UFC Fight Night 70: With Lyoto Machida, Timeless Does Not Mean Ageless

Everyone’s time comes. In everything.

In work, in life, in general. The clock is ticking on every person, all the time, in one way or another.

Saturday night against Yoel Romero in Florida, much of the evidence suggested that Lyoto Machida’s time had come. In a bout where he looked slow and lackluster in the midst of a more athletic brute a year his senior, his demise felt more of an inevitability than it ever had before.

When it came, few jaws dropped the way they did when he had suffered defeats previously in his career. This was coming since April, when Luke Rockhold dissected him with similar enthusiasm. This was foreseeable.

That's not to eulogize a man who is still living or even eulogize his career. Machida is still good—good enough to compete with high-end talent and win with some regularity. He just won’t win with the regularity he once did, when he was a Rubik’s Cube of a champion at light heavyweight or a surging contender at middleweight.

And that’s where an important distinction is born.

Machida, his talent and his accomplishments are timeless. He’s a surefire Hall of Famer, one of the few proven draws remaining in a UFC dangerously bereft of them and one of the most uniquely intriguing in-cage combatants the sport has known in the past decade.

Machida the man, however, is not ageless. He’s been violently stopped in consecutive bouts, is a stunning 6-7 since 2010 and looks like a properly shopworn 37-year-old for the first time in his professional career.

Timeless accomplishments don’t come with a guarantee of agelessness. They’re a separate entity entirely, their momentum halted almost exclusively by the reality noted above: Everyone’s time comes.

So you can be a nasty piece of business, a puzzle to be solved by UFC athletes who came out on the right side of a highlight-reel KO far more often than not over the years, but eventually the tide will turn. Those punches you once slipped and kicks you once responded with so swiftly don’t work the same. The punches hit you, the kicks don’t land.

Such is the case with Machida. It’s played out for the world to see in his past two fights.

The fact of the matter is that he’s still an elite middleweight, and he’ll still beat a lot of guys on the roster. He’s taken care of himself for a long time in the gym and in the cage, and he’s been rewarded with longevity as a result.

Still, he’s pushing 40. This game is designed to chew you up and spit you out, and no one gets out without that treatment no matter how well he cares for himself along the way.

As he proceeds to the next phase of his career, all of this is important to remember. He certainly has a few more fights left in him, as a decline so precipitous as the one suggested by the Rockhold and Romero results is an extreme rarity, but he won’t look like the man that people remember from his prime.

That’s fine. It’s how the sport works.

It’s more important to remember the greatness of Machida for what it was and the fact that he’s produced so much excitement and accomplished so much as an athlete that he’s become timeless. There’s nothing he can do about the fact that he’s not ageless, and the public shouldn’t punish him for it by dismissing his career achievements after a few bad nights when he looked older and slower.

Everyone’s time comes.

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