There are a lot of great nicknames throughout the history of MMA. Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. “The Iceman” Chuck Liddell. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua. But there’s one MMA nickname that perfectly encapsulates the essence of the man it describes: the Natural Born Killer, Carlos Condit.
That’s because Condit was born for this shit. Born for the fight. Condit wasn’t an acclaimed college wrestler, pro kickboxer, or Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. Carlos Condit was a tough kid who walked into Greg Jackson’s gym one day at the age of 15, started beating people’s asses for money when he turned 18, and simply never stopped.
In 2003, at the age of 19 and with only a few years of martial arts experience, he took a kickboxing match against legendary world champion Andy Souwer – he took Souwer five rounds. In MMA, he finished 28 of his career 32 wins, twice contending for an undisputed UFC welterweight title, winning an interim UFC belt and a WEC welterweight championship, and fighting a who’s who of the greatest 170-pounders of all time.
Condit announced his retirement from the sport of MMA at the end of last week, and it came at the right time. The 37-year-old has been a professional mixed martial artist for over half his life, the veteran of 46 pro bouts, most against top competition, many of them violent. He had looked noticeably slower in recent bouts, but had managed to grind out decision wins against Court McGee and Matt Brown over the last year before losing his final fight against Max Griffin in July.
Father Time comes for everyone, including as intimidating a man as Carlos Condit. We loved Condit because he was real. He wasn’t a special athlete or exceptionally skilled. He was just a man who had a talent for violence, and kept proving it to us for almost the entirety of his near two decade-long career.
Condit fully emerged on the national scene as a standout of the then-burgeoning WEC welterweight division in the mid-2000s, winning that promotion’s 170-pound title and finishing every fight of his WEC career before its purchase by Zuffa and the folding of its heavier weight classes into the UFC.
Condit lost his first UFC bout by a close split decision to Martin Kampmann in 2009, but it was his run over the next three years that earned him a legion of fans: an exhilarating five-fight win streak that contained many of his greatest career highlights. In June 2010, he became the first man to beat Rory MacDonald, beating the piss out of the golden boy prospect that everyone expected to be the vanguard of an entire new era of MMA; four months later he knocked Dan Hardy flat with a left hook that turned Hardy’s skeleton to jelly; the next July he hit one of the greatest switch knees in MMA history, knocking Dong Hyun Kim unconscious; and in February 2012 he snapped Nick Diaz‘s 11-fight win streak, the greatest run of Diaz’s acclaimed career, the one that made him a true superstar.
The latter win earned Condit an interim UFC title, and ensured a title bout with the greatest all-around mixed martial artist in history, Georges St-Pierre. From 2007 until the end of his career, GSP never lost a single fight, and won almost all of his contests in dominant fashion. No one came closer to beating him in that run than Condit, who put the fear of God into GSP’s hometown Montreal crowd with a head kick that dropped the champion in the third round.
GSP, a superior athlete and fantastic wrestler, won the decision in lopsided fashion, but that head kick will always be the moment people remember – the moment the great GSP almost lost his crown. Three years later, Condit challenged Robbie Lawler for the title GSP had vacated with his retirement, only to lose an absolute war by split decision in one of the most controversial judge’s calls of all time.
Condit’s career never recovered, and over a decade of wars soon caught up to him. The decision against Lawler is widely reviled among MMA fans for a number of reasons, not the least of which because it deprived one of the sport’s most beloved action stars a chance to finally hold the UFC’s undisputed title. It was the crowning moment he deserved, and never got. Even his retirement was a quiet thing, announced on social media, not nearly the victory lap his fans wanted him to get.
And even though his retirement is a good thing – the only thing that could result from him continuing to fight is undue damage – it’s also bittersweet. They don’t make them like Condit anymore. And now, the generation of real gamebred scrappers, the fighters whose success came as much from pure heart and fighting instinct as it did their talent and skills – the Condits, the Lawlers, the Diaz brothers, the Masvidals – are starting to fade away from the sport, never to return.
It couldn’t be as sad of a thing if we would ever see a fighter like Carlos Condit again. But his era is over, and nothing like it is going to come around again any time soon.
The Big Fight 