What should we make of Mirko 'Cro Cop' Filipovic's great and sometimes strange career?

Mirko Filipovic’s martial times have come to an end. Again.

That’s what he told a Croatian website recently, anyway. Apparently his victory in the Rizin FF 2016 Open Weight Grand Prix was the career high point he was holding out for.

Or, an alternative explanation, “Cro Cop” has finally run his body all the way into the ground, for real this time.

“That was definitely my last tournament,” Filipovic (35-11-2) said. “I have health problems, and this is definitely the end of my career. I know I have announced my retirement before, but this is definitely it.”

If you’re counting, that’s three uses of the word definitely in as many sentences, so maybe this retirement is going to stick. If it does, it will be a fittingly strange ending to the 42-year-old Filipovic’s well-traveled and multi-faceted career, to go out on a victory in a somewhat bizarre tournament that saw him win his semifinal fight by kneeing a 400-pound sumo wrestler in the gut exactly once.

So what are we supposed to make of it, assuming it really does end here?

It’s a tricky question in part because of how many different lives Filipovic has lived as a fighter. There was the terrifying PRIDE-era Filipovic, with his hospital and/or morgue-quality kicks. There was his abbreviated first stint in the UFC, during which he went 1-2, including a loss to Gabriel Gonzaga wherein we learned that even “Cro Cop” could get Cro Copped.

Then he went back to Japan, then back to the UFC, then Japan again, then a UFC revival that lasted exactly one glorious fight, just long enough for him to get some revenge on Gonzaga back on European soil.

He planned to keep going after that, but the USADA collectors showed up while he was training for his next fight. And sure, Filipovic told them, he was using “various cocktails of drugs” to get the old body in some semblance of sound working order. Why, was that going to be a problem?

Turns out, yep, it sure was, even if USADA’s tests didn’t actually catch him in the act. Still, his admission earned him the honor of being the first fighter to get suspended under the UFC’s new anti-doping program, but not before he could jump out in front of the news with yet another retirement announcement. That one was also based on injuries, on stuff that just wouldn’t heal. His body simply couldn’t take it anymore, he told us.

That lasted about a year and a half, and then it was back to Japan to get weird again. What, you didn’t think he was going to let a new promotion spring up there without at least wetting his beak, did you? Not when there’s an opportunity to hear his name echo throughout the cavernous confines of Saitama Super Arena one last time. Not when a giant Cup o’ Noodles mascot is handing out enormous novelty checks.

There were four rounds to the Rizin FF Open Weight Grand Prix, and Filipovic won them all, including three fights that took place within the span of three days. Not bad for a 42-year-old man who, less than two years earlier, told us he was too physically broken to go on. By the way, did I mention that Rizin FF doesn’t have a deal with USADA?

Because that has to play some role in the “Cro Cop” story too, if we’re being honest with ourselves. The hard part is knowing what to do with that information.

Coming up in PRIDE during the early years of the 21st century must have been a little like touring with Led Zeppelin in the ‘70s: The environment is such that people don’t even bother asking whether or not you did drugs, they’re just curious about how much and which ones.

Filipovic’s stay there was the stuff of MMA legends. He fought both Emelianenko brothers. He fought (and beat) Josh Barnett three times. He fought Mark Hunt in both MMA and K-1 kickboxing. He fought Wanderlei Silva, Igor Vovchanchyn, Heath Herring, Mark Coleman, Kazushi Sakuraba – you could almost build the entire roster of the old PRIDE Playstation game just by picking people off Filipovic’s hit list.

The funny part is, despite his late career resurgence coming in Japan, and so soon after his admitted use of human growth hormone, people don’t seem to mind the unstated implications.

Maybe it’s because we recognize that a PRIDE Grand Prix in 2006 had about as much of being clean as the Tour de France, and these old dogs have a hard time learning new tricks, especially when they’re still carrying around the battle wounds.

Maybe it’s nostalgia for the era he’s come to embody. Now that USADA has made the UFC clean (well, cleaner), maybe a land where the drug cocktails can flow freely just seems quaintly alternative.

Another possible explanation is that MMA just seems somehow better when you know that “Cro Cop” is still out there somewhere, winning weird fights in Japan while still looking suspiciously chiseled.

But that’s all over now. So he says. And I know he’s said it before, but one of these times it has to be true. Even the man who in his prime looked like one pale slab of granite, all the way up to his hard-angled haircut, must eventually crack under the forces of time and pressure. For that enduring battle, they don’t make a drug cocktail strong enough.