Sherdog’s Top 10: Phenoms

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7. Mauricio Rua

In the early 2000s, Chute Boxe was the most feared team in the world, the home to killers like Jose Landi-Jons, Wanderlei Silva and Murilo Rua, along with undeniable though mercurial talents such as Anderson Silva. Mauricio Rua, the brother of the already accomplished “Ninja,” was quickly pegged as the next great fighter to come out of Curitiba, Brazil.

Rua was only 20 when he took his first professional fight, but his combination of incredible athleticism, killer instinct and vicious skills, both on the feet and on the mat, rapidly made him known as one of the very best prospects on the planet. He knocked out Evangelista Santos in only his third professional fight and took on the vastly more experienced Renato Sobral in his fifth; while the older man submitted him, Rua’s upside was obvious. Pride Fighting Championships signed him shortly thereafter, and he began a reign of terror that lasted for more than two years.

The run that “Shogun” put together in 2005, at age 23, was one of the most impressive in the sport’s history and has only been definitively surpassed by Jon Jones’ 2011 campaign. In the space of a year, with less than four years of experience as a professional, Rua absolutely destroyed divisional mainstays Quinton Jackson, Alistair Overeem and Ricardo Arona, and he put on a “Fight of the year” candidate with Antonio Rogerio Nogueira. The sheer dominance of that campaign, which won him the Pride middleweight grand prix, marked him as one of MMA’s true phenoms; and by the end of that year, many were marking him as a future contender for true greatness.

While he was the first man to defeat Lyoto Machida and held the UFC light heavyweight strap, repeated major injuries have left Rua a shell of his former self. Nevertheless, his greatness in his youth has been surpassed by only a few in the sport’s history, and for that, “Shogun” remains a legendary figure.

Number 6 » From the very beginning of his run in the UFC, it was clear he was not only a big-time prospect but also a representative of a fundamental shift in the landscape of the sport. He was young, incredibly athletic and well-rounded in a way that nobody else really was at the time. Even more important, he was the first fighter who offered a real shot at crossover appeal outside the narrow confines of MMA.