How Bisping and Silva conjured ghosts of their pasts for a wonderfully weird bout in the present

Michael Bisping and Anderson Silva

You stick around long enough in this sport and you’ll see all sorts of things you never thought you would.

Things like Michael Bisping (28-7 MMA, 18-7 UFC) rocking Anderson Silva (33-7 MMA, 16-3 UFC) with his punching power. Things like a Bisping fight where there’s a controversial knee thrown by someone other than Bisping himself. Things like Silva celebrating first in the center of the cage, then on top of the fence, and all when there are still two rounds left before the fight is finished.

If you were looking for weirdness, the main event of UFC Fight Night 84 in London had it. If you were looking for clear, concise answers to the pressing questions of the middleweight division, sorry, better look elsewhere.

Bisping won the unanimous decision after five tense rounds with the former UFC middleweight champion, but he limped across the finish line with a bent nose and a bloody face to do it.

He hurt Silva in the early rounds, was nearly knocked out cold by him at the very end of the third, and spent the last two just trying not to become highlight reel fodder during the occasional flashes of that old Silva brilliance.

The problem for Silva was that the brilliance supplies are running low these days. He’s 40, at the tail end of a great career, and he has to ration out what’s left of his greatness. The rationing part he’s used to. It’s looking up at the end and finding that what he had wasn’t quite enough that’s still a new feeling for him.

The old Silva could afford to take four minutes of each round off when he felt like it. The new (but also old, in a different sense) Silva can not. This was how he gave away the fight, a little at a time. He stood flat-footed against the cage. He invited attacks that, maybe five years ago, would have doomed the attacker. He waited for miracles that never came.

They almost came. Give him that, at least. He hurt Bisping several times in that loose, easy way of his. He still looked like the Silva who once dominated the middleweight class. He seemed to think he still was that guy, and maybe that’s what cost him.

Silva fought like he could still do all the wrong things and make them right. But his reflexes weren’t what they used to be. He was just a half-second too slow, which, when your style depends on perfect timing and precision, is how you go from dodging and countering to getting hit and falling.

But there’s still some venom left in the man. Some savvy, too. When Bisping lost his mouthpiece late in the third, then became dangerously preoccupied with getting it back, Silva seized the moment and kneed it in the face. A few seconds earlier, and it might have ended the fight. Instead, Silva decided to pretend that it had in the hopes that everyone else would do the same. It almost worked, too.

Bisping wasn’t about to go away so easily, especially after all the good work he’d put in earlier on. To his credit, he resumed marching forward to start the fourth, even though the confusion between rounds had to have been the very opposite of restful.

Bisping even stood up to some of the classic Silva attacks – the front kick to the face, the awkward back elbow, the stinging right hand that starts out looking like a changeup and ends up cracking you like a fastball – and kept right on coming.

At points in that final round, it seemed like a 10 percent increase in output was all Silva needed to end the fight inside the distance. But for whatever reason – fatigue, inflated sense of his own standing on the scorecards, old habits dying slow and hard – Silva kept playing with his food, acting like a man in no hurry to finish a fight he didn’t know he was losing.

Then that final horn sounded and the math worked out against him, by which point it was too late to do anything about it.

So now Bisping gets to say he beat the great Anderson Silva (you know, the golden years version). Silva gets to say he was screwed by the judges (although apparently you’d need to speak Portuguese to know he said it). The rest of us get to say we saw an incredible fight between two men we’d mostly stopped thinking of in the future tense of the middleweight division.

If that’s not enough for you, either because you need more clarity or more of a sense of direction once all the scorecards are tallied and the blood is mopped up, you’d better get used to disappointment. This wasn’t the kind of fight. This was weird and incomplete, but still somehow thrilling to watch.

It was one of those fights where, as long as you can appreciate it for what it was and not get hung up on what it wasn’t, you’ll be fine. Because for what it was, it was a damn good one of those. Whatever that is.

For more on UFC Fight Night 84, check out the UFC Events section of the site.