“Yes, this is André’s last fight.”
That’s pretty much what UFC president Dana White had to say on the subject of former UFC heavyweight champion Andrei Arlovski on Saturday night. A 25-year career in MMA. A total of 18 years in the UFC, split between two separate stints. And how it ends is with a split-decision loss to Martin Buday in the early preliminaries of UFC 303, followed by a nonchalant dismissal from the boss at the post-fight press conference.
To be clear, when White said it was Arlovski’s “last fight,” he meant in the UFC. Despite being 45 and mired in a four-fight losing streak, Arlovski took to his Instagram after UFC 303 to say that his “chapter in the UFC is closed, but my book is not finished.”
Perhaps that distinction – finishing out his contract with the UFC but not officially retiring from the sport – explains the difference in the way Arlovski’s departure was handled Saturday night compared to that of Michelle Waterson-Gomez.
Like Arlovski, Waterson-Gomez also lost a decision in the early rounds. Unlike Arlovski, she was given a farewell interview in the cage and an adoring video package dedicated to her career as a farewell.
Arlovski, who made his UFC debut when Waterson-Gomez was in high school and won his first title when she was still a teenager, didn’t get a farewell. In fact, if you watched the UFC 303 broadcast, you might have had no idea that this was his final fight inside the Octagon.
Some of that is understandable. When you leave the UFC with a terrible final fight, in the middle of a four-fight losing streak (again, Waterson-Gomez had lost five in a row, but who’s counting), and with no clear plans to retire, the UFC might not feel any reason to celebrate the occasion.
But are we really going to pretend that Arlovski’s career isn’t worth remembering? This is a man who made his pro debut in 1999. Payton Talbott, who shared the UFC 303 card with Arlovski on Saturday night, was about 7 months old at the time. Arlovski would go on to win the UFC heavyweight title in 2005. Other UFC champions from that era include Rich Franklin at middleweight, Chuck Liddell at light heavyweight, and Matt Hughes at welterweight. It’s been over a decade since any of those guys last fought in the UFC.
In terms of longevity alone, Arlovski’s run is incredible. He fought in the UFC for eight years, then went on a wandering warrior tour that included fights in Strikeforce, Affliction, ONE Championship, WSOF (now PFL), and EliteXC. He then returned to the UFC. He remained there another 10 yearsOnly once in that last period did he fight less than twice a year, and that was not until 2023.
The first UFC event was in 1993. Arlovski had his first pro fight in 1999. This means that for 80 percent of the UFC’s existence, Arlovski has fought somewhere, against someone, without a break. There has not been a single calendar year between his debut and now in which Arlovski has not had at least one fight. His loss to Buday was Arlovski’s 60th pro fight. For reference, that’s more than the total number of fights for every fighting pair scheduled for the UFC’s next event.
Prefer a different kind of perspective? Arlovski’s first UFC fight was in November 2000. Zuffa bought the UFC from SEG in January 2001. That means Arlovski was in the UFC before Dana White.
But it’s not just his total time in the game that makes Arlovski’s career special — it’s what he did with it. When Arlovski first came to the UFC, he was an anomaly. A big, athletic heavyweight who could move and punch with knockout power and even pull off the occasional submission? That was new. Over the next few decades, he’d fight basically every relevant heavyweight from at least three different eras of MMA.
Stipe Miocic. Josh Barnett. Fedor Emelianenko. Fabricio Werdum. Tom Aspinall. Francis Ngannou. Tai Tuivasa. Ben Rothwell. Alistair Overeem. Frank Mir. Roy Nelson. Ben Rothwell. Tim Sylvia (a bunch of times). And that’s not even a complete list.
Entire careers have begun, blossomed and ended during Arlovski’s time in the sport. There are UFC greats now comfortably retired who hadn’t even made their pro debut when Arlovski was a UFC champion. To stay at this level for this long in a sport like this? It’s less of an achievement than a minor miracle.
MMA doesn’t always do well with its own history. Promoters are incentivized to sell the next event, while the past isn’t as easy to monetize. MMA has higher fan churn than many traditional stick-and-ball sports, so there were probably a lot of people watching UFC 303 on Saturday night who can’t remember a time when Arlovski was a top heavyweight. (He does have five UFC wins since Miocic last won a fight, and we keep hearing how Miocic absolutely must (Get your next shot at the UFC heavyweight title.)
Still, we should at least consider the possibility that a lifetime in this sport deserves at least a mention on the way out. These kinds of careers, spent entirely at the highest level and spanning six different presidential administrations, are not so common that we can afford to ignore them.
