Jose Aldo doesn’t meet his opponent’s eyes. Even as he joins his foe in center ring to hear the referee’s instructions, the featherweight great keeps his head bowed, sleepy stare trained on the floor. He may have borrowed the affect from Fedor Emelianenko, but it belongs to him now.

Only when the referee has finished his speech does Aldo look. After touching gloves, he sidles back to his corner, a picture of quiet, deadly grace, arms swinging loose from his shoulders as he glances up through his brows, and catches the enemy, for the first time, in his lupine gaze. Only then, in the moment before combat, does Jose Aldo take stock of the task before him.

HOW AND WHY

Any time he steps into the cage or ring, a fighter must wrestle with two great questions: How? and Why?

The answer to the first falls under the umbrella of Tactics. Its scope can be narrow--how do you counter the jab?--or it can be broad--how do you back the other man up?--but if the question is “how?” the answer is, by definition, a tactical one.

Jose Aldo knows many of these answers. His arsenal is as deep as it is wide. Wrestling, jiu-jitsu, boxing, Muay Thai--all of the subtlety and violence of martial arts is contained within his loping frame. Enter his space uninvited, and Aldo may slip away with dancerly ease, or he may stand his ground and land punishing blows with both fists. Give him space, instead, and he may fill it with his jab, or he may turn stalker, walking the foe into his legendary low kicks. Reach for his legs, and just try to guess whether he will sprawl and disengage, or meet your chin on the way down with a flying knee.

For Jose Aldo, the greatest featherweight the world of mixed martial arts has ever known, the “how” is easy.

“Why?” is a thornier matter. This is where tactics give way to strategy, or rather, where tactics become strategy. Why this counter over that one? Why counter now and not later? Why counter at all? If tactics are finite and many, then the strategies into which they fit are relatively vague and few.

The decision to stop kicking against Max Holloway at UFC 212 was, tactically, a sound one. Though he spent the first three minutes of the bout boxing, Aldo did fire one of his trademark kicks, laying his shin across the back of Holloway’s spindly thigh. Max was ready for it. Before Jose could set his foot back down, the long arms of the Hawaiian snaked out: a quick, one-two combination, thrown with an immediacy born of careful preparation. In form, it was very much like the combo that would send Aldo crashing to the canvas in round three, but this time the right hand fell just short of landing clean.

Some fighters count themselves lucky for surviving such a near-miss, and move on. Jose Aldo evaluates, and, like all great tacticians, adjusts. In this case, the adjustment was obvious: Holloway had countered the kick, and so the kick had to go--at least for now.

Strategically, this was a critical failure. Without his kicks, Aldo could not find any way of slowing Holloway down, something he desperately needed to do against a younger fighter known for his ferocious pace. Without his kicks, he struggled to confuse Max’s reactions, frequently finding himself a fraction of an inch out of range as the challenger got a read on his hands. Without his kicks, Jose Aldo could still win battles, but he was doomed to lose the war.

Perhaps we should replace “how” and “why” with “can” and “should.”

From that perspective, it becomes fairly easy to understand Aldo’s decisions, in this and every other fight of his championship career. For Aldo, whose craft and skill are matched only by his athletic talent, the cage is a wide world of possibilities. He can do almost anything, and he knows it.

But he should have kicked Max Holloway’s legs, and he didn’t.

PLAYING WITH FOOD

In his standout piece “Confusing the Wind,” Bloody Elbow’s Phil Mackenzie portrayed Jose Aldo as a skyscraper, a towering structure caught in an endless battle with the very air it occupies.

“In combat sports,” he writes, “Making a great champion requires its own engineering. The higher a fighter builds a legacy, the more stresses and weaknesses start to shift and amplify, and a lot of things can go very wrong, very fast. Technical flaws will be exposed and battered at, and a lot of new titlists fail to deal with changes in directional pressure, like the mental shift from taking to holding. In the end, talent, skill, and will can bring someone to a championship, but to hold a belt for years takes much more.”

Aldo had what it took. For seven years, from WEC to UFC, Jose defended his crown. The fans, like his opponents, were often frustrated by what they saw.

Here was Jose Aldo, the conqueror who had carved a path of blood through the featherweight ranks. And yet, instead of doing whatever it took to find the knockout, he seemed, more and more, to be doing only enough to get the win.

In his WEC days, only one opponent managed to take Aldo the distance in the blue cage. That was Urijah Faber, an all-time great in his own right, and the splotchy, purple balloon that Aldo made of his thigh soon became the stuff of MMA legend. Like Aldo, Faber was a remarkable athlete, probably the first man he had ever faced who could come close to matching his speed and explosive power. Faber was tough, too, having already garnered a reputation for fighting through injuries.

By the end of round two, the initiative belonged to the Brazilian. Faber was already losing his footing to leg kicks. By round three, he had to hop and limp to keep his leg from giving out whenever Aldo found the mark. The champion In round four, he spent much of the time standing in southpaw in a vain effort to hide his swollen ham from Aldo’s shin. He began shooting desperately for takedowns, and Aldo began casually attacking Faber on the ground whenever he was slow to stand up. For the last 90 seconds of the fourth, Aldo held Faber pinned in a mounted crucifix. With both arms trapped, Faber could only squirm as Aldo chipped and sliced and ground away at his face from top position.

That Faber still survived the fifth round after all of this would have seemed miraculous, were it not for the apparent lenience of Jose Aldo. After throwing 32 strikes in the third round, and 88 in the fourth, Aldo took his foot off the gas and coasted through the final frame throwing less than a dozen strikes. Of the six he landed in those last five minutes, one was a dig to the liver that folded Faber’s torso in two, and pulled his hands away from his face as if by magnetism.

Yet, Aldo did not follow up--and Faber could not. The fight ended in a wheeze, the first of five decisions which would mark Aldo’s legacy forever.

CAUTIO

Was it mercy that made Jose slow down in that fifth round, or fatigue? Or, as it has often seemed, was the champion simply playing with his food?

Fighters, like all people, are never really as simple as we want them to be. In the case of Jose Aldo, whose quietude can border on aloofness, true intent is a bona fide mystery. We try to understand him, but he will not meet our eyes.

It wasn’t mercy that told him to stop kicking Max Holloway. It wasn’t fatigue, either, though Max’s incredible stamina was and is a tremendous advantage. And to suggest that Aldo was playing with his food is to suggest that Holloway was ready to be eaten, which he most certainly was not.

And yet, between Faber and Holloway, between that feeling of complete control and seemingly inevitable disaster, there is a common thread. Whether coasting or collapsing, Jose Aldo’s fighting style is shot through with caution. In the cage, he practically vibrates with animal wariness, of the kind one acquires over seven years of championship defense.

Where Holloway is relaxed, Aldo is tense. Where Holloway happily lets a half dozen shots go in a row, Aldo mulls over whether to throw one punch, or none. Where Holloway trusts in his chin, Aldo trusts in nothing.

This is the tactician, who has learned through long experience to keep his violent impulses contained, to attack only when he is sure of finding the mark, to spend every moment of every bout wondering, “What is he going to do next?” And always with full knowledge that the opponent is playing the exact same game, one in which a single miscalculation can mean the end of everything.

Jose Aldo might have a hard time telling you or me why he does anything in the cage. Despite his many years of dominance, he has always been more comfortable reacting, on the spot. His mastery lies in the realm of the How, where sharp skills and keen eyes determine each and every exchange.

This is the way Jose Aldo has learned to fight, and it made him a champion. If he is to be a champion again, however, he will have to widen the scope of his questioning. How does Jose Aldo beat Max Holloway?

Leg kicks, for one.