Ricardo Almeida and the End of Dreams
By Nathan Joel

This past Wednesday, Ricardo Almeida announced his retirement from the UFC cage. This is actually the second time he has retired, but this announcement has a tone of permanence. In the short statement he released was an understated truth: "MMA is a great sport but also physically and mentally unforgiving."

Indeed.

Whole books have been written about the unique nature of combat sports: The mental tension and the physical toil and the daily grind. Fighting is a life of incessant small injuries and heart-breaking big injuries; unutterable heights of victory and the mute despair of defeat. It is an alternate universe. Which makes it a little insulting when a promoter, who hasn't been hit in years, flexes up and asks you if you want to be a fighter?!! That's kind of like the billionaire owner of the football team telling you to suck it up and get back out there, because, you know, we've all been hit. You want to say, "Well, boss, there is hit and then there is hit. I get hit by Lawrence Taylor; you get body-tapped by your massage therapist."

Just before UFC 127, which was held in Sydney, Australia, there was a media event at the famous Bondi beach. Ariel Helwani, interviewing Stephen Bonnar, asks: "Which is tougher ... being a professional surfer or a professional fighter?" Gentle reader, you do not need to know the answer Stephen Bonnar proffered. All you need to do is think of the fight gyms you have visited or trained in, and compare that to the most amazing beaches in the world. Surfers spend their life in sand and sun, beset with bathing beauties, tanned and tawny. Fighters spend their lives in stinky gyms, often between the sweaty legs of some hairy guy. Please, Ariel, take that question back...! (In his defense, he had been flirting with a wet Arianny and was thusly befuddled)

Ricardo Almeida is a serious competitor. A former middleweight King of Pancrase and Pride Fighting Championship veteran, he fought eleven times in the UFC, beginning all the way back at UFC 31. He fought seven times for Pride or Pancrase. He has five losses in his career, all of them in the UFC (he is undefeated outside the UFC, which should say something about the level of competition within it). Beyond his MMA career, he has had an impressive Jiu-jitsu career. Competing in the Abu Dhabi Combat Club, he placed in the top 4 submission grapplers in the world in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and in 2003; which is to say, that for much of his career he was among the top five Jiu-jitsu practitioners in the world. This is no small achievement.

MMA is a sport that rewards jacks-of-all-trades however, and Almeida struggled to reach his potential in his last few fights. His stand-up was smooth and clean for a Jiu-jitsu specialist, and he was certainly athletically gifted enough to roll at the highest levels. Yet, he never seemed to be able put it all together. The submission by Matt Hughes at UFC 117 emphasized this. After all, that was supposed to be a revenge fight for Hughes' domination of Renzo Gracie; and Almeida, not Hughes, was supposed to be the submissions guy.

Almeida's list of reasons for retiring included his growing Jiu-jitsu academies and his family; which, at the end of the day, is as it should be.

Firstly, his academies: There is a reason that the...