First, former Pride staff and M-1 Global teamed up to stage their own Japanese New Years Eve card. Headlined by Fedor taking on the gargantuan Hong-Man Choi (in what is only fair to be described as a ‘freak show’ fight) it is notable only for the comically outsized Fedor losing out on a takedown attempt by virtue of Choi just being huge. After surviving some (admittedly painful looking) ground and pound, Fedor locked in an armbar for the win.

Fedor took his licks in that one, but he was fighting a big guy. No one saw a decline coming.

Affliction were Fedor’s strongest suitors and they actually put on some decent cards. Some dude with stupid hair from The Apprentice was seen ringside, and a colourful cast of well-known MMA veterans populated the few cards they staged.

Fedor even managed to fight some decent competition, defending the WAMMA (World Association of Mixed Martial Arts) title, given to him by the independent board as a symbol of his lineal championship.

To modern eyes, revision of Tim Sylvia’s career does not show us a great heavyweight. In his prime he was a big guy who had decent enough striking (in the context of heavyweight MMA during this era) and had beaten some decent fighters, among them Ricco Rodriguez and Andrei Arlovski.

He had also been dropped and out-hustled by an ancient Randy Couture and submitted by the great ‘Minotauro’ Nogueira in his last bout.

Still, Sylvia was a former UFC champion, and without stepping into the Octagon, Fedor had to beat whatever UFC heavyweights he could manage to get into the ring with him.

And at least looking at Sylvia’s prior bouts with UFC-calibre opposition, we can ascertain that he had probably never been treated as badly as he was when he faced Fedor Emelianenko.

Thrash legends Megadeth played live before the fighters came out but Fedor’s performance was more akin to the guttural grindcore of Napalm Death’s ‘You Suffer’, with Sylvia clattered to the canvas in the opening exchange and forced to tap to a deep rear naked choke. The fight was over as soon as it started.

“I truly thought I was going to beat him. I really thought I had a chance to knock him out. I actually thought I could have submitted him. He got off before I did. I just had a bad performance. I wish we could do that fight all over again and I could have a good performance to see actually what would have happened. I actually don’t feel like I got beat. “We could have gone five rounds and he would have beat the ever-loving s**t out of me, you never know. It’s just a fight I’d have liked to have back and have the performance I was capable of. I had a great training camp. I got caught real quick. I trained for that position, but I didn’t do what I was supposed to do. I got caught and he capitalized on it. All heavyweights hit hard, but I was surprised by his speed. He was faster than I was expecting.”(7)

Fedor’s next bout for Affliction was against Tim Sylvia’s former foe Andrei Arlovski, a talented striker with a penchant for heel-hooks. Arlovski had seen ups-and-downs in his MMA career, but had been training with famed boxing coach Freddie Roach, sharpening up his hands.

It showed: contrary to predictions, Arlovski competed admirably against Fedor, backing him up to the ropes with quick punches and kicks, marking up the best heavyweight in the world quickly and landing on him frequently.

Then, perhaps the greatest knockout in heavyweight MMA history: Fedor, under duress, slightly wobbly at the knees, sagged into the ropes. The Belarusian smelt blood and moved in for the kill and what would have been an improbable victory to everyone looking on.

Fedor, the purest fighting force in the world at that point, an excellent improvisor and counter-puncher, used the ropes to push off and launched his deadly overhand right at the leaping Arlovski, who woke up moments later to find out he had not finished Fedor once and for all, but had face-planted in front of the Las Vegas faithful.

Fedor was described as sluggish but at this point in time commenters were in unison in crowning Fedor the greatest fighter in MMA history.

Fedor’s next bout for Affliction would have been another good-looking win on his resume. Former UFC Heavyweight champ and Pride FC veteran Josh Barnett was a big, strong grappler who came to fight, on a four-fight winning streak and well known as a dangerous submission artist.

Barnett failed a drugs test, the fight fell out of bed and Affliction folded.

Strikeforce

If Fedor’s brutal knockout of Andrei Arlovski papered over the cracks, his first fight in Scott Coker’s Strikeforce promotion only served to show those cracks were wider and deeper than first thought.

Brett Rogers (10-0, 10 finishes) was a big guy, with relatively heavy hands, but outside of that you would be hard pressed to put him in the class of someone like Derrick Lewis (for an example easily recognisable to modern MMA fans).

Yet the limited Rogers gave Fedor a very tough first round. There was always a wildness when Fedor swung his wide punches towards the target, but there was a method behind the madness: forcing a fighter towards a shorter shot, changing up the speed of his shots to confuse, using his punches to mask something else.

Now, just madness.

Fedor barely set up his looping overhand right, and Rogers looked the general, walking Fedor into a sweet straight jab that busted his nose open, claret freely flowing.

Fedor spent long periods against the fence, Rogers’ uncultured style no less a problem due to his lumpy frame, and when Fedor got Rogers on the floor he was reversed by a man who possessed none of the nous of a Nogueira and none of the tools of a Mark Hunt. Fedor was being put in positions that were not of his own doing and—even worse—that were avoidable.

When Rogers had his back to the cage Fedor swung wild combinations at him, the feints and set-ups long gone. Salvaged in the second round by a beautifully well-timed overhand right that had Rogers reeling, it seemed all was fine in the world so long as Fedor Emelianenko kept winning.

That all changed in his next fight against UFC washout Fabricio Werdum, another fight in which the final outcome was said to be elementary.

The Bloody Elbow team certainly saw it that way, unanimously voting for a Fedor victory in their preview.

Analyst Luke Thomas went as far to say:

I just don't see a way for Werdum to win here. Submission is the most likely course to any sort of victory, but Fedor has phenomenal defense. His timing and use of weight distribution is unreal. Back when he was king, no one just sat up out of Nogueira's triangle...except Fedor of course. He can create scrambles from small openings and reverse positioning in the blink of an eye. At some point Fedor's going to put it on his chin. That's all there is to it.

Those predictions looked to be accurate early on in the fight. A flurry of punches sent Werdum to the canvas. Compare Fedor’s approach to Werdum to how he carefully outmanoeuvred ‘Big Nog’ a few years earlier: gone is the first look, gone is the careful rearranging of limbs to create a clearer path, gone is the knowledge of when to allow a fallen fighter to stand.

Instead, Fedor leapt into the guard of one of the most talented big men to ever put on a gi and despite having ample opportunity to use that vaunted fight IQ, Fedor found himself constricted by Werdum’s legs, the blood flow cut off to his head, his arm bent at angles no human enjoys. He tapped out, the first legitimate loss of his career.

He would suffer many more after that. But as we said at the beginning of this dive into Fedor’s career, it’s those prime years we care about.

Legacy

“He definitely had an aura. He was a ten-year, undefeated champion. His ability was incredible. Ten years without getting beat, the man had something going for him. He could do it all. Everybody wanted to talk about his looks or his physique. You don’t have to be chiseled and ripped to be a great athlete. It didn’t matter; the guy was super strong. He had the whole package. He could stand. He could ground-and-pound. He was so dedicated to the sport. He was so prepared every time he fought. He was just flat out great. He put in his time and made himself a superstar. In my opinion he was the greatest of all time.”—Mark Coleman (9) “He’s a hell of an athlete. He’s very fast, he’s very strong, and he hits hard as hell. It was an honor to get in the ring with him. I can honestly say he’s the best all-time heavyweight. Randy (Couture) was a great heavyweight champion but he didn’t have that knockout power Fedor did.” — Tim Sylvia (10) “Fedor Emelianenko, my favourite of all time…I’ve never seen an athlete like him, fighting, as far as a fighting athlete.” — Mike Tyson (11)

For nine years and 28 fights Fedor Emelianenko could not be beaten, a truly historic run regardless of the era. As of right now—depending on who you ask—Fedor Emelianenko is either the greatest heavyweight of all time or somewhere in the top three. Anyone saying outside of the top five should be treated not just with caution but hostility.

But as we at The Fight Site have alluded to on a few occasions in this series, MMA is still a young sport. Will Fedor’s legacy remain strong in decades to come, or will he be an afterthought when we talk about the all-time greats?

And I’m not just talking pound-for-pound, like the series you’re reading an installment of right this second. I’m talking heavyweights.

It seems unfathomable that Fedor Emelianenko has not punched his slightly paunchy mug into MMA’s heavyweight Mount Rushmore. On this list alone, he is the highest ranked heavyweight, and I’m sure if you did a rudimentary search online you will find him higher in other lists.

Consider the legacy of James J. Jeffries upon his retirement as the undefeated, undisputed heavyweight champion of boxing in 1905.

Jeffries had “not a rival in pugilism today” according to the Police Gazette, and even legendary champion John L. Sullivan said, “I never saw the man that I thought could stand a chance to lick Jeffries”.

Historians agreed for much of boxing’s early history.

Nat Fleischer, founder of The Ring magazine:

As I have had it listed in The Ring Record Book for some years, my all-time rating of heavyweights is as follows: 1. Jack Johnson, 2. Jim Jeffries, 3. Bob Fitzsimmons, 4. Jack Dempsey, 5. James J. Corbett, 6. Joe Louis, 7. Sam Langford, 8. Gene Tunney, 9. Max Schmeling, 10. Rocky Marciano.



I started the annual ranking of heavyweights in the 1953 with only six listed: 1. Jack Johnson, 2. Jim Jeffries, 3. Bob Fitzsimmons, 4. Jack Dempsey, 5. James J. Corbett, 6. Joe Louis.

This was in 1971. Fleischer goes on to argue that Cassius Clay (and he calls him Clay, not Muhammad Ali) was not yet worthy of a top-ten all-time heavyweight ranking. Granted, Ali had yet to turn the trick on Joe Frazier or beaten the terrifying George Foreman, but he already had a stacked resume.

You could compare it to Stipe Miocic today: are we as historians failing to recognise what a superb resume Miocic has? Certainly more than one member of The Fight Site team has Stipe ranked as the greatest heavyweight in mixed martial arts history. Will this become consensus in years to come?

Back to James J. Jeffries, the seemingly unbeatable ‘Boilermaker’: today, with well over a Century passing since his prime, we have more fighters, more champions, more all-time greats, more data to look at.

Even before Fleischer’s revised list, Charley Rose also ranked Jeffries in the top five of all-time.

Where does Jeffries rank today amongst historians?

Well, this historian ranks him outside of the top 15, even recognising his reputation amongst contemporary sources. Bert Sugar, a boxing historian whose opinion I do not respect, ranked Jeffries outside of his top 10 even with his fervent defending of the old-time champions.

Matt McGrain of The Sweet Science—then writing for Boxing.com—also ranked Jeffries outside of the top ten in 2014:

It was (heavyweight great Jack) Johnson who unmanned Jeffries in the end, coming out of retirement during the former’s absolute prime and absorbing a beating terrible in its humiliation. Karma, perhaps, had the final word here – had Jeffries not insisted upon drawing the color line in 1904 and instead met Johnson he would likely have taken Johnson out six years before Johnson would have had a chance to lay a glove upon him, possibly changing history forever. As the man once said, it is not in the stars to hold our destiny.

Will we be saying the same about Fedor’s management failing to secure him a fight with Brock Lesnar in decades to come? About the oft-mooted ‘super fight’ with Randy Couture? It is unthinkable now that Fedor will not always be near the top in the pantheon of great heavyweights, but the same would have been said about Jeffries a hundred years ago.

It is pointless to look into the future just now though. When looking at a fighter’s legacy I believe there are two main questions we need to answer: who did they beat, and when did they beat them?

It is easy to look back at Mirko Cro Cop’s failed UFC tenure and assume he must not have ever been that good. But look at his bouts in Pride FC, look at the flashes he has shown even post-prime, look at his longevity, and you will see a fighter that has always been at least respectable, and—at the time Fedor faced him—one of the most feared heavyweights around. Contemporary reports back up the significance of this bout:

There is a lot more at stake than just a title, the winner will further cement himself in the history of MMA because this fight has legacy written all over it. What would Royce Gracie be without Ken Shamrock, or Wanderlei Silva be without Kazushi Sakuraba, in order to be great one must have a great nemesis, and Fedor and Mirko can each be that one springboard to the other’s ultimate destiny in the sport.(12)

Modern fans might assume that Cro Cop was washed up immediately after fighting Fedor, but that would be a classic example of revisionist history.

Cro Cop went on to win the 2006 Pride Open-Weight Grand-Prix, adding two wins to Josh Barnett to his legacy, ending the prime of the fearsome Wanderlei Silva, and somehow remains relevant today despite some worrying losses and long periods of poor performance. As of September 2019, Cro Cop is on a ten-fight winning streak, sometimes beating men considerably younger than himself. He even went back to K-1, unfathomably winning the 2012 Grand Prix (even beating future top ten ranked professional boxer Jarrell Miller, who was kickboxing at the time). Mirko Cro Cop is an undeniable heavyweight great.

‘Minotauro’ Nogueira’s move into the cage coincided with the end of his prime, but he still managed some respectable results: sure, he suffered the only submission losses of his career once he moved to the UFC, but was the competition really better? Beating former champs Tim Sylvia and Randy Couture (the latter for the ‘interim’ UFC title) looks good on paper, but neither man was up to much at that stage. Brendan Schaub and Dave Herman were not impressive fighters, but it is impressive to me that a shot, old Nogueira managed to still win fights at that stage of his career. Fabricio Werdum was one of the greatest heavyweights of all-time, but when he submitted ‘Big Nog’ in 2013 he was only evening up the score, a decision loss to Nogueira already on his record. Frank Mir stopping the Brazilian is perhaps the only thing you could really hold against him, but in battles between veteran big lumps anything is possible. The only way one would come away with the opinion that Nogueira was not a great heavyweight is if you believe that the only fights that matter are in the UFC. The footage, and the purveying opinion of the time should dispel this notion.

The rest of Fedor’s career doesn’t amaze, but he beat former champions (the best of them Mark Coleman, Tim Sylvia and Andrei Arlovski, the latter of whom is somehow still winning fights in the UFC today) and even on his retirement tour—which sadly seems like it will never end—he gave us an indication of what might have happened had he moved over to the UFC, destroying Frank Mir in 2018 in a fight that was long overdue and somehow managed to be fun despite us never really needing to see either man fight again.



But as a boxing historian will tell you, we only need to judge fighters past their prime when they’re doing something impressive. That is what is extraordinary, not a previously great champion losing to fighters he would have easily beaten in his prime.

For much of Fedor Emelianenko’s prime he was seen as the pound-for-pound best in the sport. He could out grapple the best grapplers, out strike the best strikers, and submit pretty much anyone who dared get close to him.

Whereas the heavyweight boxing champ was seen for decades as the world’s best unarmed fighter, the advent of mixed martial arts meant that was no longer true. In Fedor’s pomp, he truly was the baddest man on the planet.

A top ten ranking in The Fight Site top twenty should not be questioned, it should be a given.

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Sources

(1) PRE PRIDE: CRO COP VS FEDOR EMELIANENKO, MMAWEEKLY.com

(2) Total MMA: Inside Ultimate Fighting, Jonathan Snowden, 2008

(3) “Babalu Sobral on fight with Fedor: I was wanting it to be over”, YouTube.com

(4) Fighting Fedor: Chris Haseman, Fightersonlymag.com

(5) Total MMA: Inside Ultimate Fighting, Jonathan Snowden, 2008

(6) Sherdog’s Top 10: Best MMA Fights of All-Time, Sherdog.com

(7) Fighting Fedor: Tim Sylvia, Fightersonlymag.com

(8) 'Emelianenko vs. Fabricio Werdum Predictions’ BloodyElbow.com

(9) Fighting Fedor: Mark Coleman, Fightersonlymag.com

(10) Fighting Fedor: Tim Sylvia, Fightersonlymag.com

(11) “Mike Tyson on MMA and Fedor”, Youtube.com

(12) PRE PRIDE: CRO COP VS FEDOR EMELIANENKO, MMAWEEKLY.com