Hendo Wins Another Title at Strikeforce: Feijao vs. Henderson

Dan Henderson is a rare talent for many reasons. He’s able to compete and stay relevant in two weight classes nearly simultaneously. He’s one of a scarce few fighters that have honed their supplementary skills (in Dan’s case, striking) to be more dangerous than the base that they came into the sport with. Most of all, he is a rare fighter because he’s one of only a couple examples (others including Randy Couture and the younger Vitor Belfort) to fight in the old UFC days and remain near or at the top of the sport to this day.

It would be easy to turn this into a story about how Henderson has worked hard to “evolve to stay current with the times”. How he suffered some sort of humbling defeat and came to that yawner of a realization that “these days you have to train everything”. Bah. That’s not the story of Dan Henderson. What happened with Hendo is that he realized early on that a) he has ridiculous power in his hands and b) he really likes punching people in the face. You pretty much know the rest.

Suddenly, all of that wrestling served a new primary purpose. Rather than using it to take strikers to the mat or to control dangerous jiu-jitsu fighters, Hendo was using it to force opponents to deal with his blistering power all fight long. There was no escape for opponents who were hoping to avoid eating concussive right hands throughout the fight, because very few men in MMA could take Dan Henderson down.

When Hendo came to the UFC and quickly lost consecutive title matches in the light heavyweight and middleweight divisions, many were quick to write him off. (I’m still convinced, by the way, that he could have beaten Quinton “Rampage” Jackson with a more grappling-heavy strategy.) When he left on somewhat bad terms when the UFC didn’t want to pay up, even more (including Dana’s army of robot Twitter followers and apologists) wrote him off. I was not one of those people.

I was actually impressed by Hendo in his fight with Jake Shields. Had Shields not fallen flat on his face after eating a right hand early in the fight, I don’t think he would have regained his senses after hitting the mat and would have been ultimately TKOed. Furthermore, Hendo’s grappling was up to the task early in the fight, and if anything, the fight showed that Hendo probably shouldn’t be cutting to 185 pounds at this stage of his career.

I’m not going to say that knocking out Rafael “Feijao” Cavalcante is the most impressive win of Hendo’s career, because it’s not. However, it is another impressive win, if not primarily because of his opponent’s skill level, but the resilience he showed early on and the raw power he once again displayed near the end. To me, Hendo is much the same fighter now that he has been much of his career, and that is a good thing for both him and the fans.

Smart money says that Henderson will have a lot more success defending the title than the last few Strikeforce light heavyweight champs have had. I’m not sure who can really threaten him in the division right now, honestly. While it would have been nice to see if Henderson could have made good on his promise to defeat Anderson Silva in a rematch, it will be almost as good to see him piling up some wins in Strikeforce, giving himself and the promotion some great memories in the process.

Conventional wisdom says that fighters from the 90′s can’t cut it these days, because they’re too old, they’re unevolved, and better athletes are attracted to the sport these days because of better pay. Of course, conventional wisdom isn’t always right. Dan Henderson proved that again on Saturday night.

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Tags: Dan Henderson, Strikeforce, Strikeforce: Feijao vs. Henderson, UFC