As another injured MMA icon calls it quits, a reminder of 'the price that must be paid'

Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic

Mirko Filipovic has had enough. Again.

At 41, citing a long history of injuries that now haunt his aging body, “Cro Cop” (31-11-2 MMA, 5-6 UFC) announced his retirement on Tuesday, the same day he announced that he’d pulled out of his scheduled co-main event bout against Anthony Hamilton at UFC Fight Night 79 in Seoul later this month.

This time it’s his shoulder. He injured it while training for this bout, Filipovic wrote on his website, and “(b)y daily trainings the injury gets worse.” His attempts at a cure, which included “various cocktails of drugs,” haven’t helped it. If he tried to press on through the pain, he wrote, he knew from experience that he’d likely only injure it worse and wind up back in surgery again, where he’s been nine times already, by his count.

“I don’t need that,” Filipovic wrote, “especially at my age.”

“Cro Cop” isn’t alone in feeling like he’s had enough surgeries for one lifetime. Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, whose retirement seemed slightly less voluntary, recently told MMAjunkie that he’s had eight surgeries in the past five years. He spent seven months of the year doing physical therapy designed to get him healthy enough to resume training and fighting. And “healthy,” we should note, becomes a relative term after years of battering your own body.

Both Filipovic and Nogueira are card-carrying members of the old school. They came up during a different era of MMA, when bouts were especially brutal, training techniques were– to put it kindly – unrefined, and fighters on “various of cocktails of drugs” were a lot closer to the rule than the exception. That they both lasted through that era and all the way into this one is a testament to not only their skill, but also their resiliency.

Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira

But being a tough guy has its price. Just because you pushed through the pain of an injury a decade ago, that doesn’t mean you’re done with it, or that it’s done with you. Ask Filipovic, who said he spent the summer traveling back and forth to Germany to see a specialist about “chronic inflammation of the tendons.” Even getting to the doctor was tough, he wrote, since, with a knee that’s been operated on four times, spending so much time sitting down “hurt me terribly.”

“And now even the shoulder, back not to mention,” Filipovic wrote. “Whenever I go to (an MRI), no matter what, and what I record, report begins with ‘degenerative changes’, but that is the price that must be paid.”

For a lot of fighters of Filipovic’s generation, that bill is now coming due. Even for much younger guys, like WSOF vet Nick Newell, the payment plan has already begun.

Maybe the worst part about it is that no one can tell you when it will end. Not too long ago I spoke to Frank Shamrock, who retired in 2010. He said he’d spent the past few years in physical therapy, just trying to get back to some semblance of physical normalcy.

Not that any of this is news, of course. Contact sports can hurt you. We know that, just like we know that the more severe and persistent the contact, the more hurt you ought to expect down the line.

That’s a rough enough calculation in a sport like football, which breaks bodies and brains but at least pays premium salaries for all that sacrifice. And, thanks to the latest collective bargaining agreement negotiated by the NFL Players Association, there are also some guarantees as far as ongoing medical care, at least for those who play long enough to meet the requirements.

MMA is just as hard on the body, maybe even harder. But in this sport most athletes are expected to take their lumps cheap. Once you retire, your injuries are your problem. And, like “Cro Cop,” not a lot of fighters manage to nail the retirement thing the first time around.

If this one sticks, Filipovic will have spent 14 years as an MMA fighter, and almost 20 years in professional combat sports in general, once you factor in his kickboxing experience. He became a pro fighting legend in that time. That’s an honor he purchased with his body, and he’s not done paying for it yet.

Even so, his isn’t an MMA sob story. If anything, he’s one of the best-case scenarios, a guy who got big in Japan back when there was real money in that, and who exits the UFC just as the sponsorship well is drying up. In a lot of ways, things worked out much better for “Cro Cop” than they will for the vast majority of fighters.

And now he’s leaving – not exactly in one piece, but as close to it as he has any right to expect. And this time, whether by choice or by necessity, he might even stay gone.

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