Carlos Condit, a Treasure of Fighting, Begins His Long, Slow Goodbye

There is a picture of Carlos Condit that will forever speak for him. In it, his hair is soaked in sweat, his face is bathed in blood, a vertical slash carves up the right side of his face above the eyebrow. His teeth are clenched in a way that blurs whether he’s grinning sadistically, gritting in pain or both.

He looks like a man who has fought his way from the depths of hell. 

The picture has been used so many times over the years that most people don’t remember which fight it comes from. It is just a snapshot in time that encapsulates his status as one of MMA’s most ferocious competitors of all time. 

Five of his UFC fights—against Rory MacDonald, Johny Hendricks, Robbie Lawler, Jake Ellenberger and Martin Kampmann—are listed among Tapology’s top 100 all-time bouts, as voted on by fans. A sixth, against Georges St-Pierre, is No. 101.

Win or lose, Condit has bared his fighting spirit in a way few others can claim, marrying professionalism and martial artistry together in a way that should make him a role model for following generations.

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For a while, it seemed like the pictures—and his highlight videos—might be all we had left.

Sometime after taking part in the best fight of 2016—sorry, Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz fans—Condit’s year was over, he had determined. Not his entire year, but at least his participation in the thing he’s known for. The blood. The guts. The heart. It was all to be packed away in his equipment bag, zippered shut and stored away for the winter. The reason? He had a future to contemplate. His own, his family’s, that of his soon-to-be-born son.

This isn’t so surprising to people who witnessed the last moments of his UFC 195 fight with Lawler back in January, who saw the disappointment in his face when the judges’ decision was read, who heard him discuss the possibility of walking away from the cage.

Condit out of the cage. Fish out of water. It’s the same thing. Unnatural.

Thankfully (for fans' sake), he has delayed the inevitable. He’s back against Demian Maia headlining Saturday’s UFC on Fox event in Vancouver, British Columbia. But make no mistake: The countdown to his farewell is underway.

“I was definitely serious in talking about it, and I feel like I’m certainly toward the end of my career,” Condit told Bleacher Report. “It’s a tough sport, and I’ve been at it a long time. I’m looking to make my transition out of it, but the tough thing about that is I still f--king love to fight. I still have some fight left in me. I’m still young, and I can still do it. But from a logical standpoint, I know it’s time to start making my way out and transitioning to something else. I have to find the balance between those two. But I’ll probably be done in the next couple years.”

Fighters say this kind of thing from time to time, but it never seems to stick. Condit is only 32 years old and sits at No. 4 in the UFC’s welterweight rankings. Is this for real?

It turns out, yes.

During his short recent sabbatical from the cage, Condit took classes toward attaining a real estate license. He plans to take the test sometime after fighting Maia, then work part time in property development as he begins a shift to business.

But why now, and why this young?

Condit began his pro career in 2002, when he was 18 years old. He’s fought at the highest level of MMA. He’s professionally kickboxed. He even once took a pro boxing fight. 

It is a decorated, painful history, a journey that his body reminds him of all the time.

“On a regular day, something is hurting,” Condit said. “It varies more or less. Seems like I heal pretty quickly and get over stuff, or I’m just used to dealing with stuff. After this fight, I’ll have to go and get a few things looked at. I’m going to make it through this camp and I feel good, but rarely does a fighter step into the Octagon without some kind of nagging injury. Getting through these camps, sometimes you’re held together with paper clips and bubble gum and tape. You just kind of get in there and you make it work because if you pull out of a fight, you don’t get paid.”

That’s not an option now, not with another mouth to feed shortly. Condit’s wife is expecting to deliver the couple’s second son about two weeks after fight night. 

His son’s impending arrival was part of the reason he had expected to take the rest of the year off in the first place. In addition to contemplating and working toward his future, he wanted to block out the last quarter of the year to be with his family.

But when UFC President Dana White called to offer a fight just ahead of the self-imposed deadline, Condit jumped on it.

The bout’s style matchup is a sea change from Lawler, who is something of a fighting kindred spirit as an often tactical, occasionally reckless snatcher of souls. Maia, meanwhile, focuses almost exclusively on efficiently taking the fight to the ground and stoically strangling opponents into submission. 

They are disparate problems, and for a time, Condit said if he was to come back to the cage, it would be for a fight like a rematch with Lawler (per The MMA Hour, h/t MMA Fighting's Dave Doyle). For those of us who never lock up in combat, it seems crazy to think Condit would want to go through that kind of torture again, a fight that ended with a series of brutal exchanges so exhausting that both men literally had to lean against the cage at the final bell to keep from falling over.

“Physically, it’s like you’ve been held underwater a really long time and you just came up,” he said. “Your muscles and body and everything is just screaming for oxygen. You’re hypoxic, you’re a little bit dizzy and tingly from a combination of fatigue and getting bludgeoned in the head. And then emotionally, after every fight for me, it’s always the most incredible release of pressure. Leading up to these fights, there’s so much pressure and there’s so much on the line on a lot of different levels. When the fight’s over and it’s done, it’s an amazing feeling win or lose.”

Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

That feeling comes from pride in the effort both he and his team put in. After all, sometimes the result is out of his hands.

Against Lawler—in a fight in which he out-landed his opponent 177-93, per FightMetric, and which the overwhelming majority of the media and fans scored for Condit—the opinions that mattered the most went against him. The judges scored a split decision for Lawler.

It was the second time Condit came so close to winning the UFC championship. Back in 2012, he nearly ended Georges St-Pierre’s lengthy reign when he dropped the welterweight G.O.A.T. with a head kick. 

“It is what it is,” he said. “There’s really no changing it. You can’t go back on it. You can learn from it, but to have an emotional attachment to something you can’t change, that can only drag you down. It’s a bummer, hell yeah, but what can I do about it? If I think about it too much and pay too much mind to it, then what I am doing with my time in the present? The past is gone. All I got is right now.”

The fight with Maia is its own destination, but a positive result can also catapult Condit right back into the title conversation behind Stephen Thompson.

He has history with current champ Tyron Woodley—Condit tore his ACL during the opening minute of the second round of their bout and fought for another minute with it before the leg completely gave out on him—and a rematch with the belt on the line sounds good to him.

That elusive title (Condit was interim champ briefly in 2012) remains his white whale.

“I want to become undisputed UFC welterweight champion,” he said. “I’ve been so close a couple of times, but I don’t want to leave the sport always a bridesmaid and never a bride. I want to get that belt around my waist.”

This treasure of fighting admits he’s running out of time. He’ll bring his murderous stare and unrelenting will to Maia, but everything beyond that is unknown.

Enjoy him while you can, before we can only stare at that photo and wear that same smile he wore that day, grinning sadistically for what he did, gritting in pain because it is over.