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Jose Aldo and Chad Mendes gave each other 25 minutes of hell at UFC 179.

Before the final round, Aldo sat on his stool. Eyes shut, mouth open, gasping down labored breaths through his mouthpiece. Legendary Nova Uniao head coach, Andre Pederneiras, urged Aldo to “just worry about breathing.” His shoulders heaved with the weight of each breath, as the cut-man dragged a crimson rag across his face, wiping blood as it leaked from his nose. He nursed a wound on his swollen eye that had recently cracked open from a Mendes right hand.

Color commentator, Brian Stann, expressed worry over Aldo’s condition:

“We are not used to seeing this from the corner of the champ!”

In the opposite corner, Chad Mendes looked relatively fresh. A slight red tone on his cheeks and a small mark under his left eye belied the damage he had taken at Aldo’s hands just moments earlier. Mendes’ trainer, Duane Ludwig, felt no need to comfort his fighter, instead jumping right into tactical advice. And for good reason - the previous round was his strongest of the fight. He made his entry feints count and used his lead hand deftly, setting up a series of right hands on the trickling eye of Aldo.

Aldo had done the better work throughout, but the fight was close enough - and judges sufficiently unreliable - that either man could conceivably earn it in the last round.

The fifth round is where the cracks in Aldo’s incomparable composure tended to show. While near impossible to hit clean or take down at his best, Aldo had long struggled with his cardio at the end of five-round affairs. Fights with Mark Hominick and Ricardo Lamas ended with Aldo lying on his back, giving up the final frame. Neither of those men pushed him anywhere near the degree Mendes was. He could usually afford to drop the last round, but he lacked that luxury tonight.

The final five minutes represented the culmination of Mendes’ athletic career. One of the best fighters never to hold a title, Mendes had the misfortune of coming up in a division already ruled by Aldo. After suffering a first-round knockout in his first bid at Aldo’s title a mere two years prior, Mendes went on a tear. He made concrete improvements in his game - notably with Ludwig’s aid - and finished his next four opponents in devastating fashion.

Mendes was peaking. The challenge of Aldo’s throne pushed him to heights he had never reached before, and would ultimately never see again. His offense was as potent as ever, but his setups were now multifaceted, jabbing and feinting into his combinations, using crafty shifting footwork to cover distance. His counters were diverse and sharp, his defense unusually sound. Aldo couldn’t possibly prepare for this iteration of his challenger; it was a new Mendes.

The stools were removed and the men took their positions. Mendes let out a quiet “Woo!” and stayed active, anticipating the start of the round with some labored bouncing. Aldo looked distracted, fiddling with his eye wounds and checking back at his corner.

Mike Goldberg and Brian Stann pointed out that Mendes’ gutsy performance must have increased his confidence. Stann mentioned that the final round “could very well decide the winner." Mendes would never again get an opportunity as ripe for the taking as this, and he wasn’t about to waste it.

The round started fast, as Mendes tagged Aldo clean three times in the opening ten seconds. A jab, southpaw straight left, and a lead hook, all set up by shrewd feints. Mendes continued feinting to draw out counters and dull the champion’s reactions. When Aldo lashed out on the lead, Mendes smoothly pulled back, slipped, or blocked it. The wrestler with a right hand had become a defensive slickster.

After nearly a minute had passed, Mendes did the impossible. He feinted inside, drawing an Aldo counter, and sailed right into a double leg takedown, catching Aldo with his hips square. After a perfect entry, he ran his legs and launched Aldo off his feet.

Aldo was in familiar territory, on his back late in the fight. Only this time, he couldn’t afford to wait it out.

After Mendes had racked up a minute on top, Aldo found his opportunity. Warned for inactivity by referee, Marc Goddard, Mendes postured up and threw a knee, giving Aldo the necessary space to wall-walk back to his feet. As soon as he was up, Aldo exited the clinch by shoving Mendes halfway across the Octagon.

Two minutes had passed without any effective offense from Aldo, and he knew he had some catching up to do. Aldo began walking Mendes down with renewed vigor. He found an opening through Mendes’ guard after a couple ineffective leads, landing a clean lead uppercut and rear straight. As Mendes barreled backwards, he stepped in and delivered a piercing knee to the chest.

Far from having the intended effect, Mendes caught the knee and turned it into another takedown attempt. Faced with the prospect of spending the remainder of the round underneath his opponent, Aldo summoned his strength and acted. He stamped his caught leg down and pivoted with extreme prejudice, throwing Mendes out of position and landing him on his hands and knees, before picking up a loose quarter nelson and smushing the wrestler’s face into the nearby cage.

The pace and accumulation was visibly wearing on Aldo, yet he refused to coast. He pushed forward on unsteady legs, almost as if harnessing his intense fatigue as a weapon. His once beautiful mechanics were rapidly decaying, and his positioning in exchanges was all over the place. At one point a blocked body shot from Mendes sent Aldo wobbling back, and upon re-entry he narrowly avoided an uppercut with an almost unconscious spasmodic motion. A second later he pushed forward and rocked Mendes with a tight right hand, before whiffing a desperate shovel hook that seemed to signal fatigue finally sapping all motor control from his body.

Aldo was too tired to throw proper punches, too tired to bring his feet with him when he attacked, somehow too tired to stop walking down and beating up Chad Mendes. Mendes appeared the fresher man in terms of mechanics and body language, but now it was Aldo doing all the effective work.

They say that fatigue makes cowards of us all, but not Jose Aldo. No, it made Aldo determined.

With a minute left in the round, Mendes made one last attempt to take the fight to the ground. His entry was clean; he got in on Aldo’s hips in great position, with enough momentum to lift him off his feet. Aldo simply rode it out with a whizzer before standing up and shoving Mendes to the canvas using his face as a lever. The man with one of the tightest double legs in MMA was made to look utterly silly for thinking he could take Aldo down, like a child trying in vain to topple his father. Mendes had asked and been answered emphatically: wrestling was out, it was not going to work.

The rest of the round was elementary, with a few insignificant exchanges. At the end of the fight, both warriors raised their hands briefly, before quickly succumbing to fatigue. Aldo scaled the cage and sat atop it, gesturing to a roaring crowd. There was a general understanding that the fight belonged to Aldo, competitive as it was.

It would have been so easy for Aldo to fade. To do as he had in past fights and take the last round off. Mendes’ strong start gave him the perfect opportunity to fall back into a lull, but Aldo wouldn’t have it. He decided the round would be his. Nothing was going to stop him.

Ultimately the last round didn’t matter, as all three judges saw Aldo winning three of the previous four. But that final round, perhaps more than anything else in his career, provides the perfect glimpse into the kind of fighter Aldo was.

When I think of Jose Aldo, what immediately comes to mind is his masterful ability to control the flow of a fight. In a way rarely seen in MMA - a way more reminiscent of the smooth jazz of boxing legends than the metal-core/glam rock of MMA - Aldo would ride the ebbs and flows of the fight as it played out, gently nudging it along his preferred route. He wouldn’t contest what didn’t need contesting; if his opponent was content to stand outside his range and lose a low-volume snooze-fest, Aldo was happy to oblige.

But Aldo was always ready to take a firmer hand. He had preternatural knowledge of exactly where he was in a fight at all times - exactly how many rounds he was up, exactly what needed to be done to secure the next one. If Aldo didn’t care to win a round, he’d focus on keeping himself safe whilst taking an offensive rest, or chill out on the bottom, using his guard to mitigate damage. If Aldo decided a round needed to be won to bring his vision of the fight to fruition, there was no stopping him.

After being thoroughly dominated by Aldo and knocked out in the second round, Manvel Gamburyan commented on his incredible generalship:

England, they’re a very fast [soccer] team. When they play Brazil, somehow Brazil slows them down and makes them play their game. I don’t know how it happens, but it’s the same thing with Jose Aldo. Even if you want to fight fast, or anything like that, he makes you go on his pace. It’s magic, or it’s just that he’s gifted. I don’t know. (1)

It’s almost inevitable that a fighter with Aldo’s mentality of doing just enough to win would at some point find himself on the receiving end of a poor decision. MMA is such a chaotic sport - and the eyes of its officiators so often drawn to empty volume and activity - that being fastidious with one’s offense carries a significant risk. It speaks to Aldo’s mastery in his role of conductor that he never came particularly close to giving up a fight because he simply didn’t do enough (aside from a severely post-prime loss to Alexander Volkanovski, in which he seemed to lack the cardio to do enough).

Chad Mendes was, at that point, Aldo’s most fierce competitor. Arguably the most impressive win on his resume. And the greatest example of exactly what lengths Aldo would go to in order to do what needed to be done.

An All-Terrain Fighter

When pundits say a fighter can do everything, they’re usually speaking in very broad terms. “He can strike and grapple,” or “he can punch moving forwards and backwards.” It’s a phrase meant to signal breadth of skill without being taken completely literally.

Jose Aldo could do everything, and I mean that in an incredibly granular sense. Pick any constituent discipline of MMA - he wasn’t good at it, he was world-class. But even more than that, he could fight any fight required of him. Given the absurd variety of skills one must navigate to succeed in MMA, it’s often difficult to trust fighters to fight in a way they haven’t demonstrated aptitude toward before, even if their skills seem to suggest they should be capable (see Calvin Kattar becoming flustered when forced to pressure, despite otherwise possessing fantastic boxing and footwork). Aldo could enter a fight with a new weapon, or even a new style of fighting, and he wouldn’t only guarantee competence, but he’d prove a paragon of the style.

By nature, Aldo was a pocket operator. He thrived in extended exchanges, more comfortable making opponents miss in close than anyone else in the sport. His comfort zone was just at the edge of his opponent’s reach or slightly closer, where either man could step in and put together combinations. But he was amazing everywhere, capable of adjusting his game as needed. When he chose to play the out-fighter - maintaining a longer distance and maneuvering around the ring to avoid his opponent’s offense - he was shockingly proficient. When opponents refused to engage him in the pocket and forced him to advance, he pressured as well as anyone, cutting the cage with small, measured steps to maintain his positioning while slamming sweeping strikes into his opponents’ body and legs, herding them into longer combinations.

Comfort Under Fire

Aldo was a very fluid fighter. He had his preferences and areas of strengths, but on a broad strategic level, his game would take different forms depending on what the situation demanded. He would almost let opponents choose their own demise. Standing just outside of range, daring his opponents to act, Aldo would wait until they demanded something of him. In an era where most elite fighters aim to enforce their own strengths to deny their opponents a chance to work, Aldo was content to give his opponents space and time to work. He was also the best defensive fighter in the sport’s history, which meant that the brunt of his opponent’s work was futile.

Analyst and friend of The Fight Site, Phil Mackenzie, explains Aldo’s peculiar defensive temperament:

Jose Aldo takes a different approach. He’s a defensive wizard, one who doesn’t prioritize learning or responding to his opponent’s patterns. Instead, his focus is on not having to do any of that at all, or on avoiding it as much as he possibly can. This is enabled by his defensive fundamentals, the multiple layers of his footwork, his head movement, his hand parries. This itself becomes the root of a different type of adaptability. Take, say, Floyd Mayweather as the case study for combat sports defense. Floyd is famous for being an adaptable fighter, but the core of it isn’t that he takes in a lot of information and computes it all. Instead it’s that he’s able to see the enormous corpus of data that an opponent represents, and then consciously ignore the vast majority of it, or better yet, to dump it into a kind of mental box labelled “minimal processing, use if necessary.” He has an automatic, built-in response to almost everything which can be thrown at him… The amount that Floyd has to consciously think about is relatively small and so, for him, adapting is relatively easy. The heavy lifting of the defense is performed almost without thought, based in tenets of distance, foot position and pure reflexes… That’s boxing’s greatest defensive maestro. It’s something like what MMA’s greatest defensive fighter does. (2)

Aldo is incredibly fundamentally sound in terms of his positioning, footwork, and defense. These fundamentals allow him to play an atypical nullifying game. For most fighters, allowing opponents more opportunities to work simply risks getting hit more. But if you’re trying to hit Aldo, you’re likely missing. And if you’re missing Aldo, you’re likely getting countered. And if Aldo’s countering you, you’re probably going to stop trying to hit him so much. It’s in this way that Aldo paralyzes opponents into inactivity, slowing the pace to a crawl - not through fearsome power, but through impeccable fundamentals.

Almost always in perfect position to react to attacks, Aldo keeps his lead foot trained on his opponent’s center-line and uses small, precise adjustments of his lead foot to stifle their lateral movement. He’s renowned for his ability to take angles both offensively and defensively. When looking to create opportunities of attack, he’ll use a sharp jab to advance diagonally, creating a route for his right hand, or throw his lead hook with a pivot toward his opponent center-line.

His defensive footwork shines even brighter, as he possesses perhaps the finest pivots in MMA.