He does with me. I think a lot of the narratives trying to discount Chris's wins retroactively are #1 bullsheeit.
Like, had age prevented Chris from facing the absolute peak version of Anderson? Yeah, probably.
How far was Anderson beyond his peak? We don't know, we can only speculate.
Would Chris have still beaten Anderson in his absolute prime? Again, we can only speculate.
But none of this dismisses the facts of what actually happened: Chris did what no one else up to that point had managed to do inside the UFC by not only beating Silva, but finishing him. No one looked at Silva as an old victim ripe for the harvest at the time. He was still winning fights and in dominant fashion against solid competition until Weidman came along. So what actually happened in each fight?
In the first bout, Chris won Round 1 on every scorecard. Chris outstruck and outgrappled Anderson cleanly. In Round 2, it was basically tit-for-tat with Anderson beginning to go after Chris's legs to the exclusion of all else and trying to clown on him... until he got cracked. Now people at the time and today talk about the fight as if Anderson was piecing Chris up and began feeling himself too much, began playing with his food, and paid the price for his complacency. That isn't what happened... like, at all. Anderson didn't have the momentum or control of the fight. He was losing on the cards and was trying to make something happen by trying other shit out: the low kicks and taunting, likely trying to draw bad reactions out of Weidman. However, where this had worked for him before, against Weidman it didn't. This is not an indictment on Chris. He was winning the fight, forced the champ to make a bad decision, and capitalized on that bad decision. Clean win.
The narrative surrounding the rematch is even more infuriating. People say "it was a freak injury!" as if Anderson slipped on a banana peel en route to the Octagon. No, Chris talked very specifically about how Silva's low kicks were one of the few things in the first fight that had given him pause, thus he and his team wanted to be better prepared to counter that weapon for the second bout. A large portion of Weidman's training camp was accordingly spent on checking leg kicks. Anderson threw a low kick, Chris checked it... and we all know what happened next. Now this is where people screech "BUT CHECKS DON'T NORMALLY DO THAT!" and I can't help but laugh. Checking kicks is literally done with the intent of mitigating damage to your legs while simultaneously damaging the kicking leg of your opponent, either injuring them or at the very least deterring them from throwing that weapon willy-nilly in the future. Insisting that checks are only allowed to do X amount of damage until they're considered a fluke is literally some of the worst cope imaginable.
Imagine if someone argued that because the jab is primarily a punch used to set up other weapons/find one's range and not a power punch, any finishing sequence initiated by a guy getting rocked by a jab is inherently a fluke and thus "doesn't count". They would be laughed off of Sherdog. Yet when it comes to someone checking a kick with intent to damage the opponent's leg and achieving the one goal it is meant to do, we make an exception?! GTFO.
