The odds are long on Frank Mir recapturing the UFC Heavyweight Championship on Saturday night at UFC 146, when he faces UFC Heavyweight Champion Junior dos Santos in the main event of an all-heavyweight main card at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas.
Among the 10 sets of online betting odds posted at bestfightodds.com, bets on Mir to win the title range from +300 (Sportsbook) to +444 (SportBet).
But when you consider where Frank Mir has come from to be in the main event on Saturday night, it quickly becomes apparent that long odds are nothing new to the 33-year-old UFC veteran. From injuries to indiscretions that could have sidelined his career in the Octagon, it's impressive that Mir is in the position that he's in going into Saturday night.
It seems a little odd to consider Mir as having come back from his motorcycle accident in 2004, since he's fought more than half of his career post-injury, but the fact of the matter is that Mir's femur was broken in two places, and the man has recovered to continue his career as an elite-level fighter in the UFC's heavyweight division, defeating the likes of Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira (twice), Brock Lesnar (more on him in a second), and Mirko Cro Cop (more on him, too). To borrow from the staged-but-not-unrelated world of professional wrestling, Mir's motorcycle accident is not unlike Ric Flair's 1975 plane crash: the fact that we've been able to stop thinking about it while watching him in action is pretty remarkable in and of itself.
Then, of course, there are the times that Mir has gotten in his own way in recent years.
Take, for example, his 2010 comments about Lesnar, where he stated a wish that the WWE star turned UFC Champion be "the first person that dies due to Octagon-related injuries." Those comments earned him a sharp rebuke from UFC President Dana White, and marked the end of his days commentating for World Extreme Cagefighting (although those days would have come to an end anyway when the promotion was folded into the UFC at the end of the year).
A few months later, Mir and White would be at odds again after Mir's main-event win over Cro Cop at UFC 119. Due to what was generally considered to be a lackluster performance, Mir did not receive a Knockout of the Night bonus after knocking out Cro Cop with a knee, despite the fact that it was the only knockout on the card. That set off some very outspoken and public comments on Twitter from Mir's son, Marcus, and White's comments about Mir in the wake of the fight suggested a strain in the relationship between boss and fighter.
Since then, however, Mir has gradually built his way back to true contender's status, first with a unanimous decision over Roy Nelson a year ago at UFC 130, and then with the first ever submission victory over Nogueira at UFC 140. In the wake of that performance - in which Mir broke Nogueira's arm with a kimura - the same UFC president who denied Mir a bonus for Knockout of the Night declared at the post-fight press conference that Mir had pulled off the "submission of the century."
That put Mir in position for his originally scheduled UFC 146 bout with former champ Cain Velasquez, ostensibly a No. 1 contender's bout for the UFC Heavyweight Championship following the main event between dos Santos and Alistair Overeem. When Overeem was sidelined by a drug suspension, Mir made the move to the main event, and gained an opportunity to get the title back.
The champion has made some derogatory comments about Mir in the buildup to the fight, most notably that Mir "isn't a man" because he doesn't handle adversity well in fights. However, rather than become bitter in his dealings with dos Santos, Mir played it cool and contemplative at Thursday's press conference, declining to criticize the champion.
"I think that his camp and people around him are trying to get him to sell the fight," Mir said.
As for whether or not he's a man, Mir added, "I'm thinking that when we do the hernia thing, we'll prove that I'm a man."
Man though he may be, conventional wisdom is that Mir won't be the champ after Saturday's fight, that dos Santos will take advantage of his own outstanding boxing and Mir's admittedly less-than-granite chin.
On the other hand, conventional wisdom could have had Mir out of the UFC a long time ago.
