Donald Cerrone announcing his retirement last Saturday night at UFC 276 got me thinking about Rafael Dos Anjos. Dos Anjos is the man that turned “Cowboy” aside in his one and only UFC title fight and posted tandem wins over the now-departed perennial contender on either side of an eight-fight winning streak that stands as the best stretch of Cerrone’s career.

 

The second of those two pairings — the championship fight — took place on December 19, 2015, and turned out to be Dos Anjos’ only successful defense of the lightweight title. He would lose the belt to Eddie Alvarez seven months later, drop a decision to Tony Ferguson in Mexico City in November 2016, and depart the division, opting to move to welterweight.

 

He initially found success, collecting three straight wins to land opposite Colby Covington in an interim title bout. That fight would serve as the start of a stretch where the Brazilian lost four of five, with his lone victory coming off a fellow former lightweight, Kevin Lee. 

 

Dos Anjos lost to tremendous competition during that stretch — Covington, current champ Kamaru Usman, No. 1 contender Leon Edwards, and Top 15 fixture Michael Chiesa — going the distance with all of them. It was clear that the veteran was a little too undersized and outmuscled to run with the best in the 170-pound ranks, so back down he went.

 

A highly anticipated clash with Islam Makhachev turned into a short-notice date with Paul Felder, followed by more than a year on the sidelines spent dealing with various injuries before another opponent withdraw resulted in an impromptu five-round fight with fellow Brazilian Renato Moicano at UFC 272 earlier this year, which Dos Anjos won in dominant fashion.

 

Cerrone retiring last weekend after losing to Jim Miller got me thinking about Dos Anjos because this weekend, seven days after Cerrone acknowledged he’d lost his love for the sport after walking out of the cage without a victory for the seventh straight time, the 37-year-old former lightweight champion squares off with emerging threat Rafael Fiziev in the main event of Saturday’s return to the UFC APEX. He does so riding a tidy two-fight run of success, eager to extend his winning streak to three while turning back the promising Fiziev and proving that he’s still very much in the thick of the chase in the division he once ruled.

 

MMA is a sport where we fixate on shiny new things and the biggest names, relegating everyone else to “… and a bunch of other people” status for the most part.

 

Newcomers catch the eyes of observers and media members, as do fresh faces making a push up the divisional ladder, while the most familiar names and those holding championship gold are always going to carry a certain amount of cache.

 

But folks that have been to the top of the mountain, been knocked from their perch and are still hanging around, refusing to just tumble down the hill and into obscurity? They rarely get the attention their pedigree and previous performances command, and Saturday’s headlining clash between Dos Anjos and Fiziev feels like a perfect encapsulation of that unfortunate reality.

 

Fiziev enters on a five-fight winning streak; a 29-year-old talent that arrived with a ton of buzz and has started living up to his advanced billing after stumbling out of the gate. He’s earned some quality victories during his current run of success, and enters his first main event assignment this weekend positioned at No. 10 in the rankings.

 

He’s the “B-Side” on the playbill, but the fighter most will be tuning in to see because there are still unknowns with the charismatic striker and people want to see how he measures up against a tenured talent and former titleholder like Dos Anjos.

 

The reason everyone wants to see how he measures up against someone like Dos Anjos is because of the track record the former lightweight champion has inside the Octagon, with wins over fighters like Cerrone, Robbie Lawler, Anthony Pettis, Nathan Diaz, and Benson Henderson. He also shared the cage with standouts like Khabib Nurmagomedov and the others already mentioned in this piece.

 

He’s fought one of the strongest strength of schedules in the UFC, and while many of his contemporaries have either retired, departed the UFC or dropped off in terms of their performance, Dos Anjos is marching into another main event assignment this weekend, against an up-and-coming force eight years his junior, showing now real signs of slowing down.

 

Professional wrestling would call Dos Anjos as “transitional champion” — someone that held the belt for a brief period of time before it was strapped onto a bigger star, like the way the Iron Sheik took the belt from Bob Backlund before dropping it to Hulk Hogan soon after.

 

But this isn’t wrestling and short reigns like the one the Brazilian enjoyed should carry more weight and value and residual heft than they do.

 

His title win over Anthony Pettis was a brilliant performance that knocked “Showtime” out of the spotlight and is arguably a defeat that the Milwaukee native never quite recovered from. He was slated to face Conor McGregor after “The Notorious” one claimed the featherweight title and set his sights on achieving “Champ-Champ” status, only to break his foot and give way to McGregor’s two-fight series with Diaz, losing the belt to Alvarez once he recovered.

 

That unrealized fight with McGregor will forever be a sliding doors moment because Dos Anjos was the best lightweight in the world at the time and would have been an interesting opponent for the Irishman, who defeat Alvarez to claim the lightweight strap at UFC 205 in New York City four months after he’d beaten Dos Anjos.

 

The Brazilian is one of those fighters that people will speak highly of when he makes the same decision Cerrone made last weekend, but they should be speaking highly about him right now.

 

Over the course of a nearly 14-year career competing inside the Octagon, the last dozen of which have been as a ranked fighter and includes a championship reign, a title fight in a second division, Dos Anjos has fought one of the toughest slates in the sport and he still stands as one of the top lightweights in the world.

 

If he beat Fiziev on Saturday, the man commonly referred to simply as “RDA” will once again command serious attention in the 115-pound weight class and the plaudits will follow. But instead of being reactive, we need to start being more proactive, and give these fighters their flowers before they decide to call it a career.

 

Dos Anjos has been a fixture in the upper reaches of two divisions for the better part of a decade, and remains one to this day.

 

Explaining how difficult a feat that is to accomplish would take another thousand words, but a quick glance at who he’s fought and what he’s achieved inside the UFC cage should make it clear that the Brazilian veteran is someone that should be celebrated for what he’s done and praised for still being in the thick of the lightweight chase heading into this weekend.