum is such a perfect opponent for Velasquez.
It's not that Werdum is a fresh face for Velasquez, nor is it even that he put a grappling master class for the ages on Emelianenko and tapped him out five years ago. Werdum is probably one of the 10 best MMA heavyweights ever, is still showing steady technical improvement and has had an outstanding divisional run that has made him the undisputed contender. You seldom get title challengers that good in any weight class, never mind the typically stale heavyweight division. Werdum even has a feasible way to win, given his beyond-compare ground game, which few could muster against Velasquez. If Werdum himself one, he'd have a legitimate claim as arguably the best heavyweight ever. But, a win over Werdum, which most anticipate with Velasquez as a -500 favorite, would be at the very worst, the second most significant win of his career behind vanquishing dos Santos. No one is going to scan through the history book, see the closing odds of the fight and think Werdum was a chump. It's exactly the sort of notch on the belt that “greatest ever” claims are made of.
This is not an anxious decree about the sand running out of Velasquez's hourglass. He is still just 32 years old in a division where the average age is about 34 years old and the upper echelon of the weight class seems even older with fighters like Andrei Arlovski re-emerging as contenders. This is before even considering how much more skilled he is than his contemporaries. It's still well within grasp for Velasquez to hang up his gloves and be unanimously considered the greatest heavyweight ever, but at the same time, it's irrational to assume that the mere passing of time alone will bring about that ascent.
The actual “doing” part is always the hardest, even in MMA, where it's about more than your ability to beat someone up. Cain Velasquez is the ultimate FightMetric jawdropper, a man whose anecdotal and statistical manifestations of violence far surpass his contemporaries, but greatness doesn't happen “on paper.” It's a testament to how supernaturally gifted he is that Velasquez's reign of terror seems like a disappointment to anyone on any level, but to see what he is capable of inside the Octagon, I can barely stomach the thought of responding to the question “Is Cain the greatest?” with “Well...” instead of a terse “Yep.”
When it is so easy, so vivid, so clear in the mind to imagine him beating any fighter to a bloody pulp, we thirst to see it in the reality, in the cage, where the spectre of injury always creeps just outside the fence, ready to drag us all hell to with tentacles made from blown knee ligaments and torn labrums. Even the baddest heavyweight I've ever seen.