The Cosmic Terror of Anderson Silva's Leg Break

And Wyman remains the champion. I've seen just about everything this sport has to offer someone. Every week for more than 20 years now, I've been observing mixed martial arts, first as a fan, and then as a fan who is lucky enough to make a living watching it. I have written the Lord of the Rings trilogy six times over in the last decade plus, all about cage fighting. I saw all of it when it happened, and I've watched it again and again and again since then. And when you end up with that much exposure to something, you start seeing the patterns. You start seeing the little connective tissue between events that repeat. The scenes become apparent, and you eventually just... Come to accept things as they are. I remember being so nervous for Jon Jones versus Rashad Evans that I was literally sweating. And I'm extremely confident. I do believe my own hype. That's the worst thing you can ever do. Your fabric is fake. My fabric is fake. You're fake. Tell me how my fake was shot. I'm not going to get into that right here. My heart was pounding. I was so invested in that fight, in this story of these two teammates turned bitter enemies, I was physically barely able to handle watching it. Now, that was 13 years ago. A decade later, I watched Israel Adesanya finally defeat Alex Pereira in one of the richest storylines this sport has produced with one of the most shocking finishes this sport has ever seen. And if you had checked my heart rate from walkouts to the time I went to bed, it would have been a steady 60, Which isn't to say I don't appreciate the sport. Ford anymore. Absolutely love it, of course, but when you've seen enough of it, when it becomes your job, when you're constantly exposed to the knockouts and the press conferences and the rivalries and the wars over and over and over, there's a certain level of distance that you naturally take. I don't think your body could handle it if you were that amped up all the time. Have you ever watched Bruce Buffer react to a finish? He has no reaction at all, and you might see that and say, well, that's weird, but I totally get it. I totally get it. It's not that he's not amazed or shocked or any of that. It's that you cannot sustain that level for every shocking finish. Your system would be fried, but there's still one moment. There was this one time I thought I'd seen everything, and I pretty much had by that point. But this moment I'm talking about is without question the most genuinely shocked and unable to comprehend I have ever been about this sport. A moment that truly had me questioning reality in ways that a cage fight never should. And it gave me a realization about fighting that I'd not yet experienced in all my time. But in order to understand why this moment I'm talking about gave me an existential crisis, we need to go back a ways. So grab your marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate. Uncle Tommy's gonna tell you a ghost story. Which is incredibly fitting given that Halloween is also the 6th anniversary of the final fight of Anderson Silva's career. Which makes this the perfect time to talk about the cosmic terror of Anderson Silva's leg break. After the video, go check out official UFC gear through our link in the description below using code .10 for 10% off all products and rep your favorite fighters with the UFC store. Alright, so when champion Anderson Silva lost to Chris Weidman in their first encounter, it was one of the most shocking things I'd ever seen at the time. But it was shocking in like the way that sports are shocking. I hadn't given Chris Weidman much of a chance to win the fight. Honestly, outside of his horrifying victory over Mark Munoz, I didn't really know a ton about him other than that he was undefeated. And that Anderson Silva had done this so many times now that I really just assumed he would never lose. The first fight with Chael Sonnen, I think, is what really sealed it for me. If he could survive all that, if he could lose 23 minutes of a 23-minute, 10-second fight and still come out the winner, who was ever going to beat this guy? So, yeah, going into the Weidman fight, watching all by myself in my living room, my entire family gone on a camping trip without me because I'd be damned if I was gonna miss International Fight Week, it was shocking to see Silva get KO'd in the second round. He got silly! The rematch would take place later that year, right after Christmas. At the time, it felt like the biggest fight in the history of fighting, as big rematches often do feel like. Now, unfortunately for me, one side of my family was yet to celebrate Christmas, and they would be doing it on that very night. But if I'm missing vacations for fights, I'm certainly missing holidays. Lucky for me, though, this rematch had touched the mainstream enough that I convinced everyone we should watch the event at the Christmas party. And so we did. It was standing room only in the living room. Even my mom and aunt, who either have to ask every time it's brought up if If MMA is pro wrestling, or they sound like 90s John McCain talking about the sport, we're seated and watching the main event. First round, Weidman dominates. He's on top like the whole time. I remembered thinking, wow, Anderson is in trouble. And the replay between rounds made it clear that he got wobbled by the first big shot he took. So I went into round two thinking that Chris was going to validate that first win. That was the vibe. Anderson needs to be Anderson real fast, or he's going to lose again. First minute of round two, nothing really happens. But you could feel the anticipation from the crowd. And from the packed house family room that I was sitting in. One of them was about to do something. And then Anderson throws a leg kick. Oh no! He hurt his leg! So here's the thing about that moment. Not until the replay was it apparent how catastrophic this actually was. In the very moment it happened live during the fight, it was just confusion and disappointment really. What is happening? Why did Anderson fall down? Obviously he's hurt, but how? Why is Chris Weidman celebrating? What kind of anticlimactic finish to the biggest fight ever was this? He hurt himself? That was the vibe in those first few seconds. It wasn't what it is now because of course we all know what it is now. And as Joe Rogan is queuing up the replay, he doesn't The crowd doesn't realize it. We've watched leg kicks a billion times in this sport. They generally don't end with the guy throwing them suddenly on the ground. Of course, after the replay, it became one of the worst sports injuries ever captured on video for the entire world to see. Truly, it was body horror witnessed by the masses in a way that, even by 2013, was still pretty rare. You have to remember, streaming a video wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now. You had to seek out video online, and most people weren't seeking out that kind of video. My incredibly casual, mixed martial arts watching family packed into this living room. My mom and my aunt, who never watched the sport, they were all horrified. It probably turned most of them off to fighting forever. And look, I was horrified too, and I'd seen a ton. Had something like this happened in the sport before? Of course. But for it to happen in one of the sport's biggest moments at that time, and for it to happen to a man that up until the first fight with Weidman felt almost completely invincible, it was almost incomprehensible. Anderson Silva broke his leg This is how this ends. There's absolutely no possible way. And to see him lying there on the canvas, screaming out in pain. I didn't even know Anderson Silva felt pain. It was about as shocking a moment as this sport can produce. Now, by 2013, I was already working in MMA. I mean, I literally did a video about what happened that next week. But in 2013, I was still very much invested in outcomes and narratives. And this just did not make sense. There's no way that an Anderson Silva fight could end this way. How could this rematch fall apart Oh no. He just broke his leg in half. I've seen that happen a couple of times before. He's one of those guys that he already knows he wants to come back. Anderson was never the same again. It was so deeply unsatisfying and upsetting as a fan. But the sport moved on like it always does, and the next great narrative carried us through to the next and the next. Everybody kept living their lives, the world kept spinning, we all kept watching fighting. Silva's injury and his career, an increasingly fading part of our fight memory that was being filled with whatever was happening next to replace it. And then something happened What happened 8 years later that would truly test my ability to comprehend the nature of cage fighting Now, by April 2021, pretty much everybody was carved out of wood. We'd all already spent a year in a pandemic, and let's just say it wasn't the most whimsical time in the world. Eight years after Anderson Silva's break, I was in a completely different place in the sport. I'd gone from underground YouTube cartoon to Fox Sports to total demonetization, and then a whole second career here at MMA on Point. I was already three years in, so this had settled into my main gig, and the amount of writing and the amount of history of the sport I was consuming skyrocketed I went from knowledgeable superfan to semi-historian, and by 2021, I was already firmly in my headspace of just letting the sport play out as it did, without investing myself in the outcomes. It was just easier to maintain. Again, it wasn't that I didn't enjoy the sport, I did, and still very much do. It was just that my enjoyment of the sport had shifted, I stopped trying to predict it, to mold it to the narratives that I wanted it to have, I just took the sport for what it was. And then Chris Weidman fought Uriah Hall at UFC 261. There were a lot of inspirations. Interesting narratives going into that event, and I'm gonna keep it a buck, Hall vs. Weidman was not one of them. At least for me. I mean, he had three title fights on this card. And even though Usman vs. Masvidal 2 felt a bit silly at the time, given how bad the first one was, it was still a big fight on a big night. After losing the title following a brief run post-Silva, Weidman had failed to get himself back into the main event picture. By the time of this Hall fight, he'd already tried light heavyweight and came up massively short. Moving back down to middleweight, the fight before this one, he took on Omari Akhmedov as the co-main event of a fight night that saw Derek Lewis and Alexei Oleynik headlining. It was miles and miles from his peak, and as for Hall, he had failed really to ever reach that main event status, despite showing incredible promise early. And by 2021, he'd also been relegated in the minds of the fans to sort of mid-tier status. Ironically enough, his last fight before this Weidman bout was the final fight of Anderson Silva's career, as I mentioned earlier. A fight night at the apex on Halloween, a downer of a moment if there ever was one. Silva would eventually get TKO'd in the fourth round One of the greatest fighters ever retired in an empty warehouse after a lackluster fight. All of that to say, I wasn't particularly interested to see where this fight between Weidman and Hall went. If either guy won, it didn't feel that significant, and so when the fight started, well, you know how it is when you're watching fights. If it's not a big one, you may not be particularly locked in at the very start. You're watching, but your mind isn't fully there yet. Not to mention, it's pretty rare that anything significant happens in the opening seconds of a fight. That's why those moments where it has happened are so shocking. So I'm kind of blank watching. I'm not invested yet. We're 17 seconds in, and Chris Weidman throws a leg kick. Something just feels off. I look down, and my leg is like rubber. And then I face plant. It was like I was in a dream, and I just couldn't believe it. Like, was that my leg? There's no way that was my leg. I just seen that look like that. Remember how I said that initially in the moment with Anderson Silva's kick, there was this confusion. We all collectively were not really grasping fully the implications of what had just happened. It was the exact opposite when Chris Weidman broke his leg identically to Silva's. It was an immediate realization. And it is the only time that a moment has ever made me question reality in this sport. I could not accept that this had happened. There was absolutely no way- It was possible that Chris Weidman, who was on the other half of the most infamous injury in the history of the sport, one of the most infamous in all of sports, this freakishly rare thing, would suffer the exact same fate as Anderson Silva. This was only the third time ever such an injury had occurred in the octagon, and unless you were an old head, the only time this ever happened was to Anderson Silva. And now, eight years later, some ******* how, Chris Weidman had done the very same. Between the sheer, visceral shock of seeing the actual leg, and the real The realization that this cosmically unlikely event had happened to the other party that was there in the cage the other time this cosmically unlikely event occurred was just too much for my mind to process. My brain's CPU was in flames, trying to make sense of what I was looking at, and no amount of coolant was going to keep temperatures at safe levels. It was the closest I'd ever been to being a Lovecraft protagonist. Now, you might think that I'm being hyperbolic right now, but luckily for us, I was live-tweeting- April 24th, 2021, when this happened, and you get to see in real time, my mind completely breaking. I am running around my living room because just like when Silva lost the first time to Weidman, I just had to do something. I had to move somewhere. And as I was doing that, I was on my phone blasting out tweets as fast as I could just to express in some way what was happening in my mind. Now, by the time I made the Jake Paul joke, a little bit of time had passed. That was me something I tend to do quite a bit. But everything before that is sheer panic and horror. Not so much at the injury itself. I mean, that was horrific, of course, and I could not feel worse for Chris Weidman in that moment. But it was more so that it had happened again, and to him of all people. It really made me question my understanding of reality and of the sport. Here is Chris Weidman mirroring Anderson Silva in a way that doesn't even seem mathematically possible. If I were to try and calculate the odds of this happening twice, and to the same two parties, I don't even know how you would go about that, but I'm sure it's cosmic lottery levels of impossible. Have you ever heard of Neville and Erskine Eben? They were brothers in Bermuda in the 70s. This story is 100% true and was reported in papers at the time and has since been revisited and confirmed. Both brothers were struck a year apart by the same taxi driver in the same taxi carrying the same passenger while riding the same moped. A year apart. So both brothers met the the exact same fate at the exact In the exact same age, in the literal exact same scenario, what are we supposed to make of that? What does that mean? Obviously, that is a way more extreme example, but it gets to how I was feeling in the moment after watching Weidman suffer the same fate as Silva. And this wasn't 2013, I wasn't some 20-something who was wide-eyed and sweating over fights I wasn't in. Eight years later, I was already this weathered lifer you guys know today, probably nearly twice as old as the average fan currently, and that leg break shattered every notion The only notion I had about the nature of the sport. About the nature of nature. That night after the card was over and I was lying in bed, the only thing on my mind was that Weidman kick. I started thinking back to Anderson. And what happened to him? Because if the best fighter I'd ever seen in my entire life could just break their leg on a seemingly inconsequential kick, and that's how he loses his chance to regain his title, a title he'd held for nearly seven years, then literally anything could happen, and it just did. The most seemingly impossible event took place. Weidman mirrored Silva. It was this lightbulb realization moment. In my understanding of what was and was not possible in this sport, nothing was what I thought it was. All of a sudden, I was rust, cold, the ponytail, crushing cheap beers. Time is a flat circle. That was a horrible Matthew McConaughey impression, but that's where I was at. At first, I was looking at the pattern. I was thinking, what does this mean, right? This has to mean something, but it doesn't. It doesn't have to, at least. That doesn't mean all patterns ever aren't connected, of course. But, you know, Weidman checked a kick and Silva got injured. There was no karma for checking a kick. That's not some sin. There was no reason that Chris would suffer the same fate. He suffered the same fate because sometimes, as we now know, very well, since this has happened several more times, that when you kick and that part of the leg has been weakened in some way, your leg can break. It was just so exceedingly rare at the time that for it to happen to Chris felt truly anomalous. I remember thinking that night about the real horror of that moment, at least from a fan perspective outside the obvious with the injury itself. It made me confront an uncomfortable truth about fighting, that there is no grand narrative. There are no hero's journeys or season arcs. There's just the cold, unflinching... reality that these are two people locked in a cage together, pushing their bodies to the limit of human ability, and the story you've been telling doesn't matter. Your bones do not care that it is your destiny to regain the title. Your brain doesn't know that this is your big comeback fight, that this means everything to you. It will shut down all the same if acceleration to the skull shears the brainstem reticular activating system and thalamocortical arousal networks, transiently disrupting neuronal membrane integrity and ion homeostasis If you want it more than the other guy, if you want it more than anyone has ever wanted anything, you can and still will lose in mixed martial arts. The best fighters in the world don't always get to have these incredible moments that we are expecting. Sometimes they come into a fight hurt and can't compete. Sometimes they lose a close decision in a fight that isn't particularly dramatic. Sometimes they get rocked early in a fight and never recover. However, to quote Jay-Z in public service announcement, movie dog. We love narratives as humans. We're natural storytellers. And so we want our sports to fit into nice, neat little tales. We want everything to make sense, but sometimes it doesn't make sense. And possibly the greatest fighter ever losing the last truly significant fight of his entire career because of a checked kick doesn't make sense at all. That same thing happening to the guy who checked the kick eight years later doesn't make sense at all. That's not That's not how any of this is supposed to happen, but that cage is completely indifferent The scariest thing is not that it happened twice. It is that it could happen again to anyone, and the pattern would not mean anything. Now, you don't have to subscribe to my interpretation of reality by any means. This is literally just how I see things. Which is why this video has been more so about my personal experience watching these two fights, and not a more general sense of the event and all of its history and all of its pieces. It only works as horror if it's a personal narrative. I know it's a bit different than what I usually do here on the channel, but it's also fun to explore other facets of storytelling, and maybe you got a kick out of this right around Halloween. Now, you might listen to how I view the sport and reality and think, god damn, that is depressing as hell. You live like this? This is what your day-to-day is like? But that's not really how I see how I see things. I framed this video as cosmic horror because, well, one, it's spooky season, and two, for a lot of people, the idea that the universe, as demonstrated through Anderson Silva, is completely indifferent can be horrifying philosophical thought, if you subscribe to it. But I don't see it as horror. I see it as a universe without specific hostility or malice. Chris Weidman wasn't being punished, he didn't get singled out, he didn't have any cosmic debt to pay for what happened to Anderson Silva. Weidman's body failing is not some moral verdict. It was just a super rare freak occurrence without any meaning. And once I realized that as a fan, I was able to stop looking for meaning in things that happen in the sport and make my my own, which is what I do every day. I find the meaning I want to find in it, and I enjoy it deeply, and then I get to talk about it with all of you. Taylor gets to turn my nonsense into a really cool video, so please do thank him for that, and go check him out on Title Picture with the rest of the boys. They're always chatting it up all week about whatever the hell's happening in combat sports. A big thank you to our channel members. You guys are awesome. I definitely wouldn't be able to make a video like this without your support. So that said, if you guys want more stuff like this, and you want exclusive content, hit the join button. Like and subscribe, because we're here kicking ass all week long. Please do leave a comment on this one. I'd love to get your feedback. Love to chat you up in the comments. Let me know what you thought, and thank you guys so much for watching. Have a great day.