Aldo vs. Mendes 2: Poking the Bear
Artwork by our friend Shunsuke Visuals
Action-packed fights are by no means uncommon, but few of them achieve veneration within the lexicon of MMA. So what makes a fight not just good, but truly great? What are the qualities that separate a forgotten barn-burner from a fight that lives on the tip of every tongue? The matter is certainly open to debate, but there’s a few points we can likely agree on.
It must have action, that’s a given, but action alone doesn’t constitute a legendary fight. The fights that stand the test of time tend to be those with emotional stakes underpinning the action. A fight between two fighters that fans are invested in, with a history between them, well-developed motivations entering the fight, and a title on the line carries more emotional weight than an under-card fight between unknown prospects.
While background narrative can heighten the emotional character of a fight and foreshadow the action, the narrative produced within the fight is even more important. A major part of the tension in combat sports stems from our curiosity about the human body’s limits. When two competitors push each other beyond imaginable boundaries, it creates a human interest story. These fights explore the depths of heart, determination, and will that humanity is capable of - stories that become iconically inscribed on the faces and bodies of its writers, often permanently.
I’d like to posit one more necessary constituent of a truly great fight. To me - and indeed The Fight Site’s picks for our top 5 UFC fights supports this idea - a great fight must also posses depth in tactics, strategy, and technique. Elite fighters tend to posses an ability to respond to their opponent’s strengths thoughtfully. When a fight sees two elite fighters attempting to figure each other out, there’s often a near endless depth and variety to the adjustments and facets of skill on display. These fights stress test their participants’ skillsets the same way they do their emotional state, forcing them to truly explore the depths of their tactical well by confronting them with someone prepared to deal with their standard approach.
The second fight between Jose Aldo and Chad Mendes had everything you could ask for.
A natural storyline took root in the build up - the great Featherweight champion was no doubt facing his toughest challenge yet. After holding the UFC/WEC Featherweight belt for five years, Aldo began routinely making his fights look so easy that pundits criticized him for complacency. Mendes’ first shot at Aldo came too early into his career to prove much of a threat, but the ultra-athletic wrestler subsequently reevaluated his skillset and added a new dynamic to his game. After losing to Aldo by first-round knockout in 2012, Mendes developed an incredibly crafty striking skillset, finishing four of his next five fights, three within the first two minutes.
Mendes’ run before the fight mirrored Aldo’s early career, in which he ascended to the WEC Featherweight Title through a string of devastating first-round finishes. In the eyes of many, Aldo had now grown bored in his position, paring back his game to its most high-percentage tactics and abandoning the wild aggression of his youth. But that wouldn’t slide against Chad Mendes, who possessed the ferocious athleticism to force Aldo to work for his money. For those who aren’t interested in conservative striking clinics, there was once again a reason to get excited about Jose Aldo.
An Octagonal Pressure Cooker
Mendes began delivering on those narrative promises in the opening minutes of the fight. He started out intent on pressuring the champion, pushing him back to the cage and forcing exchanges to deny Aldo the time and space with which he was so used to working. With Aldo’s temperament and Mendes’ aggression, it wasn’t long before the fight boiled over into something truly special.
Unbridled aggression is a great way to get oneself seriously hurt against a counterpuncher as skilled and powerful as Aldo, but Mendes’ pressure was far from thoughtless. Mendes backed Aldo up with feints, making sure to close distance and disguise his power punches behind a shield of false entries. He also made excellent use of throwaway punches, using light, non-committal jabs and lead hooks to occupy Aldo’s vision and draw out his counters.
Aldo’s fearsome counterpunching and incredible defense rely in part on his ability to time opponents’ attacks. By throwing out a lot of static in the form of feints and throwaway punches, Mendes was able to disrupt his timing. The non-committal strikes allowed Mendes to stay safe while entering and in position to avoid Aldo’s counters. The more a counterpuncher finds himself throwing at air in attempt to counter a feint, the more hesitant his trigger becomes, which opens up entries into more committed strikes.
The lead hand of Mendes served as an excellent distraction and setup tool. He flicked out light lead-leg low kicks at long range and stepped into non-committal jabs while slowly eating up space, remaining poised to explode into powerful rear-side punches and kicks at a moment’s notice. His jab was multifaceted and layered, and Mendes would vary its rhythm to close distance into his rear hand. Whenever Mendes found success with a particular tool, he would build off it to exploit Aldo’s reactions. The success of his jab was used to open up snappy left hooks, and he combined the threat of the jab with level changes to show takedowns, before springing up into his lead hooks and rear uppercuts.
Anyone looking to beat Aldo must have a plan to deal with his preternatural control of pace and position. There’s a sort of Catch 22 to fighting Aldo - he’s such a skilled, comfortable, and versatile striker that letting him control the pace of the fight means almost certain defeat, but so dangerous is he that to attempt to force an uncomfortable pace on him is to put oneself in perilous danger. Mendes showed incredible composure and skill in navigating this conundrum early, skirting a thin line between finding opportunities to apply his offense and exposing himself to counters.
Hand-fighting was a valuable tool for Mendes early, as he advanced behind extended hands to tie up and neutralize Aldo’s hands while he gained ground. Keeping the rear hand extended to cover Aldo’s lead limited his ability to jab, but it also gave Mendes an advantage in range-finding and information gathering.
One of the primary uses for the jab is as a discovery tool - even missed jabs provide valuable information about how close you are to your opponent and how he reacts to their threat. But covering an opponent’s jab and forcing them to jab into an extended palm denies them this critical information, presenting them with a false sense of distance. Furthermore, catching an opponent’s jab allows you to effectively gauge distance yourself, and Mendes was able to score several counters off his hand-fighting. Since Mendes was generally the one enforcing the hand-fight, he also had the opportunity to quickly pull his hands back and leap forward into a strike, catching Aldo by surprise when he extended his own hands to meet it.
While pressure fighters are characterized by eye-catching displays of offense and aggression, effective pressure benefits heavily from sound defense. Pressure fighters spend so much time in range of their opponent’s weapons that it’s critical they have an effective means of protecting themselves. Heavy pressure will often cause opponents to lash out in panic or frustration, and a coherent defensive system allows a pressure fighter to capitalize on those openings to deal damage.
Mendes’ pressure was bolstered by shocking development in his defensive system. His head movement and distance management looked as good as ever, but he’d also added a terrific high guard to his game. High guards are difficult to pull off in MMA due to the small glove size and diversity of weapons; they can often become a crutch used to compensate for a failure of eyes - a rote attempt at a catch-all defense that is easily worked around by crafty strikers. Mendes didn’t merely cover and hope for the best, however. He flashed his high guard on and off in exchanges, seamlessly integrating it with his head movement and counterpunching. His guard was highly responsive and aided his eyes rather than inhibiting them. He was able to see specific strikes coming and maneuver his guard to protect himself, tilting his elbow horizontally to cover against uppercuts and closing his guard inward to deflect rear hands.
Leading up to his second fight with Aldo, Mendes had become known for his crafty and devastating counters. But they never looked better than they did against Aldo. Catch and pitch counters flowed naturally out of his high guard, and Mendes was able to catch several of his trademark cross counters, sending his right hand over Aldo’s jab or lead hook. Aldo’s firepower makes pressuring him a tough task, and Mendes’ improved defense and counters allowed him to keep himself safe while moving forward and punish Aldo for lashing out.
For his part, Aldo met Mendes’ early aggression with poise and composure. One of the worst ways you can respond to an aggressive, powerful hitter is to give ground continually. Backing up to the cage puts the opponent in a much better position to apply his power, but it also forces you to cover much more distance in escaping. Although it flies in the face of all instinct, closing distance is necessary to keep a determined pressure fighter away. While continually backtracking forces you to circle in a wide arc to retake the center, stepping forward means that you only need to circle around your opponent in a tight arc to escape, rather than the entire cage.
Aldo’s performance provided a perfect demonstration of this principle. He met Mendes’ pressure not by scurrying back in panic or lashing out in uncontrolled fury, but by remaining composed and defensively sound while refusing to concede any more ground than necessary. By stepping forward or staying planted when Mendes pressed, he prevented Mendes from controlling the cage and achieving his desired position. Aldo also managed to smother Mendes’ strikes by closing distance, taking himself inside the trajectory of his hooks and stymieing his combinations by removing the distance needed to throw them. This also allowed Aldo to enforce his cage positioning by physically shoving Mendes away when Mendes attempted to force him back with strikes - an underused but effective tactic for fighters looking to create space and neutralize offense.
Teaching Lessons
By this point in his career, Chad Mendes was used to being the hammer facing a nail. His athleticism, power, and skill in applying it meant that he could easily scare opponents off and proceed with enforcing his game without having to worry too much about their intentions. Skilled pressure footwork and shrewd feints enforced his position within the Octagon, and a devastating right hand kept opponents light on the trigger. A Mendes opponent had two choices - retreat and allow Mendes to continue pressuring, or stand his ground and get knocked out. Jose Aldo was different.
After an explosive ascent to his first title, Aldo settled into the role of conservative technician, characterized by his poise and mastery of fundamentals. Few of Aldo’s previous opponents were able to consistently land clean strikes on him, let alone generate significant effect with them. He spent his previous two fights - against Ricardo Lamas and Chan Sung Jung - operating mostly in first gear, feeling no need to amp up his aggression against opponents unable to crack his defensive shell. But Chad Mendes was different.
When facing a fighter with the intent and tools to control the initiative through pressure, you can’t avoid them forever. No matter how sound your footwork, how tight your positioning, how deft your sense of distance, there will come a time when you need to plant your feet and dissuade them. Jose Aldo understood this as well as anyone, and it made him one of the most difficult fighters to effectively pressure. Mendes brought Aldo out of first gear very quickly in the fight, a significant accomplishment in itself, and Aldo simply dialed up the intensity.
Pressuring Aldo, getting in his face, and making him uncomfortable was Mendes’ most reliable path to victory. And if he wanted to achieve it, he would need to walk through hell to get there.
When it became clear that Mendes presented a new level of challenge, Aldo didn’t abandon his calm, collected process. He merely married the tight footwork, impeccable defense, and preternatural distancing with ferocious, punishing counters and spots of well-placed aggression. Aldo picked his battles wisely, making Mendes work for every bit of ground he gained both through his brilliant cage-craft and creating timely exchanges.
Here we see him put it all together. He feints to keep Mendes hesitant moving forward, pivots out when Mendes engages before trapping hands and pushing off when he follows. Collapsing himself into Mendes’ body kills the entry on a lead hook. Once Aldo shoves him back into the center of the cage, he enforces the distance he gained with a fit of hard strikes. Mendes maintains brilliant defense upstairs, parrying the jabs and covering the straight rights, but a hard right to the body gets through.
Mendes’ high guard was integral in allowing him to pressure without putting himself in danger, but Aldo soon began working around it. One of the downsides of relying on your hands to block strikes is that you’re forced to choose your coverage gaps, especially in MMA, where 4oz gloves leave ample room for an opponent to puncture holes in the armor. While Mendes was doing a great job seeing the strikes coming and reacting, it’s a simple fact that an arm cannot be in two places at once, and Aldo started playing his threats off each other and building combinations to exploit the positioning of Mendes’ guard.
Lead hooks widen the guard, encouraging the rear arm to drift outward, while lead uppercuts and straight rights penetrate down the middle. Mendes was often forced to pick between covering against the left hook or the jab/lead uppercut, as all three look similar in their preliminary motion. Aldo often followed his combinations with marching knees, keeping Mendes honest and punishing him for adding head movement onto his defensive arsenal or attempting to counter.
When Mendes came out intent on a firefight, Aldo pushed back even harder. The first round was fought at an unsustainable pace, but it was a pace Aldo had no intention of sustaining. He was training Mendes to fight his fight. As soon as Mendes brought out a new tool, Aldo started adapting to take it away. If he couldn’t strip a tool with minimal effort through his defensive mastery, he would rely on dissuasion, repeatedly punishing its implementation until the risk was no longer worth the reward.
After Mendes landed several clean, hard leg kicks in the opening minute of the fight, Aldo decided that wasn’t going to fly. He started checking the kicks when possible, but perhaps more importantly, he focused on making Mendes hurt for every kick that got through. From that point on, the clean leg kicks were followed back by a hard Aldo kick or a flurry of monstrous punches.
Mendes had one of the best double legs in MMA history, but struggled to make his takedowns count against Aldo’s prodigious defensive wrestling. Not only was Aldo diligent in defending the takedowns, but he made sure to dissuade level changes and punish near-successful attempts.
Aldo’s takedown defense is almost perfect. Whenever Mendes got in on his hips, he would look to pivot away hard to kill his grip, while securing a strong whizzer and forcing the head away. This broke down Mendes’ positioning at every level and often left Aldo with a three-quarter nelson, which he could us to force Mendes down, tire him out, and land strikes. Aldo also consistently attacked the level change with marching knees, promising a knee to the skull if Mendes was overzealous with his level changes.
One of Aldo’s most defining qualities is his masterful control over the context a fight takes place in. Aldo had a way of getting his own way, nudging each fight toward his preferred pace, place, and position through a combination of finesse and force. Former Aldo opponent, Manvel Gamburyan, phrased this quality succinctly:
“England, they’re a very fast [soccer] team. When they play Brazil, somehow Brazil slows them down and makes them play their game. I don’t know how it happens, but it’s the same thing with Jose Aldo. Even if you want to fight fast, or anything like that, he makes you go on his pace. It’s magic, or it’s just that he’s gifted. I don’t know.”
Aldo showed against Mendes exactly how he does it - by systematically stripping his opponents of their weapons, nullifying their attacks with fundamentals, and punishing every success with extreme prejudice. In a sense, it’s almost more dangerous to attempt to win against Aldo than it is to accede to his fight. If Aldo is made uncomfortable, he is going to ensure that his opponent is more uncomfortable.
If there’s one particular weapon that facilitated Aldo’s control of pace in his prime above all else, it’s his counterpunching. As the premier defensive fighter in MMA, Aldo was unbelievably hard to hit clean on the lead. Any attempt to consistently hit Aldo required a lot of work in terms of disguise, sound footwork, and establishing and playing with threats of various strikes, and even then it was far from guaranteed. His last two opponents were solid if not elite strikers in Jung and Lamas, and they could scarcely hit him. Trying to hit Aldo clean was often a fruitless endeavor, but it was also dangerous. The more opponents throw, the more they miss. The more they miss, the more openings given to one of the most skilled and fearsome counterpunchers in MMA.
Neither fighter had a terribly easy time hitting the other given the defensive skill at play, but Aldo’s footwork and positioning allowed him to maximize his counter opportunities. When Mendes pushed exchanges, he was often left guessing whether Aldo would gracefully dance out of the way, or plant his feet and fire back. Several times, Aldo was able to outmaneuver Mendes in exchanges with his pivots, taking a dominant angle and smacking Mendes hard when he turned to keep up.
While Mendes found a lot of offensive success in the first round through his thoughtful aggression, Aldo made him pay for it hard at every corner. He carved Mendes up with clean counters and bit down in exchanges, conditioning Mendes to expect damage and pain every time he walked forward. With under a minute left to in the round, Mendes feinted his way in behind a jab and Aldo landed a right hand over top of it, while pivoting inside to catch Mendes with a monstrous lead hook. Mendes hit the canvas, a sign that his aggression was pushing him past his own limits.
Aldo sold the point even harder as soon as Mendes got back to his feet.
In the dying seconds of the first round, Aldo walked Mendes down behind a barrage of punches. Amazingly, Mendes maintained enough composure to defend several of the shots and counter after being knocked down a moment ago, but it didn’t matter. Aldo willed himself forward, attacking continually and mixing up his combinations to manipulate Mendes’ guard. Mendes managed to block a big uppercut and anticipated its return by folding his lead hand across himself. Aldo took the opportunity to blast him with a flurry of straight punches, the last of which landed just after the bell and sent him to the floor once again.
Aldo made it clear to Mendes that his most consistent path to victory was likely to get him violently finished. A round won by Mendes through aggression, pressure, and pace was inevitably going to be a Pyrrhic victory, and even with all his success in the first he ended up taking too much damage to win it.
This is how Aldo trains his opponents to fight his fight. It was a lesson that Chad Mendes learned emphatically.
By the time the second round started, Mendes was forced back to the drawing board. Constant pressure was causing him to take an unsustainable amount of damage, so he had to figure out a way to land consistently without exposing himself to Aldo’s ferocious pocket work. Mendes starting entering from further outside, rather than closing distance steadily and spending more time in Aldo’s range. He also flirted with stance switching, either entering directly from southpaw or shifting mid-entry in attempt to catch Aldo unaware. Some of the shifting was quite crafty and may have proved fruitful against a lesser opponent, but a master of footwork and positioning like Jose Aldo is not the one to debut nascent stance switching against.
The problem with darting in from further away is twofold - not only are the entries more predictable, but they also require more commitment. Mendes was forced to cover a larger amount of distance and Aldo read it nearly every time. While large, explosive movements were necessary on Mendes’ part, Aldo could simply pivot or hop-step at an angle to defuse Mendes’ entry while staying in position to counter. When Mendes fought out of a southpaw stance, Aldo found counters to the open side while Mendes was out of position, including a brilliant leg kick to take Mendes off his feet as he attempted a head kick.
The second round involved a lot of experimentation from Mendes, who was forced to abandon his A-game early in the fight. This coincided perfectly with Aldo’s preferred pace, and Aldo was content to lead the round with distance control and a sharp jab.
Now that Mendes was no longer enforcing a close range and tying up hands, Aldo was free to let his jab fly. The second round is a jabbing clinic as Aldo used it to freeze Mendes at range, bar entries into the pocket, and disrupt his rhythm when he tried to initiate offense. When Mendes was able to get past the jab or rush in from outside, Aldo would use his lateral movement to reset the exchange and turn Mendes.
When Aldo wanted to initiate offense, he would distract with the jab upstairs before smashing a powerful body shot into Mendes’ midsection, a smart way to ensure his opponent is ill-equipped to outlast him. Mendes had already been dissuaded from aggressive pressure, but fighting Aldo at range wasn’t working out either. Down two rounds, Mendes needed to find an answer quick lest the fight slip completely beyond his reach.
Adjustments, Adjustments, Adjustments
Mendes started to find his range in the third round. After being dissuaded from close-range work and shut out at long-range, Mendes took his in-and-out movement from the last round and sharpened it up. Instead of darting in from long range, he began operating just outside of jabbing range and feinting his way inside. This had the advantage of allowing him to set up his entries while keeping his feet in position to respond. It also proved much more effective in drawing out Aldo’s reactions.
Mendes’ entries became much less predictable. When Mendes was leaping in, Aldo could read it early and slide away with little effort, but now he was forced to take defensive actions or counter due to the presence and threat of Mendes’ lead hand. Taking away some of that distance from Aldo left him with less time to read the entries, enabling Mendes to draw out counters and dull his trigger.
Though Mendes’ entry feints from closer range proved effective in creating opportunities, Aldo’s defense made it difficult for him to capitalize. Here Mendes succeeds in making Aldo work while keeping himself safe by layering his feints, playing the threat of his jab and level changes off his lead hook and overhand right, but all the effort leads to is a trade of grazing hooks due to Aldo’s head movement defusing the power strikes.
Mendes figured out how to capitalize on those openings just over halfway through the third round:
Mendes sold layers of feints toward Aldo, threatening and playing with the rhythm of his jab, using foot feints and bouncy movement to disguise his entries. For the first time in the fight, Aldo found himself operating on Mendes’ initiative as he reacted to static and flung counters at air. After making Aldo miss a couple times, Mendes extended his rear hand to cover Aldo’s jab, encouraging Aldo flinging out his jab as soon as the hand retracted. Mendes ducked under Aldo’s jab, threatening a takedown. Aldo lowered his base to defend the takedown and skewered himself on a massive uppercut. Mendes wasn’t done - he loaded his lead hip while stepping forward to show a jab, before leaping forward with a lead hook around Aldo’s parry. Aldo once again went to his lateral movement and attempted to pivot to safety, but Mendes anticipated it. The first lead hook is followed by a diagonal hop-step into southpaw, giving Mendes an outside angle when Aldo pivots and shortening the path of his left hand. Mendes then leaps forward again and cracks Aldo with a thunderous left hook from a dominant angle.
The beauty of this sequence is that Mendes isn’t just anticipating Aldo’s reactions, but he’s proactively creating the conditions that force those reactions. The uppercut and left hook represent the culmination of all the information Mendes had previously gathered through feints and exchanges. He knows Aldo is going to jab once he uncovers the hand, change levels in response to the takedown, and pivot out when threatened with a leaping attack. Within the span of a couple seconds, Mendes encourages and punishes all three.
A momentum swing at the fight’s halfway point was exactly what Mendes needed to turn the tide. Already down two rounds, he couldn’t afford to let another one slip through the cracks. But now he had Aldo hurt. It was the best opportunity to dethrone Aldo anyone had achieved since the inception of his reign.
There’s a lot we don’t know about a fighter until we see him respond to adversity. The ability to take a hiding and come back stronger - not just physically, but mentally - is predictive of sustained success at an elite level in a way few other traits are. Many fighters can operate brilliantly while in control, but far fewer can wrest back control of a fight slipping away from them.
Adversity allows fighters to display technical savvy in their adjustments, but more than that it evokes a quality which transcends the fight itself, laying bare their character on a human level. Moments that force a fighter into unfamiliar and dangerous territory inject dramatic structure into a fight. They’re the unexpected incident that plunges characters into chaos, heightening a story’s tension and intrigue. When these moments occur, the stakes cease to be just about fighting, instead reflecting something universal to the human experience.
Mike Tyson famously said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. But great fighters get punched in the mouth. And they adapt. Aldo’s response is characteristic of the best that combat sports has to offer on every level.
After eating two huge punches that would have finished lesser fighters, Aldo takes a brief shuffle back and instantly resumes his stance, ready to defuse the storm. He changes the direction of his circling while weaving underneath a follow-up left hook, buying himself some time and space to recover. Mendes stalks him patiently, still feinting into his entries and setting up his punches. Two exchanges follow and Aldo calmly slips every Mendes punch. The third time Mendes enters, Aldo immediately drops him with a cross-counter over his jab.
Aldo had never been hurt the way Mendes hurt him, but he couldn’t have been better prepared to deal with it. It was the best opening any challenger had found against Aldo, and it was sealed off within seconds. He stumbled once and immediately went back to doing everything that was winning him the fight up to that point, with some added adjustments to deal with the new threats Mendes presented.
Mendes repeated the level-change uppercut when following up, but this time Aldo simply pulled his head back to safety. When Mendes was setting up his attack by drawing out Aldo’s counters, Aldo was attempting to slip outside or pull the jabs, before returning with a right hand. Outside slip and pull counters involve two motions, the weight transferring to the rear foot first to defend, and then the front foot to attack, which gave Mendes a short window to slide back and make the counter miss. This time, Aldo slipped inside with a simultaneous right hand. There was no room for Mendes to avoid the punch that dashed his best hope of a comeback.
Aldo had proven that he could make world-class fighters look impotent. He’d proven that he could hurt them severely. But Mendes forced him to dig deeper into his heart and reveal even more of his character as a fighter and as a human. When he’s hurt, he stays calm and works through it. When he’s tired, he keeps going. When he’s pushed to his limit, he pushes back harder. Moments like this represent the apex of what fight sports can give us, when great fighters blend technical brilliance with undying heart and a desperate will to win.
Wrapping Up
The timely counter and ensuing flurry helped seal the third round for Aldo, who found himself up three rounds to none. While Mendes was pushing Aldo to the brink repeatedly, he had nothing to show for it on the scorecards, and time was running out. Despite the circumstances, Mendes went right back to work.
Aldo was content to slow down a little after the ferocious third round, focusing mainly on his distance control and defense to prevent Mendes from landing any fight-changing offense. Mendes, however, wasn’t finished looking for opportunities. He had found success to the body throughout the fight, and trying to enter to Aldo’s head was getting him chopped up by counters, so he started pushing the body work harder to initiate entries and open up his powerful rear hand.
The lead hook to the body built on all the lead-hand work Mendes was doing throughout the fight. The threat of the jab and left hook upstairs allowed him to safely feint into the body hook, loading his lead hip while drawing Aldo’s attention away from it. When Aldo started blocking the body or giving ground to make it fall short, Mendes added a running right hand over the top to track his movement.
The pace and damage was wearing on Mendes, but he never stopped trying to create openings to finish the fight. Fatigued and beaten up, Mendes pushed forward. He continued layering his jab, feinting into powerful punches and drawing out counters, and even managed to pressure a tired Aldo to the cage occasionally.
While Mendes was still doing consistent work, Aldo’s defense and footwork prevented it from mattering too much. His entries were frustrated by Aldo’s head movement, his ability to work in combination shut down by Aldo’s pivots and timely shoves on the inside. Aldo’s design for the fight did not require him to win every round, and his goal in the fourth was to keep each Mendes success an isolated moment. Mendes was able to land, but those successes were never permitted to build into something more substantial due to Aldo’s control.
The fifth round was a grueling slog. Aldo was done sitting back and letting Mendes work, but he was exhausted. His swings labored, his feet unsteady. But it was time to go back to work, and so he did. We know now that Aldo was up three rounds on all cards, but that wasn’t a certainty as the fight played out. Both men looked to squeeze every last drop of fuel from their tank to win what could have been one of the most important rounds of their career. They had been pushed to their limit and surpassed it, summoning a strength of will neither competitor had ever before been forced to display.
Mendes started the round fast, landing several clean shots early and finally hitting his first meaningful takedown of the fight. Aldo’s cardio had always been seen as his biggest weakness, and after all the work Aldo had done to dissuade him throughout the fight, Mendes was still testing it.
In Aldo’s later career, far past his prime and no longer able to stretch his gas tank over even three full rounds, his fights against future greats are characterized by a steadfast refusal to give up that borders on absurdity at times. Referees allowed him to take uncomfortable beatings against Max Holloway and Petr Yan - beatings that dragged on for minutes because Aldo wouldn’t stop moving, wouldn’t stop looking for an opportunity to avoid damage, or hit back, or stand up even when a fight became utterly unwinnable. The fifth round against Chad Mendes hinted at how deep Aldo’s tenacity ran. I describe the circumstances in my long-form examination of Aldo's career:
Aldo was in familiar territory, on his back late in the fight. Only this time, he couldn’t afford to wait it out.
After Mendes had racked up a minute on top, Aldo found his opportunity. Warned for inactivity by referee, Marc Goddard, Mendes postured up and threw a knee, giving Aldo the necessary space to wall-walk back to his feet. As soon as he was up, Aldo exited the clinch by shoving Mendes halfway across the Octagon.
Two minutes had passed without any effective offense from Aldo, and he knew he had some catching up to do. Aldo began walking Mendes down with renewed vigor. He found an opening through Mendes’ guard after a couple ineffective leads, landing a clean lead uppercut and rear straight. As Mendes barreled backwards, he stepped in and delivered a piercing knee to the chest.
Far from having the intended effect, Mendes caught the knee and turned it into another takedown attempt. Faced with the prospect of spending the remainder of the round underneath his opponent, Aldo summoned his strength and acted. He stamped his caught leg down and pivoted with extreme prejudice, throwing Mendes out of position and landing him on his hands and knees, before picking up a loose quarter nelson and smushing the wrestler’s face into the nearby cage.
The pace and accumulation was visibly wearing on Aldo, yet he refused to coast. He pushed forward on unsteady legs, almost as if harnessing his intense fatigue as a weapon. His once beautiful mechanics were rapidly decaying, and his positioning in exchanges was all over the place. At one point a blocked body shot from Mendes sent Aldo wobbling back, and upon re-entry he narrowly avoided an uppercut with an almost unconscious spasmodic motion. A second later he pushed forward and rocked Mendes with a tight right hand, before whiffing a desperate shovel hook that seemed to signal fatigue finally sapping all motor control from his body.
Aldo was too tired to throw proper punches, too tired to bring his feet with him when he attacked, somehow too tired to stop walking down and beating up Chad Mendes. Mendes appeared the fresher man in terms of mechanics and body language, but now it was Aldo doing all the effective work.
They say that fatigue makes cowards of us all, but not Jose Aldo. No, it made Aldo determined.
When the dust settled and the scorecards were read, Aldo emerged the clear victor. Though all three judges gave Aldo four out of five rounds, the scores do not paint a complete picture. Aldo was one step ahead at every point, but Mendes put on the performance of a lifetime. Every time Aldo found an answer, Mendes changed the question. He did what no other challenger to Aldo’s throne had ever been able to do, eliciting another level of ferocity from the champion by pushing him early and often.
Every narrative promise established prior to the fight saw full fruition. The champion that had seemingly grown bored with his own dominance cast off the illusion of disinterest and exhibited terrifying urgency, the likes of which is seldom seen in MMA. The challenger gave the Champion no choice but to go to war, striving to impose his own will at every point despite attempts to bludgeon the enthusiasm out of him. The in-fight action took these converging stories to new heights as Jose Aldo and Chad Mendes wove with their fists an elaborate tapestry of action-reaction, adjustment and counter-adjustment. Never content to settle, they pushed on through copious punishment. Their limbs unsteady, faces cut up and bruised, bodies battered, but heart and mind unwavering.
Legendary fights are often the ones that remind us of the human cost involved in fight sports. When Jose Aldo and Chad Mendes met for the second time, they left a piece of themselves in that Octagon. Both men would lose a step shortly after. For Aldo it was a timely decline, giving way to a new generation of Featherweight greats after nearly a decade of dominance.
Mendes, however, was just entering his prime when he fought Aldo and could never recapture the form he displayed that night. Although a split with striking coach, Duane Ludwig, and a two year PED suspension contributed to his deterioration, Mendes never seemed to take hits as well as he did before the Aldo fight, losing two of his next three fights by (T)KO. But for that night, he was unyielding. While his career failed to live up to its full potential, Mendes will always have one of the greatest losing efforts in MMA, when he gave the legendary Jose Aldo everything he could handle.
Sometimes it’s important to take a step back and remember that the stakes involved in combat sports are real. The fights that we adore can have long-lasting consequences on athletes, and the stories we identify with don’t always end happily. This series has been our attempt to examine the peak highs of Mixed Martial Arts and express our appreciation for those sacrifices.