Kitchen sink time

Saturday’s UFC 102 main event will be like a couple of slabs of Mount Rushmore colliding.

In one corner, five-time UFC champion and hall-of-famer Randy Couture. In the other, former Pride FC and UFC champion Antonio Rodrigo “Minotauro” Nogueira. A combined professional MMA record of 47-14-1.

It’s a match-up that won’t have much impact on the UFC heavyweight division. But who cares? It’s Ali-Frazier time as two ageing warhorses slug it out for pride, relevancy, bragging rights, a paycheck, just to see if they still can, whatever.

Couture has a modest 16-9 pro record, including 13-6 in the UFC. But he’s almost always faced top-level opponents, including nine current or former champions, against whom he is 7-6. Couture has never lost to someone who wasn’t a belt holder at one time or another. And he’s fought for or defended a title 15 times in two different weight classes. His last fight was a loss to current heavyweight champ Brock Lesnar at UFC 91. Oh yeah, Couture’s also undefeated in fights that go the distance, so it’s in Nogueira’s best interest to keep it out of the judges’ hands.

While Couture is legendary, Nogueira is a fucking mythic. He’s a submissions miracle worker with a granite chin and a heart the size of Brazil. When he was 10 years old he was run over by a fucking truck and hospitalized for 11 months – there’s a very visible chunk of flesh missing from his back as a result. The truck was a total write-off. Big Nog’s not always the victor, but he’s a goddamn survivor.

Minotauro has nearly twice as many pro bouts as Couture at 31-5-1 (2-1 in the UFC, with wins over Heath Herring and Tim Sylvia back when they mattered). Like Couture, he’s always faced the best of the division – he’s fought eight current or former Pride or UFC champions and has a 5-5-1 record against them. And he’s never lost two fights in a row.

As I said, he’s a jiu-jitsu wizard (19 of his wins have been by submission) with an inhuman ability to absorb punishment and overcome adversity. He wins ugly, taking punishment and appearing on the verge of defeat – being kicked in the head by Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic or piledrived (piledriven?) onto his head by Bob Sapp, for example – only to pull a submission out of thin air. Of course, there’s questions about the toll the abuse has taken, especially after being TKO’ed by Frank Mir at UFC 92, the first knockout loss of Big Nog’s career. (Not to make excuses but it was subsequently revealed that Nogueira was suffering from a serious knee injury and staph infection going into the Mir fight.)

So who wins? Let’s break it down.

Couture is 46 and Nog is 33. No matter how good a shape Couture is in, or how many miles Nogueira has on him, the years have to catch up eventually. Nog also has a slight size advantage, a couple inches in height and upwards of 20 pounds, which is crucial when you consider that all three of Couture’s UFC heavyweight losses were at the hands of bigger, stronger grapplers or wrestlers: Brock Lesnar, Ricco Rodriguez and Josh Barnett, none of whom are on the same planet skills-wise as Nogueira. While Couture is an Olympic-level wrestler, he’ll be in deep water if the fight goes to the ground.

So the battle will be decided standing up (even if it doesn’t end there). Couture has good dirty boxing – he put on a clinic when he fought Tim Sylvia – but Nogueira is a great boxer who works with Freddie Roach, who trains Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquaio.

Couture needs to get the fight up against the cage, work the clinch and if it goes to the ground he has to keep it up against the cage (and preferably on top) so he can limit Nog’s submissions arsenal and work the ground-and-pound.

For his part, Nogueira wants to keep things in the open and work to get things to the ground – no easy feat against Couture’s takedown defense. But Nogueira will get it there, and once he does he’ll throw up every submission in the book until he either catches Couture – a distinct possibility – or he impresses the judges enough to earn the victory the hard way.