With Anderson Silva Sidelined, is Ed Soares Calling the Shots?

It was surprising for me to learn that Anderson Silva would be having surgery for an elbow injury in the near future.

Reading Jesse Holland's report that Anderson's manager Ed Soares was insisting on a fight between Dan Henderson and Nate Marquardt to determine who would fight the Spider next, also was news to me.

In the past I have been unhappy to learn that Soares, who acts as an interpreter for many of his clients from Brazil, did not always tell Anderson what was actually transpiring, but rather, put his own twist on what he relayed to Anderson.

This was after Anderson's "boring" fight with Thales Leites when Dana White decided that Anderson needed a public dressing down in front of the world for winning the fight, but not providing enough excitement in doing so.

Anderson, who is rapidly learning English, may have caught onto this deception before the rest of us non-Portuguese speaking folks did and was not too happy either. It took someone else who knew the language to let us in on Mr. Soares method of "interpretation," which was for his own purposes, apparently.

Dana White has been very cautious in avoiding any confrontation with iron fisted Soares and has not challenged him as openly as he has the managers of his other fighters' managers (with fewer or less influential clients). Crossing Ed Soares could cause a mass exodus of Brazilian fighters from the UFC.

Joe Silva previously was in charge of matching up the fighters for the UFC events. I am sure that Dana has a lot of input and helps by making suggestions of what he would like to see occur in the octagon, but I did not think any of the fighters' managers ever chose the match-ups. This must be something new.

Having Silva sidelined due to surgery will add a lot of rethinking about his final three fights for the UFC before he retires.

This seems very unusual because initially Anderson was very anxious to rush through his UFC commitment and have a fight every two months. He even requested a fight at UFC 91 just after fighting with Patrick Cote in Chicago at UFC 90.

For Dana's own purposes, the fights have been more spaced out than Anderson had wished, and at the present Anderson may be competing in an entirely different weight class.

Nothing is for certain with Anderson's future participation, but surgery and recuperation will doubtlessly take a chunk of time out of this and possibly next year as well.

Best luck to the Spider and I hope his surgery is a success and that he recovers in no time at all. Don't rush back, though. Take your time and do what is right for you, Anderson. We all want you to be rested and well when you do make your return to the cage.