UFC Fight Night: Dern vs. Hill

 
Victoria Leonardo       vs.   Natália Silva  


You know, I was going to exploit what I had assumed to be the rampant disingenuity of the above quote, but then it occurred to me that as statements go it's as bona fide as they come. When you're as bad as Victoria, everyone is tough.Bums don't exist, and if one does, you are it.

The Ancient Celts had a saying for this, which roughly translates to 'The badger dog cannot smell its own hole'. Similarly, I used to have an accountant afflicted by clinical IBS, who didn't like crowds, complaining that 'They're made up of people, and people smell of ****'. Ah well, I thought, remembering the old adage: Never wake a sleepwalker.

But if you ever do (or don't) chances are that person will swing at you with the same level of skill and velocity as Victoria Leonardo, especially if that person happens to be your grandmother. 

Frankly Silva is as close to a dead-cert as you're ever going to get in WMMA here. Having watched three of Leonardo's fights, I can say confidently and without hyperbole nor exaggeration that she is less than mediocre in every facet of MMA that bears consideration. Common sense would dictate that a woman as large as she for the division would have average hand speed offset by significant power--yet in defiance of this, and physics, neither is true, the lack of both being perhaps a unique symbiosis of fail. She is as however as cumbersome as her frame alleges; flat--footedly lumbering about the octagon as though it is inch-deep in treacle and she is fitted with diving flippers. Her defence is porous enough to shame a colander, and her range of strikes does not exceed in variety those thrown by instructors wearing wrist weights in a televised aerobics segment targeted at senior citizens. When hit with a strike she shakes her head and charges back into range to generally always be met with another having learned nothing, reacting with something that far exceeds human bewilderment and extends into the magically beheld, like an ape shown a game of three cup Monty by a street magician or bull trying to break through an electrified fence.

Indeed, one would have to look far and wide to find her a fair match--would need to scour the grimiest skid-rows and deadlurks of the most progressive American cities. Kensington Philadelphia perhaps, where trash-fattened rats grown unholy-large large that they might fairly be mistaken for corgis at dusk and a little distance, stuffed with weeds clawed fresh daily from fissures in the sidewalks, spit-roast on rebar blackened by the hellish light of garbage-fire and sell out on the penny by mid-morning to shuffling lines of bedraggled unwashed a hundred yards long, who are so grateful to have them that one might be convinced, for a moment, that they are in fact God's last and finest creation.

One woman that I encountered of a night in Mass and Cass, Boston, does come to mind. Passing a rat stand of the common nature described above--which to find required neither direction nor guide owing to the odour of the attending crowd, perceptible as it was a fair three adjacent neighbouring districts distanced from it and verily enough to make a man of more sensitive nostril weep, I encountered a youth--- a dirty-cheeked whippet of a thing I reckoned between the ages of nine and twelve. Numerical age is a thing of meagre implication in such places, of course, a faulty yardstick. He was a seasoned drunkard, sported an eye patch, and already as competently full of oaths and vulgar wisdom as any veteran barfly from whose sebum-rank loins he had doubtless sprung, and who would in turn (he had likely done so already) spring more himself--a fresh generation of surnameless babes engendered into the sprawling jungle of effluence to crawl about the hillocks of sacked garbage like fledgling flies, and breed on like them, in perpetuam.

I plucked the shard of asbestos upon which he chewed absent-mindedly upon approach: 'See now,' Said I, That is no toothpick!' And where happens to be your mother, young master'? He turned, eyes scouring, until he found her, and pointed.I looked. There in the dim illumination of the slum laburnum which is always curiously always the same in such locations, being not unlike mustard powder drifting softly through the beam of a weak flashlight, and oddly devoid of moth life, which I suppose is always eaten, she leaned against the facade of a dispensary of some kind, the brickwork darkened with man-grease and smog, as though misery itself could not bear to countenance and consider itself in human flesh and had fled instead to the dumb matter of masonry where it was not obligated to feel itself be. 

She was, for lack of a better description, like a freshly unwrapped mummy--the belly in particular creased and imploded, like a deflated Pilates ball and brashly displayed by the shortest and most heavily stained glitter-gel crop top I had ever seen; a consequence of malnutrition, countless unwanted pregnancies and entrenched addiction, the instrumentation of which still hung limply and disregarded from her left arm. This held what I believe was an empty bottle of everclear, and with it played a losing game of hideous whack-a-mole in unenthusiastic defence of a boil on her ankle which was being assaulted by a balding, half-tailed mouse. She rose, finally, to walk up and down the strip in a jerky, demented panoply of quasi-obliviated seduction, one of Satan's electrified marionettes, scarcely operating on a dying battery. She would scratch herself occasionally in unprintable locales with one hand, while the other scrabbled to free what to this day I suspect was a human turd--no less than nine inches long--from the tangle of her hair--a grim token of some client's unthinkable request. 

I turned away in disgust, reached into my pocket and retrieved a twenty dollar bill, which I veritably slammed into the boy's hand. 'That', said I, 'is not for rat'. He snatched it away and began to make off. I caught his arm and asked 'I didn't catch your name. 'Boyfriend' he said, pointing to a strikingly boggle-eyed obese man, probably mid 40-ish, who wore a faded tracksuit and lurched by a nearby dumpster, watching intently as he chewed maniacally on three fingers. 'Boyfriend', he repeated, 'Say my name Baremaras'.

Silva KO/TKO R1.

* Edited at 05.17.2023, 4:24 PM ET *