Let's Remember A Guy: Wanderlei Silva
If you can hear "Sandstorm" without rolling your wrists and glaring with gleeful menace, all it tells me is that you missed an insane period in MMA.
Hello and welcome to Let’s Remember A Guy, a possibly regular feature in which we hit pause on the ceaseless MMA carousel of weekly fighting events to reflect on some figure from the sport’s past. This is not meant to imply that they are dead, retired, a good (or bad) person, or really anything else. It’s just an opportunity to remember a fighter who may or may not be all that well-known or understood by newer fans, while also giving those us who do remember him/her the chance to go, oh yeah I remember that guy. This week: Wanderlei “The Axe Murderer” Silva.
Picture a young man, in his early-ish twenties, sitting on a friend’s couch with a giant-ass laptop open because he doesn’t have internet at his house. He’s focused, yet impatient. He’s on Limewire, which you young punks don’t know anything about, and he’s searching with a purpose. There, at last, he’s found it. The download he’s been searching for: a six-minute, amateurish Wanderlei Silva highlight reel, complete with bare-knuckle Vale Tudo finishes from the big homie’s days on the let’s-headbutt-each-other-in-a-nightclub scene in Brazil. Naturally, the whole thing is set to “Sandstorm.” It will take approximately 90 minutes to download.
That young man, as you may have guessed, was me. I know it must shock the people who started following this sport after the age of streaming ubiquity, but in the early 2000s we had to go to great lengths to keep up with the world of MMA. The only way to watch the UFC on TV was pay-per-view – they were all numbered events in those days, no Fight Nights, no Contender Series – and even then there might only be four or five of those events per year. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, there was this whole other world that it felt like we only heard about after the fact.
This was the realm of the terror Wanderlei Silva. A man who seemed to take genuine glee in stomping on other people’s heads. A man so vicious in the ring that no one ever questioned why he was nicknamed “The Axe Murderer.” A man who radiated a sort of violent energy that seemed to come so very naturally to him. It wasn’t so much that he was turning it on when it was time to fight, but rather turning off the part of him that was necessary to live in civilized society. His fighting style seemed like an expression of pure id, like what Enkidu, the wildman of the forest, might have looked like with just a little bit of Muay Thai training prior to his showdown with Gilgamesh.
If you go back and look at some of the insane early fights from Silva’s career, you get a window into how a person might have developed into a fighter of this type out of sheer necessity. The Brazilian fight circuit that he came up in during the mid-to-late ‘90s was about as close to some real life Street Fighter II shit as you’ll ever see. Cramped rings stuffed into nightclubs and bar backrooms. Maybe a mesh lining under the bottom rope to keep anyone from rolling under them to escape a brutal onslaught of head stomps. In the dim background, a mass of humanity pumping sweaty fists and shouting for blood.
In the U.S. they were talking about rule changes and regulation, all meant to make this sport more palatable to commissions and broadcasters and sponsors. In Brazil they seemed to be actively trying to kill each other.
Out of this primordial combat sports ooze walked Silva. He was not yet fully formed, of course. He had a few mostly unsuccessful early forays in the UFC, but really started to find himself in PRIDE, the Japanese fight promotion whose rule set favored his blood-thirsty style. He debuted there in 2000, but he really made his mark when he absolutely pummeled Japan’s favorite son, Kazushi Sakuraba, twice in 2001. From then on, Silva was a PRIDE fixture. And you know what? It pretty quickly became apparent that he was down for whatever.
Would he fight three or four times a year? Of course. Would he fight at basically any weight class, up to and including taking on Mirko Cro Cop and the supersized version of Mark Hunt at heavyweight? Absolutely. Would he set his championship belt aside to fight weirdo non-title bouts at times? You bet. And would he send rival “Rampage” Jackson spiraling into existential despair by kneeing him into oblivion twice? Oh yeah, you know he’s going to do that.
Silva’s fighting style in those days was so violent that it almost felt abusive. He’d stand there in his corner during the introductions, doing that menacing wrist roll thing while staring across the ring at his opponent like he was genuinely excited to find out what the inside of his skull looked like. Then when they rang the bell he attacked like it had never even occurred to him to worry about what the other guy might do to him. Here was a man who would offer to festoon his bedchamber with your entrails, and he would do it with a smile, as if nothing could make him happier.
This attitude, of course, carried over into the whole Chute Boxe team that Silva trained with. One of my favorite Wanderlei stories is the one we commissioned an artist to depict for us in comic form back when I worked at Cage Potato. The story went that when a dog belonging to Chute Boxe teammate “Shogun” Rua had puppies, Silva asked for and received one. But while Silva thought the puppy was a gift, Rua thought he was making a sale. When he later asked Silva for the money, they quarreled. As you can imagine might have happened a lot down at Chute Boxe in those days, they decided to settle it with a goddamn fist fight.
“All I will say is that we went at it very hard and the fight ended in the first round,” Silva recalled later. “And I did not pay for that puppy.”
For fight fans in that era, the one that got away was Silva vs. Chuck Liddell – and I mean in their primes. They would eventually fight in the UFC after Zuffa had purchased and dissolved the problematic yet beautiful flower that was PRIDE FC, but by then both of them were already beginning the long slide that would become the downslope of their respective careers. It was still a good fight, but it no longer had the importance it might have back when they were the two scariest champions of the two biggest MMA promotions.
As is often the case in fight sports, the last chapter of Silva’s career was too long and a bit of a downer. He’d lose a couple, win one, lose a couple more. He still fought like he never worried about what was coming back at him, only now his chin was starting to betray him.
Though, there was that one time back in Saitama for what would end up being his final fight in the UFC, where he and Brian Stann traded sledgehammers to the head until Silva somehow pulled himself back from the brink of unconsciousness to win.
I don’t know if it really works this way, but you’ll still never convince Stann that it wasn’t some type of steroid cocktail that kept Silva awake and in that fight. He hit him so hard, Stann told me on more than one occasion later, and he saw Silva’s eyes roll back in his head. Still the son of a bitch snapped back to life and kept going and eventually found the button on Stann’s chin.
And see, if we’re going to talk about Wanderlei, I suppose we’ve got to talk about doping. It is, after all, how his run in the UFC ended. See, what had happened was, one day the Nevada State Athletic Commission showed up at Silva’s gym for a random drug test. He was supposed to fight Chael Sonnen – for real this time, not in flip-flops on a reality show with help from his friends – and the NSAC had finally decided to get semi-serious about drug testing. This was maybe not welcome news to Silva, who jetted out the back door real quick and refused to give a sample. (For the sake of fairness, we should note that just a few weeks later we learned Sonnen, who did provide a sample at right around the same time, had popped positive. So, you know, it’s not like anybody was planning to go into that one squeaky clean.)
The NSAC threw the book at Silva. Or, well, they tried. After the commission initially hit him with a lifetime ban, which seemed pretty extreme and inconsistent with other punishments, a judge later overturned it. He might have been free to resume his UFC career then, but instead he made a bunch of increasingly weird statements that eventually seemed to imply some accusation of UFC fight-fixing, which he later had to apologize for.
If I try very hard, I can almost forget this whole section of his career. I can absolutely forget his two fights in Bellator, in which he lost to Sonnen and then “Rampage.” And the doping stuff? Well, it almost seems unfair to take a guy who was beloved for his vicious performances in PRIDE, where the drug testing consisted of sniffing your breath before the fight to see if you were actually drunk right then and there, and then get mad at him for probably being on the juice later, when he was middle-aged and slowing down.
Not trying to make excuses for the guy (OK maybe a little), but if you were fighting in the funhouse mirror that was Japanese MMA, and if the laissez-faire attitude toward performance-enhancing drugs made it seem like everybody you fought was on the gear, don’t you think you’d probably cycle up too? And later, when some American commission wanted to treat you like Al fucking Capone for it, wouldn’t you maybe feel a little aggrieved?
Silva began his MMA career in 1996 and had his last fight in 2018. He didn’t just span different eras, he damn near encompassed the entire modern history of the sport. For those of us who saw him in his berserker prime, he still embodies some ineffable aspect of that wild yet tantalizingly inaccessible period of MMA. I still can’t hear “Sandstorm” without thinking about the guy, picturing him rolling his wrists as he prepared to visit great harm on another human being for money. Or, you know, to beat up a friend for a free dog.