Don't kid yourself: You'd totally watch Vitor Belfort's 'legend league,' which only delays the inevitable

As ideas go, Vitor Belfort’s latest isn’t the worst one he’s had. If anything, it’s a little too plausible, the kind of thing you could easily picture the UFC’s new owners jumping on board with, and also the kind of thing that competing organizations like Bellator have arguably already embraced.

Belfort called it the “legend league,” though this is one of those situations where “legend” is clearly meant as a synonym for “old.” In a conversation with MMAjunkie’s Fernanda Prates, he suggested a combat sports platform for the aging and the infirm, pitting them against each other with revised rules and round times to help balance out the limitations imposed by Father Time.

“Why just retire them?” Belfort (25-13 MMA, 14-9 UFC) said of older fighters. “Bring them back. You can have guys fighting into their 50s.”

Belfort’s eyes positively lit up as he discussed this possibility. Here he was, less than a month out from his fortieth birthday, a few days before a main event bout against a man who was in kindergarten when Belfort’s career started, and nothing seemed to please him more than the thought that he might be allowed to keep doing this for another decade or more.

Say what you will about Belfort and his complicated legacy (and we will), but don’t overlook the man’s passion for this sport. He’s been at it more than 20 years, spanning eras and inhabiting multiple body types across several different weight classes, but still he’s not ready to go away. The guy just wants to fight. Which is, of course, how he got himself into this mess.

On Saturday night in Fortaleza, Brazil, Belfort will step into the cage against 25-year-old Kelvin Gastelum (13-2 MMA, 8-2 UFC), who, depending on which oddsmakers you believe, is either almost certain or merely very likely to take Belfort apart in front of a crowd of his countrymen. If ever there was a time to invent a new league for MMA old-timers, it’s now.

Which is not to say that Belfort’s situation is hopeless at UFC Fight Night 106. At this point he’s a little like an old, scarred grizzly bear still defending his little section of cave. Even if he doesn’t have too many more National Geographic-quality battles left in him, he can still take your head off with one good swipe when the spirit moves him.

But say he does just that against Gastelum. Say he wins his first fight since that victory over fellow old-timer Dan Henderson back in 2015. Then what? Is he supposed to charge right back into the teeth of a terrifyingly talent-rich middleweight division? Is that really the only option for a former champ who’s dying to stay relevant?

And he is. That part is clear when Belfort delves into plans like his “legend league.” What you hear him describing is a way for him to fight someone else with a name of their own, someone who’s not just buoyed by the force of youth and trying to build a reputation by kicking holes in his. Can you blame him?

Belfort doesn’t want to give this life up, but he’s savvy enough to know how the fight game cannibalizes its own parts. You can either swim against that current until it inevitably drags you under, or you can try to find your own way out. To Belfort’s way of looking at it, maybe that’s where the old guys can find strength in numbers.

Is he wrong? We might tell ourselves that what we want to see is the best fighting the best, not two AARP candidates wheezing on each other in slow motion. But the evidence provided by ratings numbers suggests that our nostalgia is often a stronger force than we like to admit. It seems we’d rather watch diminished versions of fighters we know than prime versions of ones we don’t.

Belfort vs. Chuck Liddell, maybe with bigger gloves, shorter rounds, and recliners in each corner to allow both parties to catch a breather and possibly a nap before heading back into the fray? We laugh, but throw it on cable TV and see if people don’t dive for their remotes.

Still, as good a bad idea as that is, it really only postpones the problem rather than solving it. Because eventually even Belfort is going to have to stop this. Eventually even the legends will all get little too, uh, legendary, at which point they’ll have to figure out how to have a life without this in it. And then what?

That’s the question Belfort doesn’t seem to want to face, which is why he keeps trying to outrun and outwit it. That, as much as anything, is what he’s fighting for these days, trying to put a little more distance between himself and the end of his career. But that’s the thing about time, is it only moves in one direction. And unlike a fighter edging into his 40s, time never has to stop to catch its breath.

For more on UFC Fight Night 106, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.