Silva vs. Weidman: Loss Shouldn't Hurt Spider's MMA Legacy

One win does not a career make, and one loss does not a career break.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who had predicted that Anderson Silva would get knocked out by Chris Weidman, but that's exactly what happened on Saturday night at UFC 162. The result was so stunning that some may even feel the fight was rigged and Silva took a dive.

The Spider's comments afterward don't do anything to convince the conspiracy theorists otherwise, per ESPN.com's Franklin McNeil:

"

I trained hard for this fight. I changed my life. I changed the life of my family. Chris Weidman tonight is the champion. Chris is the best.

I won't fight [again] for the belt. I had the belt for a long time.

I have 10 more fights [with UFC], but not [necessarily] for the belt.

"

Although it does sound as though the champion was tired of holding the belt, any idea that Silva threw the fight is completely off-base. He's often made a mockery of his opponent during a fight, and now it finally caught up to him.

The bigger question is whether or not this loss clouds what is Silva's overall body of work. The answer should be that it doesn't. Silva is still one of the greatest fighters, if not the greatest fighter, in the history of mixed martial arts.

The numbers alone are worth lauding. Coming into the fight against Weidman, Silva was 16-0 in UFC and won 10 straight title defenses.

More important was the way in which he won. Time and again, Silva would easily dispatch his opponents, making them look like amateurs in the process. It didn't always make for the greatest spectacle, but you had to acknowledge his dominance nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the one opponent Silva can't beat is Father Time. After all, every professional athlete succumbs to age at some point.

It's easy to forget that Silva is 38 years old. This is about the time most athletes start winding it down and taking it easy. Instead, Silva was out defending his middleweight title.

What makes the loss slightly less damning was the way in which the Spider went down. He wasn't getting embarrassed and dominated the entire fight. Instead, Silva was more than holding his own but left himself open one too many times—and he paid dearly for it.

There was always going to be a reckoning point when Silva's antics were going to write him checks his talent couldn't cash. As he aged, the likelihood of that happening was only going to increase, and fans finally saw it happen on Saturday night.

We don't remember great fighters for how they ended their careers; we remember them when they were in their prime and at their most dominant. It wasn't as if Silva burned bright for a short time and fell off quickly. His period of dominance was sustained for a decade or more.

At his peak, nobody could touch Silva. And that's how he should always be remembered, no matter what happens in the future.