On Christmas, Jeff Monson climbed into a cage an hour outside of Moscow to fight a man 20 years his junior in the 84th professional bout of his MMA career. It lasted less than a minute.

The way it ended was, Donald Njatah Nya, a 23-year-old fighter from Cameroon, hit him just behind the ear with a right hand. For a moment the punch seemed to freeze Monson in mid-air – his hands still up in a defensive posture, his bulging, tattooed arms still stuck to his bulging, tattooed body – then he pitched forward and landed face-first on the mat.

The referee rushed in to save him then. Nya cocked a fist and held onto it. Monson rolled slowly to his back, offering up his open guard to an opponent already in the early stages of a post-fight celebration.

This is how 2015 ended for Monson. It was his third TKO loss of the year, not counting a disqualification win over Nikolay Savilov, who stopped Monson with strikes in September, then soccer-kicked him in the face after the referee intervened.

But it’s not the numbers that worry Monson, even if it is, somewhat paradoxically, the numbers that keep him going. What worries Monson is what happened in the Nya fight before the right hand landed.

“He jabbed me twice,” Monson told MMAjunkie. “Just two jabs, no big deal. But man, I felt it. I was groggy, my bell was rung, just from two jabs. I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t normal.’”

Monson also remembered a conversation he’d had with longtime friend and former WEC featherweight champion Mike Brown, now a coach at the American Top Team gym in Coconut Creek, Fla., where Monson has trained for many years. Brown had told him that he knew it was time for him to quit fighting when minor blows, punches that wouldn’t have bothered him five years earlier, suddenly left him woozy.

When asked to recount that conversation for MMAjunkie, Brown even described his feelings in much the same way Monson had described his – it wasn’t normal.

“I could tell that my chin wasn’t as good as it was,” Brown said. “I had gone 10 years and maybe got rocked once. Then I got rocked a handful of times in a year, and I realized, something’s different now.”

He told Monson this as both a friend and a coach. The extent to which it was a warning and a cautionary tale – if this happens to you, don’t ignore it – was left unsaid.

But now, at 44 and with a sudden burst of knockout losses peppering a record that, for the first 15 years, included just two defeats by TKO, Monson seems to realize he has a problem. He fought for the UFC heavyweight title. He went three rounds on a broken leg against Fedor Emelianenko. He fought everyone from Daniel Cormier to Chuck Liddell to Josh Barnett and Roy Nelson.

His toughness has never been a question, but now his chin is failing him and he can’t stop it. He also can’t seem to stop himself, even if his family and friends wish he would.

“Everybody thinks (continuing to fight) is a bad idea for me,” Monson said. “Everybody.”

In many ways, Monson, who recently became a Russian citizen, is a man of contradictions. How else can you describe a guy with the symbols of both anarchy and old Soviet-style communism tattooed on his body?

He’s an outspoken critic of the United States government, which he has at times likened to a terrorist organization. He also showed up for his last fight wearing a shirt with the image of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has overseen exactly the sort of aggressive military action and domestic human rights abuses in Russia that Monson himself was so critical of in the U.S.

It’s a similar story with his fighting career. Ask Monson if he believes that the aging fighter is usually the last one to know when it’s time for him to quit, and he’ll tell you yes, absolutely. Ask him if he’s ready to quit and he’ll tell you no, not just yet.

He can, in the same breath, admit that how he felt after eating two jabs from Nya was a cause for serious concern, then turn right around and say that they’re “going to have a rematch in March, thank goodness.”

Monson’s plan is to do two more fights. But then, the reason he wants to do those two fights is because he knows he shouldn’t fight anymore. It doesn’t make sense until you hear the reasoning behind it, and then it still doesn’t make sense, but in a different way.

The first reason is pure, arbitrary numbers.

“I have 58 wins,” said Monson. “It’s not that deep or anything. I want to win 60 fights.”

The other reason is as old as the fight game itself. That last loss, the one where Nya cracked him with a right hand that resulted in what Monson insists was a flash knockdown? He doesn’t want that to be the last the MMA world sees of him. He wants to leave on a better note, and he’s convinced that he can.

“I can’t live with that situation, with December 25 being my last fight,” Monson said. “I can’t accept that.”

But what happens if Monson gets his wish? What happens if he wins these next two fights and reaches the 60-victory mark? Will he not be encouraged by that success? Won’t he think that maybe it’s proof that he doesn’t have to retire just yet?

And if he loses one or both of those fights, won’t he be tempted to try a little longer just to reach the goal he’s set for himself?

To others, like Brown, it seems clear enough. Monson might be telling himself that he just wants to win a certain number of fights, but really what he wants is to keep going.

“We’ve had that conversation before, about, you know, what’s next,” Brown said. “I think Jeff’s thing is, he just loves to compete. He likes to compete more than he likes to train. Even if he’s not training a lot, he’ll hop in a grappling tournament in Miami with a $500 prize the week before fighting in the UFC. He just loves to compete at every opportunity, and that’s something that may never die in him.”

But Monson is also an intelligent man. He has a master’s degree in psychology, for crying out loud. He knows when he’s kidding himself, or at least tricking himself. Asked if he might be setting this arbitrary end point as a way of allowing himself to put off the question of what he’ll do with himself once he’s done fighting, Monson didn’t hesitate.

“Yes, 100 percent that’s what I’m doing,” he said. “I know that when I’m done I want to teach, run my own school, all that. But do I want to do it right now?”

So for now Monson’s plan is to work around it, this thing that’s happening to him. For these next two fights, he said, he’ll tailor his training around avoiding punches, avoiding any and all shots to the head, focusing on getting his fights to the floor where he can put his considerable grappling skills to good use.

In this way, he tells himself, he might be able to get those extra wins he thinks he needs. He might be able to leave the sport on something other than a dismal knockout loss, and in so doing, he might find some lasting peace that he can carry into his post-fighting life.

“But if it doesn’t happen, if I win one of them and not the other or something like that?” Monson said. “I don’t know. It’s going to be hard to take.”