Whether it’s coaching, teaching or just sharing hilarious anecdotes from his long, rich history in fighting, Renzo Gracie has never really been out of the conversation when it comes to MMA.

On Friday though, Gracie (13-7-1) returns to a position in which we haven’t seen him in a while: He’ll be the one wearing the gloves, with fellow vet Yuki Kondo (60-34-9) standing across from him in the cage at Mall of Asia Arena in Pasay, Philippines.

It’s been more than eight years since we’ve seen Gracie in action – more precisely, since April 2010, when he met Matt Hughes at UFC 112. At 51, with his place in MMA secured, Gracie’s comeback might not be one that many were expecting.

But hey, what can he say?

“It’s never too late to have fun; that’s the secret,” Gracie told MMAjunkie Radio ahead of his main-card welterweight bout at “ONE Championship 78: Reign of Kings,” which streams on the ONE Championship app.

The story of how the bout came to be is pretty simple.

Gracie is friends with Chatri Sityodtong, chairman and CEO of ONE Championship, who also happens to have trained at Gracie’s gym for a while in New York. Asked by Sityodtong whether he’d be interested in another MMA bout, Gracie was direct.

“Sign me up. When is it?” Gracie told him.

As for how the opponent was picked? Well, first he had one request.

“They asked, ‘Renzo, do you want us to get a guy your age?’” Gracie said. “I go, ‘Guys, are you crazy? I don’t beat up old people. What do you think this is, a geriatric encounter? No way. I want to fight a kid. Get a young kid.’”

We’re not sure if 43-year-old Kondo falls under the “young kid” category – but he is a few years Gracie’s junior. And for Gracie, it was easy to embrace the idea of a fellow PRIDE veteran whom he’d long seen in action and admired. Even if it wasn’t necessarily the promotion’s first choice.

“I believe they tried (Kazushi) Sakuraba, but I think Sakuraba is involved in a grappling association right now that he’s organizing and he couldn’t do it,” Gracie said. “I think they see me as a legend. They want to get someone who has history on this sport on the same level. So they went and got Kondo, who did over 100 fights.

“He beat a lot of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys, the best Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys out there, and he was able to beat him. Many times, in PRIDE, (they) asked who I wanted to fight. I said him, back in the day. But I never had the opportunity to fight him and it came about now.”

OK, so maybe 51 isn’t really the average age for fighters to stage comebacks. But then again, the word “average” is not one you’d associate with anything Renzo-related. As far as his body holding up in training goes, Gracie said, it is a non-issue.

“What people don’t realize is, I never stopped training,” Gracie said. “I keep training. I’ve been training, seriously, for over a year and a half. And I’m feeling better now than when I was 25. I’m really feeling good. I can’t wait to test myself on this match.”

As we know, though, MMA isn’t just tough on older bodies; it’s tough, physically and mentally, on pretty much everyone. Add to it that Gracie is a successful business owner, with an already-solidified legacy, and one would understand if he’d simply said no to Sityodtong when the invite first came along.

As Gracie, himself, will tell you, “I don’t need to work one day anymore in my lifetime.” So money isn’t a problem. And Gracie also said he doesn’t carry – or has ever carried – a bad taste in his mouth after his last outing proved to be a slow-paced, ultimately losing one.

So why is it that he’s still going?

“People only see winning or losing; that’s a very shallow sight of what fighting is,” Gacie said. “In reality, I want to fight because I keep wondering – before anything else, I’m a teacher. And I teach jiu-jitsu. So I keep wondering, I need to know every aspect, in every age, of how your body reacts, how your mind reacts. How you can be calm, how you shouldn’t be anxious, how you do things under pressure.

“I think it’s a unique opportunity for me, especially being healthy the way I am now, to test myself and to improve my knowledge so I can pass (it) to the future generations. Not only my family, but of my students. That I’ll be able to build better fighters, that I’ll be able build better human beings.”

More importantly, Gracie gets a chance to create memories. And it’s through those that he hopes to share the knowledge he’s been able to acquire in this lifetime – or even, who knows, the ones after it.

“Some people say that there’s life after death,” Gracie said. “So I hope there is. And I hope there is fighting there, too. So I can bring these amazing memories to kick some ass on the other side too.”

For more on ONE Championship 78, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.

MMAjunkie Radio broadcasts Monday-Friday at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT) live from Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino’s Race & Sports Book. The show is hosted by “Gorgeous” George Garcia, Brian “Goze” Garcia and Dan Tom. For more information or to download past episodes, go to www.mmajunkie.com/radio.