Vitor Belfort could follow the Alex Rodriguez plan for redemption
A funny thing happened to perennial villain Alex Rodriguez when he returned to work for the New York Yankees this season following a 162-game ban from Major League Baseball.
Rodriguez largely kept his head down all season long and just went out to the park and played ball. He smacked 33 home runs and drove in 86 runs to help lead the Yankees to a playoff berth, and he even found cheers coming from fans that seemingly abandoned him years earlier.
If Rodriguez's resurrection in the public eye relates to mixed martial arts in any way, it's with Saturday night's main event winner Vitor Belfort and his latest victory over Dan Henderson, which reminded everybody that this “young dinosaur” still has some gas left in the tank. Even if that tank is not super charged any longer.
Much like Rodriguez in baseball, Belfort has been the poster child for performance enhancing drug abuse in mixed martial arts dating to 2006, when he first tested positive for steroids following his first bout with Henderson.
Back then, Belfort bucked the system and circumvented the Nevada State Athletic Commission's ruling, which came with a nine-month suspension. So “The Phenom” moved to England to fight in a promotion there that didn't adhere to rules set forth in the United States.
While baseball had the “steroid era”, MMA was haunted by the testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) era. While the treatment was legal by all standards, Belfort certainly did his fair share to help drive commissions to ban TRT.
Belfort enjoyed a physical transformation as if he was sipping directly from the fountain of youth. His muscles bulged like something out of comic book while he enjoyed a three-fight win streak that was as vicious as anything he'd done in the past decade. He ripped through Luke Rockhold, Michael Bisping and Henderson before the treatment was outlawed and he had to give up the synthetic goodies.
When Belfort returned in July to face middleweight champion Chris Weidman, his body looked like a popped balloon that someone attempted to re-inflate. Belfort was still in incredible shape, but his pulsating muscles were gone. His traps no longer connected to his ears, and the power that once sent a trio of top middleweights crashing to the floor couldn't survive Weidman's onslaught as he put Belfort away in the first round.
So as Belfort moves forward in his career in an age when the UFC is funding around-the-clock drug testing with penalties that reach into multiple years on the sidelines, it seems like the 38-year-old Brazilian fighter finally is fighting clean (or so we hope) and still knocking people out cold.
Of course there are always going to be questions surrounding Belfort, especially in a sport like MMA, in which PED use doesn't lead to bigger and better home runs, it leads to brain damage and bodily harm.
But Belfort would be wise to follow Rodriguez's lead in the wake of his return to baseball this year, as he went out and put up good numbers before landing a second job as a postseason anaylst following the Yankees' elimination from the playoffs.
Rodriguez impressed the sports media so much that it had some people rooting for him to win “Comeback Player of the Year”.
Now, unlike Rodriguez, chances are Belfort won't be calling fights any time soon. But he certainly has a chance to impact fans around the world if he were to act as an ambassador and maybe come clean about some of the poor choices he's made to prevent the next generation of fighters from doing the same. Of course the first step in that plan is Belfort admitting he did something wrong and he's never really done that.
If there's one thing separating Rodriguez from Belfort, it's that the Brazilian never really has faced any consequences for being labeled dirty. Sure, it took baseball the better part of 10 years to finally make Rodriguez pay for his cheating, and Belfort is closing in on a decade since he got first got busted for PEDs and to date he's never really faced any discipline.
Belfort could do well to answer the charges and set the record straight on his past transgressions. After that, Belfort could go out and continue to knock people's heads off for the next few years before riding into the sunset.
It may sound strange to tell anyone to follow the “Alex Rodriguez plan,” but Belfort is already a kindred spirit — why not go all the way?
