Have you seen the video of a young José Aldo shopping for his first suit? If you’ve been on any form of the MMA internet over the last decade or so, probably you have. It is memorable, wholesome content, and so it gets shared a lot because there isn’t much from here that fits into that category.
What made it so charming at the time was his boyish enthusiasm. Aldo, already a champion by this point, seemed positively tickled as he tried on sport coats and hats — while still wearing his fight shorts below the waist.
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He was in his mid-twenties but in that moment seemed much younger. Just a kid, really. Amazed and amused by everything. Watching it now I can’t help but think of Paul Newman in “Hud,” the part where he recalls once being so young that he “hadn’t had enough of nothing.”
Now it seems that maybe Aldo has had enough. The man who lost a unanimous decision to Aiemann Zahabi at UFC 315 on Saturday is around 15 years older than the kid who giggled his way through that purchase of a suit. But it’s more than just the years and we all know it. It’s the things those eyes have seen since then. It’s the miles on his body. More than anything, though, maybe it’s all the joys and sorrows, having been to the mountaintop and tumbled back down.
Aldo’s explanation of his own retirement considerations was especially eloquent on social media the day after his loss. He’d prepared hard for the fight, Aldo wrote, still dreaming of becoming a UFC champion again at the age of 38.
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“But while cutting weight, something inside me said: ‘You don’t ned to do this anymore.’ And I listened.”
Buried in that succinct description are some truths about this sport. For instance, it’s telling that the revelation came to him when he was cutting weight — not when he was training or actually fighting.
As anybody who’s done it knows, weight-cutting time is a psychological minefield. You can end face-to-face with some hard questions about yourself in that sauna or scalding bath. It’s a time of suffering. And when fighters are dialed in and hungry (both literally and figuratively), that suffering can be a weirdly positive part of the pre-fight ritual. It focuses the mind on the battle to come.
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But if you aren’t totally committed anymore — if you don’t really want it the way you used to want it — maybe the suffering just feels like pointless misery. You might start to ask yourself: why am I doing this? And you might find that you no longer have an answer that works.
Chances are that every fighter will get there eventually. Aldo was simply good enough for long enough that he got there while still in the UFC.
Consider how incredible it is that he started out back when the UFC’s parent company didn’t see much in the way of viable commercial potential for any fighter below 155 pounds. He was already at the top of the featherweight division when the UFC absorbed the bulk of the WEC’s roster. He entered the UFC as the reigning champ of a new division (buying his first suit to mark the occasion), then stayed at the top for the next four-plus years.
He’s also the rare fighter who moved down in weight late in his career and somehow made it look like a good idea. When does that ever happen? He logged 42 MMA bouts, from favela fight night events in Rio de Janeiro to a packed hockey arena in Canada, and the worst you can say about his eventual decline is that he went from utterly dominant to merely very good.
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To last so long in this sport, you need more than talent and skill. The fight game chews through talent all the time, quickly and without sentiment. You need to have some kind of fire burning there in the engine room of your heart. Some fighters feed that fire with childhood rage or lingering fears on inadequacy. Others feed it with their egos, some deep need to stand above everyone else and look smirking down.
Whatever it is, though, eventually the fuel runs out. You burn through it. The better you are at this sport, the longer they want you to keep doing it. That means eventually you use up all the stuff that got you here in the first place. It’s only a question of when.
Aldo has options. He’s already tried stepping away before, only to find that the desire to punch someone for money in one combat sport or another did not entirely depart. Maybe he’ll discover the same again this time and end up in some celebrity-adjacent boxing match before long.
Still, to hear yourself asking why you’re doing this on the night before a UFC fight — and to have no compelling answers left — must feel like the clear end of something. And if Aldo has finally had enough, you can look at his résumé and know he came by the feeling honestly.
