Anderson Silva Is Using Michael Bisping as a Vehicle of Redemption

This Saturday marks the long-awaited return of MMA's first and arguably only true genius, of a mythic, superhuman figure who could defy physical laws and redefine anatomical possibility but who tumbled down to earth by committing the most human of sins. A man who has gone from being a myth to merely another professional athlete with tainted blood.

All of which makes Anderson Silva's return this week after a one-year suspension a bittersweet occasion for MMA fans, especially those of us who grew up in this sport with Silva as our North Star: the beacon showing the brutal and too-often artless world of professional fighting the way toward beauty. For those of us whose MMA fandom was always a conflicted state, who troubled themselves trying to reconcile their love of the sport with their moral abhorrence of human violence, Anderson Silva was proof of something higher in the sport's soul, the perpetual counter-argument to the brutishness of MMA.

So now what? Do we cheer Silva's return in the hopes that as a 40-year-man clean of performance-enhancing substances he can prove that his genius was something that would have existed regardless of biological tampering, a pure good? Will a victory this weekend be a great redemption story and proof for fans of something true and beautiful in this world, or will it be just a cruel reminder to longtime, now skeptical, fans that every one of those gorgeous, perfect Silva victories must now be doubted and questioned?

Had Silva just retired after beating Nick Diaz last December his legacy would have been marred by his subsequent positive drug tests, but that marring eventually would have been lost in the mist of time. Sure, we never would have known if Silva had been on steroids during all those sublime performances, but eventually our positive memories would have silenced our doubts and we would have put them aside out of the need to believe we once witnessed something beautiful and pure. By coming back, though, Anderson Silva is forcing us to reckon with all our ugly questions about his past achievements, about all those impossible performances that now seem even more impossible.

Still, you have to give Silva credit. He knows there's no redemption to be found in slinking away and vanishing, that the only way he can save his legacy is by showing his face and that the only way to prove the skeptics wrong is to show them the old Anderson Silva magic once more, this time unmarred by steroids and lurid stories about vials from Thailand filled with sexual-performance drugs.

And if what Silva is after is, in fact, redemption then he couldn't do any better than to fight Michael Bisping. Not because Michael Bisping is the best fighter in the middleweight division but because Michael Bisping is the best trash-talker in the middleweight division. Bisping was never going to let Anderson Silva or anyone else forget why Silva was gone for a year-and-a-half and how, in Bisping's opinion, Anderson Silva built his reputation as a genius. Silva had to know that Bisping wasn't going to ignore Silva's failed drug tests like some other fighters he could have fought would have, either out of decency or propriety or indifference or promotional incapacity. He knew that Bisping was going to turn those failed drug tests into a lash and a means to gin up interest in their fight: Look at the cheater, slinking back into the cage after years as the untouchable champion, dirtied beyond recognition yet desperate for love. And now look at me: the righter of great historical wrongs, clean as a whistle yet for so many years denied my chance at Silva's title—the true, clean champion, undone by injustices. By agreeing to face Michael Bisping in his first fight back, Anderson Silva was agreeing to public contrition.

Just look at a recent exchange between the two men on Instagram. Silva uploaded a post mocking Bisping for kicking his own trainer while hitting pads at an open workout the other day, and immediately Bisping responded by sending out a copy of his most recent clean drug-test report: a wildly disproportionate response to a bit of light ribbing, but if what Silva is after is absolution he couldn't have planned it any better. Goading Michael Bisping was an act of expiation, of penance, of mortification, of self-flagellation, a mea culpa that any medieval monk would be jealous of. Michael Bisping has become the vehicle for Anderson Silva's redemption. It's all over now but the bloodletting.