Ready for an MMA fact that ought to blow all of our minds? Like, every single time we hear it? Buckle in. Because it takes a second to get the full scope of the matter.<\/p>\n
In 2003, Valentina Shevchenko officially made her professional debut as an MMA fighter. She also debuted as a pro kickboxer the same year. She had just turned 15. She then fought for 10 full years, which is an entire career for many fighters, in both MMA and kickboxing. Then the UFC finally opened its doors to women for the first time. Then Shevchenko had an entire other career as a UFC champ \u2014 the career we know her for now \u2014 on top of the one she\u2019d already logged as an MMA and kickboxing wiz kid who was knocking out grown women as a teenager.<\/p>\n
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To put that in perspective, Shevchenko started fighting as a professional seven years before Ronda Rousey had her first amateur bout. Shevchenko is not only still here but is still a UFC champion nine years after Rousey\u2019s MMA career wrapped up.<\/p>\n
Other fighters who started at around the same time Shevchenko did \u2014 people like Julie Kedzie, Roxanne Modafferi, Tara LaRosa, Shayna Baszler \u2014 are considered pioneers of women\u2019s MMA. Which is this sport\u2019s way of saying that they blazed the trail for others back before there was any money in it for them or even much mainstream respect. All of them are retired now. Because that\u2019s life in combat sports. It\u2019s a meat-grinder that your body and spirit can only endure for so long before one or both just give out. That\u2019s how it is for everybody. Except for Shevchenko.<\/p>\n
The sheer longevity would be impressive enough on its own. To start fighting professionally as a teenager \u2014 in two different combat sports \u2014 and still be here at the age of 37 is almost unheard of. To do all that and still be the most dominant champion that the women\u2019s 125-pound division has ever known, by a wide margin, is frankly absurd.<\/p>\n
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That brings us to Saturday\u2019s co-main event bout from Madison Square Garden. In Zhang, Shevchenko faces an opponent who seems much fresher and closer to her prime, even though she\u2019s somehow only one year younger. She\u2019s also coming up from the 115-pound weight class, which she cleaned out so thoroughly over the past few years that there\u2019s really nothing very interesting left for her to do there.<\/p>\n
These kinds of fights always put a peculiar kind of pressure on the reigning champ in the higher division. There\u2019s a feeling that she should win. She\u2019s literally the bigger fighter. She\u2019s protecting her own turf from the ambitious neighbor bent on violent expansion. To win is to uphold the basic order of things. To lose is a disaster.<\/p>\n
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But Shevchenko\u2019s situation seems different. She\u2019s already one of the all-time greats, no matter what happens Saturday. She\u2019s also looked in recent years like a champ who\u2019s finally slowing down a little bit. It\u2019s just that she was so far ahead of everyone else to begin with that even this has not allowed the rest of the division to catch all the way up to her.<\/p>\n
She could lose and retire all in the same night and it would do nothing to diminish her legacy. There\u2019s simply no one else out there who\u2019s put in this kind of work, for this long, at this level.<\/p>\n
Entire eras of the sport have come and gone during her time here. The UFC didn\u2019t even have a TV deal when she started. Dana White and Joe Rogan both still had hair. The MMA world changed and then changed again and then changed some more. Still, Shevchenko has not only endured but dominated. What else can you really say about a career like that except \u2026 wow?!?<\/p>\n
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But for some reason, Shevchenko still manages to fly a little bit under the radar these days. We don\u2019t talk all that much about her until she shows up to defend her title. (This will be her 14th UFC title fight, by the way. She hasn\u2019t fought a non-title bout since she initially dropped down to the newly established flyweight division in 2018.) She\u2019s not controversial. She doesn\u2019t demand or even seem to care about our attention. She just goes on being arguably the most consistently successful fighter in MMA history.<\/p>\n
The thing about that kind of longevity is people get used to it. They kind of stop noticing it at a certain point. We take for granted that Shevchenko will show up, win, do her celebratory dance and then disappear. Until next time.<\/p>\n
But eventually even this career has to wind down. Sooner or later, the day will come when this sport no longer has Valentina Shevchenko anywhere in it, and that\u2019s a reality we haven\u2019t known since George W. Bush was president and Tim Sylvia was UFC heavyweight champ.<\/p>\n
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When that day finally comes, I suspect we\u2019ll wish we had taken a moment here and there to appreciate Shevchenko\u2019s unparalleled dominance in a sport that\u2019s known for chewing people up and spitting them out. And when she\u2019s finally done for good, there\u2019s a very good chance that we\u2019ll never see this kind of run, over this many years, ever again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ready for an MMA fact that ought to blow all of our minds? Like, every single time we…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,151,641,638,20154,82,640,11037,73180],"class_list":{"0":"post-280936","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-career","11":"tag-fighting","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-mma-fighter","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-ufc","16":"tag-valentina-shevchenko","17":"tag-womens-mma"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}