A bloodied and at many points almost beaten Mauricio "Shogun" Rua reversed the momentum in the fourth round of his bout with Dan Henderson and never looked back.

I actually didn’t get to see UFC 139 during its initial airing. Those of you who actually know me personally (which accounts for somewhere in the neighborhood of my entire readership) will know that I spent much of the weekend nursing a stomach virus that had me completely out of commission – and solid intake – from Thursday until Saturday morning. Even after I was able to keep down a meal (Chinese take-out from down the street, because I’m a rebel), an incessant headache and remnants of dehydration kept me home on Saturday night. Since I don’t have cable, I have to watch MMA either at a friend’s house or gather a group for a table at a local restaurant. Which I actually prefer, since I love MMA enough to want to do everything possible to maximize the number of eyes on the sport on any given ngiht.

Long story short, I skipped the event.

I started to regret missing the card around the time I started seeing reports of the Urijah Faber and Brian Bowles fight. Then the drama and controversy of Wanderlei Silva’s win over Cung Le (see the previous post). By the time the main event came around, I was bummed out.

Then my Twitter stream turned into a half-hour scroll of expletives, transcriptions of audible gasps, and exclamation points. The phrase “fight of the night” popped up, then was supplanted by “fight of the year.” By the end of the night, everyone from the most stalwart contrarian to UFC President Dana White himself was calling the five round main event pitting Dan Henderson against Mauricio “Shogun” Rua one of the greatest fights in MMA history.

On Sunday, I *ahem* borrowed footage of the previous night’s top two fights, and wow.

Wow.

One of the first things I thought of watching the fight was that this is exactly the sort of thing that gripped me when I was first introduced to the modern version of the sport through not the UFC but bootleg VHS tapes of Pride events I would purchase when visiting my older brother Jack in Manhattan during the early aughts. Like the earlier performance of Wanderlei Silva that showed glimpses of the Axe Murderer I saw ten years ago, the struggle between Henderson and Rua showed the heart, determination, but most importantly skill that I admired in those early Pride fights. This isn’t to say Pride didn’t have its share of controversy and bad fights. But men like Silva, Rua, and Kazushi Sakuraba engaged in wars in those early days of the promotion that made you forget about not just what had happened earlier that night, but everything else in the world of sports.

By the time Rua gained full mount on Henderson for the second time in the fifth round and was once again reigning down strikes while asking himself what he had to do to finish this guy off – an inverse of the position both men found themselves in just two rounds earlier – I was thinking about what a lost opportunity it was for me not to have taken out my note book to document this blow by blow for this space or someone else’s. The blows, the blood, the seeming ends supplanted by sudden reversals or heelhook attempts. It had everything I honestly didn’t expect, even if I had secretly hoped for, in the weeks leading up to UFC 139.

Then I realized that even if I had taken notes, they would have been of much use. I would have been too transfixed by what I saw unfolding before me to convey it in words. Even if I were to re-watch that fight (an inevitability) and try to document it in hindsight, I’d be distracted by the thought that something would be lost in not conveying the experience of seeing this for the first time.

That fight – or whatever it was that unfolded on Saturday night – ended in a unanimous decision win for Dan Henderson. Of course, fans complained. This time I feel they were right, in the sense that the fifth and final round was as clear a 10-8 round as you will ever seen in MMA, but not one of the three judges appointed by the California State Athletic Commission saw fit to judge it as such. It brought to light the problems inherent in judging (note I didn’t say “MMA judging” because the problem is actually just as bad if not worse in boxing and there’s plenty of overlap in personnel).

But the beauty of that fight and the sport as a whole is that it doesn’t matter. Nobody will look at the extra digit at the other end of Rua’s record and hold him against him. It’s the same reason why one of the two or three greatest fighters of all time, Randy Couture, has a 30-11 record. MMA isn’t about your record, statistics, or the result of your last three fights. It’s about who you fought, what you did, and how you got there.

Just one week before, 8.8 million people in the United States watched MMA for the first time during the UFC on Fox broadcast. Rua vs. Henderson would have been too much a shock to the system of someone getting their first exposure to the sport, but I’ll be goddamned if it didn’t more accurately reflect what this sport is, what it should be, and why we love the goddamn thing.

Bring on the rematch.

Le took literally the beating of his life this past Saturday night, and it was totally avoidable.

 I’ve read both ire and praise directed towards Joe Rogan after he vehemently criticized the stoppage in the second round of Saturday’s fight between Wanderlei Silva and Cung Le.

 Surely, Rogan has been around long enough to know better than hugging your opponent’s calves with your face on the mat while he pounds the side of your head doesn’t quite qualify as a “takedown attempt” as he insisted.To be fair, though, the original angle did show Le as being deceptively active. It was only when they showed the angle that the referee saw – where Le’s face practically exploded after a knee before collapsing to the canvas – where it was absolutely clear that fight was over and whatever Le was doing was pure reflex. Rogan, to both his detriment and benefit as a color commentator, is first and foremost a fan of the sport. I think his fanboyish obsession with Le – one that he shares with no shortage of fans in the sport – got the better of him. Still, this ignores that having a loose grip on whatever happens to be in front of you is not enough to qualify as intelligently defending yourself, and the fact that when it was stopped, Le’s hands were apart.

 Personally, I think Rogan owes referee Dan Snell an apology for calling him out in public for a bad stoppage and then harping on the point. There have been bad stoppages in MMA – and there always will be – but that wasn’t one of them.

 As for the fight itself, Wanderlei looked like it was 2001. Clearly his return to Chute Box has reinvigorated him physically and mentally, as that was the most focused and on-point I’ve seen him in years. After losing four straight, he got a much-needed win against a legitimately dangerous opponent. I won’t go so far as to say he’s back, but it’s a step in the right direction.

 Le, on the other hand, should not fight at this level if he’s not going to take it seriously. I’m not talking about his waist, either, which too many people harped on. Le’s always had a thicker core. Sure, he had an extra pound or two he didn’t have a few years ago, but the guy is 39 years old. The problem, though, is moments like when he had Silva rocked and primed for a kill in the first round with a spinning backfist, which he followed up by completely wiffing on a stupid wheel kick. It only got more frustrating as the fight went on. Early in the fight, he was able to keep Silva at a distance with devastating front kicks. As the round wore on and especially when he got in trouble in the second round, he resulted to more spinning back kicks, axe kicks, and other gym rat bullshit.

 I mean no disrespect to his love of San Shou and devotion to the form. Okay, maybe I do. See, the thing is, that sort of thing is all well and good when you’re in Strikeforce fighting an aged and broken Frank Shamrock and other hand-picked opponents in-between film shootings. But the UFC is on a whole different level. They’re going to put you in there against guys that can do some real damage, and if you’re not going to take it seriously enough to throw a straight punch when you need to, you’re going to end up without a nose at the end of the fight.

 More than reckless in terms of competition, Le’s choices posed a very real danger to himself in that fight. Maybe he’ll realize that, or maybe he’s still not that serious about MMA and just needed or wanted to pick up a paycheck in front of his home crowd.

 As bad as Saturday night was, just imagine if things had gone as originally planned and Le stepped in there against Vitor Belfort. That fight would have been even harder to watch.