Mirko Cro Cop May Have Just Retired

Mirko Cro Cop might be messing with our hearts again.

Just when it seemed the MMA legend was settling in and making a good go of things during his third stint with the UFC, just when it seemed like his recent brush with retirement had passed, just when he'd gotten himself back on the winner's side of the tally, the Croatian kickboxer posted a heartbreaker of a message today on his Web site announcing that his fighting days are behind him.

And like that, he's gone. Apparently. Again. Never to return. Probably.

One can never be sure with Mirko Filipović. After arriving in the UFC at the end of 2006 with the kind of fanfare that can only come from being the reigning Pride Heavyweight Grand Prix champion at a time when Pride and the UFC were still neck-and-neck in the race for fans' hearts, the Croatian was gone barely a year later after two ugly losses, on his way back to Japan's greener pastures. Just a year after that, though, he was back in the UFC, where he seemed to sink over the course of his next seven fights into a kind of heightened passivity, an almost poetic slackening of the spirit and slowing of the body—a shocking turn of events for fans who remembered the glory days of Cro Cop, when he was the embodiment of what the human mind and body were capable of when aligned in the cause of inspiring terror. Then came "retirement," which really just meant a return to kickboxing for a couple of years, and before you knew it, 40-year-old Mirko Cro Cop was back in the UFC again. And winning! So, one can never be sure with Mirko Filipović.

Still, there is something final and resigned in the tone of today's announcement. Even in a rough translation the letter is full of the kind of poetry, fragility, and self-awareness professional fighters usually only stumble upon at the end of their careers. Unless you're Muhammad Ali, too much poetry too early in a fighting life can get you killed.

Under the heading "My Final Decision After Long and Great Career," Cro Cop summons a sense of grief and resignation de profundis that Oscar Wilde himself would envy: the cry of a man whose body is in rebellion against his soul. Most of the note is a just a list of physical maladies and recurring anatomical tragedies: the torment of a man who spent his entire adult life turning his body into a weapon that has now turned itself on him.

"I tried to save a shoulder injury and repair in all possible ways: daily therapy, injections of blood plasma and various cocktails of drugs but didn't work out," Cro Cop writes. "The only cure would be a break of two to three weeks, and that I could not afford in the midst of final preparations. By daily trainings the injury gets worse. Part of the muscle is snapped, the shoulder is filled with a lot of fluids, and the great danger is that tendon ruptures and then go to operation again."

And more: "Throughout the summer I spent traveling to Munchen on therapy to one of the famous doctor for chronic inflammation of the tendons on the grips bones that drives me crazy, when I go to Vinkovci I have to stop twice during the travel due to pain in these tendons that hurt me terribly in sitting position, right knee which was operated four times, too. And now even the shoulder, back not to mention. Whenever I go to a magnet no matter what, and what I record, report begins with 'degenerative changes,' but that is the price that must be paid."

And more: "My body is battered by countless trainings, I collected nine operations, the body has become prone to injury, after each workout I put ice on my knee operated on because it's filled with fluid, therapies twice a week."

Cro Cop's spirit is willing, but after 20 years his body has collapsed under him. This is the final and inevitable indignity of the fighter's life: The body starts paying you back for all the pain you caused others with it. A cruel and terrible kind of revenge.

"I don't need that, especially at my age," Cro Cop writes, with a tragical-ironical shrug worthy of Philip Roth.

But still (and speaking of revenge), there is something perfect about the timing of Cro Cop's letter, something cinematic, especially for longtime MMA fans who remember Filipović's glorious arrival in the UFC and then, just three months later, the horrid, ironic ignominy of seeing him—the man who turned head kicks into agents of doom and works of art—knocked out by a head kick from Gabriel Gonzaga and splayed out awkwardly on the canvas like a puppet dropped by a child. In that moment all the mythology seemed to drain out of Cro Cop, all the sense of indomitable wonder. He became human. If this latest retirement of Cro Cop's is true, that would mean his last fight ever was his revenge victory over Gonzaga at UFC Fight Night 64 this past April. Which has a poetry and perfection and symmetry to it life outside the movies rarely provides. No, Cro Cop was never the same fighter after getting knocked out by Gonzaga in 2007 (it was as if by stealing the Croatian's signature move, he was stealing some part of his soul), but now, eight years later, he'll be able to walk away knowing he not only redeemed that crushing loss but did so as a fuller, and more human, human being: one beaten and battered and decidedly un-mythic and carrying with him absolutely no aura of indomitability, like the rest of us. Cro Cop's career was a great long lesson in the destructibility of the human body and the absurdity of the human legend. He was the myth who turned into a man. He was the people's champion. Long may his retirement reign.