UFC legend Anderson Silva has revealed in a recent interview with UFC Brasil that he was planning to retire before his middleweight title defense against Chris Weidman at UFC 162, which saw Silva lose the middleweight title after being KO’d by Weidman in the second round.
“I want to stop, I want a time for myself, to stay with my family,” Silva says he told UFC president Dana White and former UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta at the time, per MMA Fighting’s Guilherme Cruz. “I have been doing this for years and I’m losing contact with my kids. I’m only training and training, it’s not working for me anymore.”
“But one day before I started my camp to fight Weidman, I already was too saturated. I never talked about this, never used this term ‘if I win.’ I said to [my wife], ‘If I win, I’ll stop, I won’t fight anymore.’ It was a group of things, many things led to my loss to happen that way. Weidman had all the merits and won, he won well, but that’s what happened.”
Instead of retiring, Silva went on to face Weidman again at UFC 168, this time losing via second-round TKO after breaking his leg while throwing a low kick. ‘The Spider’ says he was “100 percent focused in the fight” but credited Weidman for being the better man on fight night.
Silva was planning to retire had he avenged his loss to Weidman but says ‘God’ had other plans for him.
“I would have stopped if I had won the fight, I wouldn’t fight anymore, but I ended up breaking my leg,” Silva said. “I think that was a message from God saying to me, ‘Look, man, you’re not supposed to stop yet. It took so long for you to get here and now you want to stop?’ I don’t know, I think those are subliminal messages that stay in your head.”
Silva, 45, is now the oldest fighter on the UFC roster and 1-4 in his last five fights. The former middleweight champ last fought at UFC 237, where he suffered a first-round TKO loss to Jared Cannonier at Jeunesse Arena in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.