The Fall of The Axe Murderer: The Sad State of Violence God Wanderlei Silva

Oct 09, 2024

They called him the Axe Murderer, a seemingly insane, over-the-top nickname— right up until the moment you first saw him. Wanderlei Silva was indeed a monster, shaven tattooed head gleaming, veins ropey and bulging, a twisted look in his eyes as he casually rotated his wrists before a fight.

Then the bell rang and the massacre began.

There has never been another mixed martial arts fighter who struck fear into the hearts of both opponents and fans quite the way Silva did. It’s not just that he was a great fighter (he was). It’s not that he was the consummate winner (he was that too). It’s that the level of violence he appeared capable of unleashing seemed limitless, the capacity for mercy correspondingly small. This was a man who wouldn’t just knock you down and kick your teeth in—he’d smile gleefully while he did it, then point to the sky and thank Jesus when he was done.

Terrifying doesn’t begin to do Wanderlei Silva justice. At the height of the PRIDE phenomenon in Japan, often playing in front of tens of thousands of fans and millions more on television, Silva once went 17 fights and more than four years without tasting defeat. Olympic gold medalists, catch wrestling geniuses, and violent street fighters all fell before his mighty, torrential, unstoppable appendages of doom, fists, knees and feet combining to create an tsunami of violence that was impossible to defend.

Along the way he became a mainstream star, appearing in commercials and taking the place of the Gracie family as the unconquerable foreign avatar, the measuring stick for the Japanese fighters who lined up to best him. His record in PRIDE was 24-4-2, a standard of success that has rarely been equalled in the years since.

When you think about Wanderlei Silva, you think about all the damage he unleashed on others. But, along the way, through 51 professional fights and countless gym wars as part of the fearsomely competitive Chute Boxe team, Silva was accumulating miles of his own.

Too often we think of fighters in their most glorious moments, sitting atop the UFC’s Octagon or perched in the corner of a PRIDE ring, celebrating a flawless victory. But, once the bright lights are no longer shining, there’s a price to be paid for such glory.

No one knows that better than Wanderlei Silva, who by his own testimony suffered many significant injuries, including multiple concussions during his 22 year fighting career.

“I have suffered traumatic brain injury and am noticing symptoms common with TBI and CTE including depression, mood swing, and irritability,” he writes in support of a settlement in a class action lawsuit against the UFC. “To date, no treatment for CTE has been found. I suffer from sleep apnea and have difficulty sleeping and breathing.”

His litany of injuries has resulted in nine surgeries and a life of toil and pain. He needs this settlement, not just to restore justice after years of staggeringly low fighter pay days—he needs it support his family, to provide the kind of financial stability that simply doesn’t exist for a retired mixed martial arts fighter.

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While top boxers make multiple millions every time they strap on a pair of gloves, even UFC fighters whose names every fight fan would recognize often operate at near poverty levels.

Eleven years ago I interviewed the top UFC brass about their fighter contracts, legendarily one-sided and brutal. Then UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta, a smooth operator if ever there was one, told me that they were fair with fighters while also struggling to build a new sport in the face of continued mainstream opposition:

"People want to compare us to other sports, and in some sense that's fair to do," Fertitta said. He sat down with two key members of his team, president Dana White and general counsel Lawrence Epstein, to discuss the inner workings of the UFC's fighter contract with Bleacher Report.

"There are a number of things that are unique to our business," Fertitta continued. "First and foremost, we absorb 100 percent of all production and marketing costs associated with the event. The NFL gets a license fee from Fox. Even boxing gets a licensing fee from HBO. Those media entities then roll in and operate the entire production. They do all of the marketing. So those expenses are not borne upon the actual league or entity. In our case, we televise the entire card. There's over a thousand people who get paychecks when we do these events. It's a massive, massive undertaking.

"In addition to that, we're building a sport. We've had to open up offices in various countries around the world, work to get laws passed in states all over the U.S. and Canada. When you actually take into account those costs that we bear, and other leagues don't, we actually compare very favorably on an apples-for-apples basis."

I was skeptical of Fertitta’s claims and my insistence on covering fighter pay ended with a permanent ban from the promotion. It turns out, of course, I was entirely correct to believe the UFC wasn’t telling us the whole truth. As MMA Fighting’s Steven Marrocco reported, while UFC claimed to be paying fighters a fair share of the revenue, comparable to other professional athletes, information revealed in the lawsuit demonstrated that simply wasn’t true. Even a study commissioned internally by UFC itself showed its fighters received a relatively low share of revenue:

UFC paid 18.6 percent of its total revenue to fighters, four times less than Major League Soccer, which at 76 percent topped the list of revenue share paid to athletes.
The closest comparison to UFC fighters, according to a one-sheet document believed to be the Mercer study, was men’s tennis, which paid 23.5 percent of its revenue to athletes.
Boxing, the only example drawn from combat sports, paid 62.5 percent of revenue, a reflection of a decentralized business model centered more on stars such as Floyd Mayweather.

Even a superstar like Silva, an enduring legend whose name has stood the test of time in a sport that generally discards fighters like used tissues, didn’t earn enough in the ring to pay the piper for the toll it took on his body.

“In my situation,” he pleads with Judge Richard Boulware, “a bird in the hand truly does beat two (or three, or even nine) in the bush.”

I’m not sure what’s left to be said about UFC fighter pay. If anything, it’s important to remember that, while Dana White is dropping seven figures in a Las Vegas casino or paying off a pseudo-journalist for favorable coverage and Lorenzo Fertitta is sailing off into the sunset on a $160 million mega yacht funded by UFC revenues, fighters bear the burden of the bouts they wage for our entertainment. Silva should be a cautionary tale for everyone involved in the sport. He is a best case scenario, as big as it got in his time. But CTE doesn’t care about that. Brain injury doesn’t discriminate.

UFC owners don’t risk anything more than a fluctuating stock price and margin calls. Fighters are potentially facing a lifetime of suffering for a few years of fleeting glory. Get paid while you can, as much as you can. It’s not just part of the game—it’s the whole purpose of the endeavor.

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.