Andrei Arlovski suffered a split-decision loss to Martin Buday in the prelims of UFC 303 on Saturday night and Dana White declared afterwards that the 45-year-old veteran’s time in the UFC has now come to an end.
“Yeah, this is Andre’s last fight,” was White’s only comment on Arlovski’s future at the post-fight press conference.
There had been no prior indication that this was to be Arlovski’s final fight, but he had gone into the fight with Buday on a three-fight losing slump, having been submitted by Marcos Rogerio de Lima, TKO’d by Don’Tale Mayes and decisioned by Waldo Cortes-Acosta in the past couple of years.
He certainly didn’t fight like his future was on the line against Buday though, engaging in a painfully dull, uneventful clinch battle for the vast majority of the fight, and it seems that was the catalyst for White to call time on his long UFC run.
The fact that Arlovski is competing at all is remarkable when you considered that his career began 25 years ago. He became a star in the UFC during his initial eight year run there, including winning the interim and then undisputed heavyweight title along the way.
However, Arlovski was then lured away from the UFC by big money offers from the likes of Affliction, but while that started off well enough, he suddenly hit a wall in 2009, starting with a brutal first round KO loss to Fedor Emelianenko.
That was the start off a dismal spell of four defeats in a row in which he was also TKO’d in the first round by Brett Rogers, beaten on the scorecards by Antonio Silva in addition to another 1st round KO loss against Sergei Kharitonov.
At that point most observers believed that Arlovski’s chin had gone and that it was only a matter of time before he retired. However, Arlovski had other ideas and went on to put together a 6-1 (+1nc) run that led to him being welcomed back into the UFC in 2014.
And to his credit, while there’s been more downs than ups since, Arlovski managed to remain in the promotion for a 10-year stretch.
The downside of this 13-14 (+1nc) campaign however was that Arlovski reinvented his gameplan for much of it, becoming a far more cautious, risk-adverse striker than in his earlier years, which helped prolong his career but didn’t deliver much in the way of exciting fights or finishes.
To emphasize the point, in his first UFC run 9 of his 10 victories came inside the distance, while in his 2nd run only 2 of his 13 wins were finishes.
Nevertheless, Arlovski defied the doubters in terms of his longevity in the sport, and as he’s now forced to bow out of the UFC with a career record now standing at 34-24 (+2nc), it’s quite possible that he may now look for other opportunities to continue competing.
