Jose Aldo doesn’t want legacy fights, ‘came back to be a champion’

MONTREAL — In 2015, they wondered if he could recover after Conor McGregor slept him before the world. In 2017, they called it a featherweight torch-passing following back-to-back stoppages vs. Max Holloway. In 2019, they said he was cooked when Alexander Volkanovski prevailed playing his own game against him.

Then he moved divisions, not up but down, as a 33-year-old who wasn’t exactly on the smaller side of 145. They questioned the notion. If his cardio was already diminished up a weight class, what would it look like after such an aggressive cut? And when he dropped a split decision in his first bantamweight contest after getting rocked early by a head kick, they all said, see?

Yet a pandemic, visa issues, and a champion’s sudden retirement created the strange circumstances necessary to get him into an improbable 2020 title fight in Abu Dhabi for a vacated bantamweight belt. Outlasted and outgunned at the end of a five-round blockbuster, eating relentless ground and pound from Petr Yan until the fight was stopped in its 29th minute, they said that was the night, surely, all these years and implausible career resurrections later, that Jose Aldo was finished.

He wasn’t. Not even close. Aldo’s gone 4-2 since within the top-15 of UFC’s deepest, most competitive division — something most bantamweights won’t accomplish in their careers — with victories over veteran contenders such as Marlon Vera, Pedro Munhoz, and Rob Font. Impossibly, one of the greatest to ever do it reinvented himself again.

And yet here he is in the lead-up to UFC 315 presented by Skilled Trades College, coming off a loss, gaunt and drained from a gruelling weight cut, looking all of his 38 years as he prepares to fight down the rankings against UFC’s No. 15 bantamweight — Montreal’s Aiemann Zahabi — in a fight that had to be moved from 135-lbs to 145-lbs early Friday morning. Although no official reason was given, Zahabi later confirmed what was evident from the condition of the two fighters on the scales — it was Aldo’s struggles making weight that forced the last-minute change.

All this for what? Shouldn’t Aldo have wrapped his MMA career by now, as he nearly did in 2022 on the day his first son was born, when he briefly retired to pursue boxing? Shouldn’t he at least be booked into fan-friendly, legacy bouts against fellow legends such as Dominik Cruz or Patricio “Pitbull” Freire rather than low-stakes, end-of-ranking-sorters against grinders like Jonathan Martinez and Mario Bautista? Why keep doing this?

“I came back to be a champion — and I need to go through people that are in my way,” Aldo said, completely earnestly, this Wednesday. “I need to be able and ready to fight anybody they put in front of me in order to be a champion. If these are the names they’re going to put in front of me, so be it. I need to do it.”

At 37, Zahabi isn’t exactly an up-and-coming prospect. Yet, when he made his UFC debut in early 2017, Aldo was a dozen bouts in to a preposterous streak of 14 consecutive featherweight title fights between the defunct WEC and UFC, which absorbed the former’s roster in 2010. While Aldo’s only a year older than Zahabi in age, he’s ahead by a century in experience, with 41 professional fights on his record, many of them waged on the sport’s biggest stages against some of its toughest competitors.

But that means Aldo has extensive miles on his odometer, too. He hasn’t won via stoppage since early 2019 and eight of his 9 fights since have gone to decision. He may still be able to hang in with the pace of a bantamweight fight, but what power he had was left behind a pandemic ago.

Of course, Aldo was never a devastating knockout artist, relying instead on crisp, instinctual boxing and a lethal long-range kicking game that chopped down opponents.  Near-impenetrable takedown defence allowed Aldo to dictate where fights occurred; a deep gas tank let him drag fighters into deep waters; and innate athleticism kept him perpetually a step ahead while retaining explosiveness to burst his way out of trouble.

Late career Aldo doesn’t possess that burst, that quick twitch, that gas tank. But he hasn’t lost an ounce of drive. He wants this just as much as he did when he was a broke, hungry teenager, toiling on the sweat-stained mats of dingy Rio de Janeiro gyms. 

That desire is why, these days, Aldo’s competing with himself more than he’s competing with the other man in the octagon. And the version of himself he brought to his last fight — a controversially-judged, split-decision loss to Bautista — is one he’d like to wipe the mat with.

From the first minute, Bautista utilized a strategy to take away the time and space Aldo needs to create offence, trying to fatigue him with repeated takedown attempts that led to over half the fight being spent tied up in clinch-work against the fence. Aldo isn’t mad at Bautista for making his night a grind. He’s mad at himself for letting it happen.

“I’ll tell you what, that shit that I did in the last fight? That’s some shit I don’t want to do again,” Aldo said. “I was pissed. Everybody was pissed. I couldn’t even look at myself or talk about fights for a long time. It got me off of fighting.”

Imagine how angry with himself Aldo of all people would need to be to not want to think about fighting. The guy’s entire life is this sport. It’s all he’s ever done. What would it take to get Kobe Bryant off of basketball? Or Serena Williams off of tennis? There aren’t many pursuits in which one bad night, one momentary lapse, can be so haunting.

“You know what the thing about fighting is?” Zahabi posed. “There are a lot of banana peels in there. And mistakes happen. Awkward things happen.”

Although he’ll try to take his head off Saturday night, Zahabi doesn’t hesitate to give Aldo his flowers. After all, he’s a diehard MMA fan himself. He can tell you exactly how many professional appearances his opponent has, recall his team’s Portuguese corner instructions from the Yan fight, and explain in detail why he scored Aldo’s loss to Bautista in the opposite direction.

When he was offered this fight, Zahabi was in a car with a training partner and could hardly contain his excitement. And if there was even an ounce of hesitation over taking it, Zahabi’s teammate quickly extinguished it.

“He’s like, ‘bro, that’s amazing. I’m so proud of you. You should do it; you have to take this fight. There’s no losing,’” Zahabi remembered.  “’Whether you win or lose, people are going to respect you because you fought a legend.’”

Zahabi’s been stopped on the street since by Montrealer’s who say they’re hoping he wins, provided he can do it without damaging Aldo too badly. He’s had to explain to his daughters why, despite the fight being on Canadian soil, a segment of his hometown fans won’t be cheering for him. It’s all a little awkward.

Georges St-Pierre — one of Zahabi’s cornermen and a legend in his own right — has warned against over-respecting Aldo as he did against Matt Hughes in the first fight of their trilogy, which stands as one of only two losses in the all-time great’s career. That’s why, while repeatedly emphasizing his respect for Aldo’s legacy, Zahabi says he wants to go into Saturday as if he’s fighting any ordinary guy.

“I’ve reached the point now where I’ve realized, it doesn’t really matter who the opponent is. In the end, the opponents are just a mirror. They’re exposing you for your faults, and that’s all that you can use them for,” Zahabi said. “[The opponent] doesn’t change anything. I’ve got to fight the guy. It’s just me and him in there.”

To that end, Zahabi says he doesn’t even know which tools Aldo will bring into the octagon with him. Maybe he’ll blitz combinations, maybe he’ll lean into his kicks. Maybe he’ll lay back and let Zahabi lead, awaiting openings to exploit.

In his prime, Aldo was among the greatest defensive fighters in MMA, utilizing his quick-twitch speed and footwork to slip just off the centre line from his opponent’s attacks, keeping close enough range to make them pay for those attempts with crisp counters. His takedown defence was legendary and still ranks within the top-10 all-time regardless of division at 91.6 per cent.

Those defensive instincts remain and probably always will, even as Aldo’s footwork and head movement has noticeably slowed. The last fighter to take him down was Font in 2021. Over his three fights since, Aldo’s opponents — Merab Dvalishvili, Martinez, and Bautista — have combined to go 0-for-28.

Yet Aldo’s dropped two of those fights. Not that there’s any shame in losing to Dvalishvili, currently bantamweight’s champion, and the up-and-coming Bautista, who needed a split decision to extend his seven-fight winning streak. But as his reactions have dulled and his pace has inevitably slowed, Aldo’s recent fights have contained unavoidable reminders of how far past his best before date he is.

As did how he looked on the scale Friday, swaying forwards and backwards while staring expressionlessly forward as “one-forty-three” was read aloud, before UFC officials guided him backstage. And yet, Aldo will look you dead in the eyes and tell you he’s here to once again become a champion. He doesn’t want legacy fights. He doesn’t want a smooth send-off towards UFC’s hall-of-fame. He wants this. He wants what he always has.

“What did you expect from me? To come back and take out a bunch of retired, overweight dudes?” Aldo questioned. “No, they’re going to give me some young talent and I need to be able to face those challenges. I need to be able and ready to fight anybody that they put in front of me in order to be a champion.”

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