Jose Aldo vs. Pedro Munhoz: The Gravedigger's Tragedy
Photo by Cooper Neill/Zuffa LLC
Seventeen years into a brutal career, Jose Aldo still runs every town he comes across.
The featherweight career of Jose Aldo was enough to make him a legend. At the start of 2019, Aldo claimed it would be his final year in the sport, and a knockout over the slick contender Renato Moicano in the fifteenth year of his career cemented him for some as the best to ever do it. Aldo had become a world champion in 2009 and turned back every challenge until 2014 at one of the strongest weights in the sport. When his reign finally ended, he still remained one of the elites despite his physical limitations growing more defined. The loss to Alexander Volkanovski, around that point and in the manner in which it happened, was an inevitability; the shocking thing wasn’t that Aldo’s unparalleled command of the pace started to degrade, but that it only degraded so late in his career. While being outgamed by the Australian (soon to be revealed as one of the best ring-generals around in his own right) wasn’t humiliating in the slightest, it did seem to show that time came for everyone.
The fact that the loss to Volkanovski pushed Aldo to a different weight class was, in itself, also not a surprise — older fighters do tend to hop around weights a bit more as progression to a belt becomes less of a concern, and Aldo’s troubles making 145 even in his prime were well-documented — but cutting more to compete at 135 was completely absurd. Spirited losses to Marlon Moraes and Petr Yan helped his case for being a great, but didn’t make the decision to drain himself further seem worthwhile — and while the win over top-15er Marlon Vera was impressive in many ways, Aldo still looked like a fighter who would struggle massively to even compete against the level of fighter he’d once outclassed.
However, Pedro Munhoz was a different test — one that could be compared to some of Aldo’s significant wins. In fact, for a fighter who increasingly struggled with a high pace or a consistent workrate, “The Young Punisher” seemed like a nightmare; a completely indestructible and indefatigable pressurer, Munhoz was the sort who could be held off with great difficulty but never really stopped. It took a horrifying amount of work from Aljamain Sterling to keep Munhoz at bay for 15 minutes, and Munhoz likely deserved a 25-minute decision over Frankie Edgar — a man with one of the best motors in MMA as a whole. Simultaneously attritive and opportunistic, Munhoz was a handful for anyone, and he was still improving; right before Aldo, Munhoz avenged a loss to the incredibly talented Jimmie Rivera, and he quietly had first-round finishes over both surging elite #4 Font and former champion #6 Garbrandt. The usual messiness with the rankings kept him officially at #9, but to anyone paying attention, the man was a threat at a much higher level than that.
While Aldo was a slight favorite on the books, Munhoz posed issues to specific attributes of Aldo that had decayed, and there was plenty of reason for pessimism— and yet Aldo found a way. Even “finding a way” somewhat underplays the way Aldo dealt with Pedro Munhoz — it wasn’t a narrow win, but a convincing and comprehensive 30-27 over a de facto top-5 at the best division in the sport, several years and a weight class away from his best form. Jose Aldo vs. Pedro Munhoz didn’t at all feature a prime Aldo, but like the rest of his late-career, the King of Rio only seemed more brilliant for it.
I — The Young Punished
The most enduring spot of criticism for Jose Aldo in his prime was also his greatest source of strength — he always kept a handle on the pace of the fight like no one else. He wasn’t passive, but he also didn’t need to act as frantically as his contemporaries (or even champions after him); Aldo’s skillset as a defensive-fighter and as a ring-general was absolutely unparalleled, and it so thoroughly pruned down his opponent’s avenues that he didn’t need to do too many things to end up with a commanding round-win. For instance, while he largely controlled Frankie Edgar with a couple counters a round, it was far more than what Edgar did, which in any given frame was often “nothing meaningful” — and even against very aggressive fighters who didn’t always bother caring about whether they’d be able to get away clean, such as Chan Sung Jung, just closing the distance and finding Aldo became an impossible task. What further placed Pedro Munhoz into a spot of disadvantage, at least early, was that his primary scoring tool at range was something that Jose Aldo simply never allowed.
The calf kick has gained some notoriety as a bit of a cheat code in striking; especially after fights like Dustin Poirier vs. Conor McGregor 2 (where it immediately had a very clear effect on a high-profile fighter), kicking below the knee is often seen as a low-risk and high-damage attack that can’t really be dealt with. In truth, this is really more of a quirk in mixed martial arts specifically — even very good fighters often have very suspect responses to kicks, and the visual of dramatically knocking someone’s leg out of stance with a lower-leg kick is probably more appealing to the judges than kicking any other target but the head (which tends to be the focus of any defense whatsoever). Pedro Munhoz’s kicking skillset is fairly versatile with regard to target, but he’s downright destroyed several opponents with his leg kick specifically — in his previous fight, he’d battered the lower half of Jimmie Rivera’s lead leg to the point that many of Munhoz’s relative downsides in the matchup (speed, footwork and defense on the inside against a strong pocket-boxer) just ceased to be relevant. As he found out, though, Jose Aldo is as close to unkickable as anyone in MMA.
Aldo showed a similar way of dealing with the low-leg kick from Renato Moicano, himself a very strong kicker — simply drawing his leg back at the knee, the kick could often completely whiff. Of course, at the points where it wasn’t quite that low, Aldo had several other responses — turning his knee into the kick made it fairly ineffective and more of a pain for Munhoz to continue trying, whether he went to the outside (as usual) or the inside. Munhoz using the faked kick to draw the response in the second was a nice touch, though.
Of course, simply defending isn’t always enough to limit an attack — when Munhoz started to look for the leg kick despite Aldo’s active and effective defences, Aldo punished him hard for several attempts. Aldo’s heavy combinations to the body became a staple of his late-career style, and here they made sure that Munhoz would be wary to kick for more reasons than just futility.
Munhoz’s other tool to score from range was the jab — while it isn’t the focus of his game, Munhoz has quietly become quite clever at jabbing to both push a pace and draw out counters. The best showing was his official (if questionable) loss to Frankie Edgar — Edgar played a backfoot game, drawing Munhoz into his quick combinations, and Munhoz largely seemed to solve it by using the jab to draw flurries out and punish them as he recovered. While Aldo’s opponents have always struggled mightily to kick him, there is a model for a strong jabber to give Aldo a good deal of trouble; Max Holloway’s wins over Aldo largely hinged on his ability to force out Aldo’s defensive reactions and big counter-combinations with light volume, forcing Aldo to expend energy he didn’t have. However, there’s also a reason Max Holloway’s chin became the stuff of legend after the Aldo fights; Aldo immediately got to work making sure Munhoz wouldn’t get the jab for free either, severely limiting it as both a standalone strike and a building tool.
Munhoz’s attempts to close distance behind his jab were largely unsuccessful, for several reasons. The first is just Aldo’s instincts as a backfoot fighter; constant retreating on angles meant that Munhoz couldn’t push him to the fence nor follow up without needing to turn mid-blitz, even when the first snappy jab could sometimes surprise him. The second is Aldo’s offensive response; as the fight continued, Aldo countered Munhoz with backfoot jabs as he came forward, breaking his rhythm and disincentivizing the same sort of entry over and over.
Munhoz had an answer, and it was to jab and duck — drawing the counters from Aldo to end up underneath his swings. Aldo’s counters here were just as constant — preempting the duck by countering the jab with upward-arcing strikes like the knee and uppercut. Just as often, though, he was fine simply limiting Munhoz’s ability to end up where he wanted to be — lowering his level with Munhoz, checking him with the shoulder to physically push him away.
As such, even from the very first round, there were long periods of time that Aldo controlled Munhoz at range — with Aldo’s footwork, his jab, and his kick defense limiting Munhoz to massive swings from out of range that Aldo could see and respond to. As jumpy and stressed as Aldo could seem in fights like Holloway 1 and 2, a fight where he can mostly lean on his built-in responses just isn’t that much work for him.
With efficient and dangerous answers to Munhoz’s initial questions, Aldo forced Munhoz to rethink his original plan by the end of the first round; if he continued to try to kick and work off the jab to make Aldo tire, Aldo may fade, but likely not before he’d taken Munhoz’s head or his body out of commission. Even if Munhoz could take it (and historically, the indication is that he could), he was far too smart to keep doing the same few things that Aldo had rendered useless — getting zero return from any of them by the end of the first, and assuming a great amount of risk. To his credit, even stripped of his primary safe tools, Munhoz didn’t shut down the way someone like Jung or Lamas did to allow Aldo to control him in the open effortlessly — but in knowing the advantages he needed to push, he willingly placed himself in the path of Aldo’s greatest threats.
II — Pyrrhic Victories
Munhoz’s adaptations when faced with Aldo removing his best tools wholesale were, understandably, a bit limited; with his systematized offensive routes easily blocked off, Munhoz could only turn to one-off tricks in the hopes that he could have a moment. The aforementioned kick feint into a huge right hand was a good example — Aldo wasn’t the sort to get hit by a set-up like that more than once, and without the ability to layer more on top of it, there wasn’t much of a purpose in relying on it. Of course, the other side is Munhoz’s evident conditioning edge — he really only had to survive to expect the advantage by the tenth minute, so staying in front of Aldo and doing enough to keep him from resting (as Aldo’s hair-trigger and his high-commitment flurries are well known) could’ve been a fight-winning gambit on its own. Either way, Munhoz never figured out the ways in which Aldo was controlling him — but he had a few other moments that could reasonably be grouped.
Munhoz’s jab was mentioned before as a decent threat, but not really in the Holloway mold of being a consistent annoyance; Munhoz uses the jab to score independently or to draw something out specifically, but not as much to dull his opponent’s trigger over an entire fight. When Munhoz forced Aldo to think about the jab instead of simply responding to it, he did a better job through the second frame — feinting the jab to draw Aldo’s head-movement or playing it off the left hook. Making Aldo work with extraneous movement is a triumph of its own, and the way Munhoz convinced Aldo to move his head before turning the missed jab into a collar-tie was very Font-esque.
The bigger issue for Munhoz was that a pace-pushing game was an inherently dangerous one, and that especially against Jose Aldo. Even well before he started to show some physical decline, his tough cuts and explosive actions lent credence to the route of “keep him working and he’ll stop being able to hit you this hard”; however, weathering a storm that was nearly impossible to weather proved a tremendous difficulty in practice. When Munhoz tried to force Aldo into unsustainable activity by just keeping him on the backfoot, Aldo showed a glimpse of the comfort that marked his years atop the featherweight class. Aldo certainly worked, but no more than he wanted to — and while this is far more characteristic than the Holloway fights made it seem, Aldo’s methods weren’t the same as they used to be.
Aldo’s jab took on a role against Munhoz that wasn’t simply keeping him away — it served defensive and offensive purposes simultaneously and masterfully. Against high-guards, the general route is to vary the arc of one’s strikes, attacking the gaps it leaves behind — and as the jab started to sneak between Munhoz’s arms and Munhoz moved to actively parry them, the left hook went behind the arm to punish it. As Aldo started to really sit down on big combinations underneath the guard and Munhoz looked to extend the exchange past them, the jab also “closed the door” — getting Aldo back behind his shoulder and in a balanced stance, while also stinging Munhoz for rushing in.
Aldo’s sneaky body jab also deserves a mention. Compared to a normal body jab, Aldo’s against Munhoz was fairly bizarre — without the deeper level-change characteristic of the attack, it more resembled the rare triphammer jab, where Aldo’s stance was upright and the only indication of the target was the angle of the arm. Prioritizing speed and concealment over anything else, Aldo’s body jab further disorientated the high-guarder in front of him, and the general level-changing work could set up attacks like the huge stepping uppercut at the end of the first.
However, all of Aldo’s success early was virtually a given — the fact that Aldo won the first half of the fight was less an achievement and more of an expectation (although even that speaks to the regard in which Aldo should be held — that a dangerous bantamweight who took out two top-sixers in the first frame clearly had no hope of doing that to Aldo, even at this point in his career). The test Munhoz represented would most meaningfully be applied over five rounds and Aldo happily only had three to work around, but the last few minutes could’ve been a trial on their own. Against Marlon Vera, Aldo spent his shakiest minutes on his opponent’s back, but Munhoz’s sturdy defensive wrestling and ever-present guillotine threat made that an option that could go very wrong very quickly — even at best, it could be a waste of energy that Aldo didn’t have.
Despite Aldo being up two rounds, either man could’ve been in trouble in the third — Aldo had looked excellent for long enough that his drop-off only seemed like a matter of time, and yet Munhoz couldn’t necessarily afford to continue trading his durability for Aldo’s tiredness. To maintain control of the situation deep into the fight against an opponent who demanded it, Aldo showed improvements that old fighters should only be able to make in theory.
III — Down The Stretch
Jose Aldo being 34 (in fact, slightly younger than Pedro Munhoz) massively belies his age in a functional sense; in terms of the mileage he’s sustained and how long he’s competed professionally, he’s closer to someone like Alistair Overeem than most of the other contenders at 135. Aldo’s teammate Renan Barao — in the same training environment and with a few truly damaging fights behind him but not necessarily more than Aldo — started fighting professionally in 2005, the year subsequent to Aldo’s professional debut, and was completely finished as an elite fighter by 2016. Seventeen years is a point in the average fighting career where it no longer exists and likely hasn’t existed for about half a decade, so it would be putting it lightly to say that skillsets don’t tend to grow. In fact, even among the best fighters around, the tendency is for them to shrink around year ten — for a fighter to decide what weapons really matter to their aims and what can be cast aside, as even Aldo himself did with his legendary low-kicking arsenal a few years ago.
With that in mind, Aldo didn’t necessarily add new tools to his style with the Munhoz fight, but modified his approach to the tools he had — and if new tools are hard to make work for longtime fighters, new philosophical approaches are even harder. Aldo’s new alliance with the Brazilian Navy’s boxing program — one also associated with Olympic gold medalist boxer Robson Conceicao — is as good a guess to why as any; Aldo hadn’t lost the habits that he’s had all along, nor would it have been wise to, but his approach against Munhoz very markedly focused on staying power over stopping power. His jab is a good example — even in fights like Edgar 1, Aldo’s jab was more of a hurting shot with weight than an annoying interruption — but the way he opted to complicate Munhoz’s consistency through the later half of the fight was also a brilliant marriage of old and new.
Here’s classic Aldo — sometimes the route to keep your tank is to scare your opponent off as quickly as possible, and Aldo flurrying with massive hooks was likely intended to set the tone for the round and keep Munhoz from looking to march him down again.
Here, however, is something Aldo seems to have prioritized for this fight — understanding that not every shot is meant to land or land hard, and sometimes just throwing is enough. With Munhoz already very wary of Aldo’s power, Aldo could occupy him and keep him from pressuring comfortably by just chaining together throwaways. This also created opportunities for some choice hard shots — the throwaway 2-3 drawing Munhoz’s guard laterally so he could slam the straight down the middle, or the usual Dutchie at the very end of the fight. Aldo’s punching form and his commitment were prime sources of exhaustion for him, and he seems to have recognized that when he really needed to.
Of course, the usual sources of Aldo’s economy were still present and helpful— namely, that wicked pivot, especially as Munhoz grew more desperate. The pivot allows Aldo to maintain control of his ring position without any inefficient circling or even losing any ground — and Aldo brings this to an extreme of efficiency with superlative confidence, closing distance on his opponent to step in a tight circle around them and create space. The way he used the threat of the left hook to get Munhoz shelling, framing on his shoulder to feel his response as he pivoted and rolling the right hand, was just brilliant.
Near the very end of the fight, a few of the previous factors came together to create one extremely cool exchange, showing the offensive utility of the pivot as Aldo has done before. Like the rest of the fight, Munhoz’s pressure leads him into Aldo’s intercepting jab, this time doubled up, both the original and the little body triphammer. Aldo uses the time the jab bought to pivot away, creating a strong dominant angle —
Munhoz is still in his stance but not facing Aldo at all, as Aldo’s already pivoted out. At this point, Munhoz is looking to find an awkwardly long, straight-armed left hook while completely out-angled, in no position to win an exchange without turning to face. Aldo blasts him with the straight before he can.
As the fight ended, Aldo’s third round had somehow been stronger than his other two; among his usual economy of movement, his new confidence in lighter blows to do the work he needed, and Munhoz still eating quite a lot of very heavy blows, the fight was fully in his control. Naturally, Aldo didn’t look fresh — in fact, the later parts of the fight had a few moments that Joe Rogan certainly would’ve blown way out of proportion, had he been there — but Aldo’s limitations were also never going to simply disappear. Just as the back-control on Vera let him save energy and avoid dropping a card, Aldo’s approach to ringcraft and stifling offense forced Munhoz to be the one doing all the work — and as Munhoz got more desperate to find an entry, reverting to the completely fruitless spinning offense of the early fight, Aldo was able to stay sharp enough to keep him from having any argument to the fight.
Aldo doing the Eddie Alvarez, just for fun — squaring his stance along the fence to enable quick lateral movement, then changing direction as Munhoz committed to one of them. Only came out of him in the last minute of the fight, likely as a way to keep Munhoz from easily tracking him while maintaining his lead without having to throw. Notice that he’s not at all trying to outrun Munhoz, even though he easily can — compared to the circling of dedicated circlers like Edson Barboza, who simply circumnavigate the cage as their opponent can just follow them. While the pivot is even more efficient, Aldo somehow still does circling better than anyone.
Parting Thoughts
After his final featherweight loss, Jose Aldo’s career seemed on the sort of dignified downturn that could very quickly become horrifyingly undignified. While age manifests in different ways in combat sports, and Aldo was still competent at a lot of things against the future champion, the worry among many was that his conditioning had become too much of a concern — and his opponents too aware of routes to exploit his reactivity — for him to be the man he used to. In fact, this sort of decline isn’t uncommon — the fall of fighters like Robbie Lawler wasn’t marked by an instant and permanent decrease in the things he could do, but by the time in which he looked like himself growing shorter and shorter until it dwindled to nothing. In his final featherweight wins, even Aldo seemed aware of the possibility that he could lose to his need for rationing activity the way he did against Volkanovski — as soon as he landed a single decent shot on Renato Moicano after a fairly defensive first round, he unleashed completely, clawing at a wall until it became a window.
However, instead of Aldo’s moments of being Aldo disappearing, he’s truly figured out how to be as uncompromising as he used to be. Compared to the distinct lack of willingness to do essentially anything against the patient range-fighting of Volkanovski, Aldo’s urgent and diligent limiting of any route Munhoz could’ve possibly taken was a refreshing throwback to the days of every contender just never finding a way to touch the champion. Certainly there's a difference in approach between the two, but considering that Aldo is now two years deeper into his career, the lack of a straight downward trajectory — let alone actually figuring out how to work around his limitations — is incredibly impressive. In fact, in terms of process, it was the most similar to his old self Aldo has looked in a long while — against both Marlon Moraes and Marlon Vera, Aldo needed to be the aggressor to be effective, but against Munhoz, Aldo’s composure under fire was what mattered once again, and that against a truly dangerous and skilled bantamweight contender.
In terms of legacy, it’s difficult to truly contextualize what Aldo has done in the sport; even beyond having a very strong case as the greatest fighter to ever compete, his seemingly-doomed run at 135 puts him in territory that MMA has never seen. While there are fighters who have won titles at two divisions (an accolade Aldo likely would’ve attained, had the promotion allowed it during his featherweight reign), very few have bothered to even try to have sustained success at two divisions; to do so in a career as long and as grueling as Aldo’s is almost unparalleled. The best comparison is likely Rafael dos Anjos’ terrific welterweight run, and RDA didn’t have the same flawless stretch of dominance Aldo did before the move, nor the sort of active mitigation of his flaws that was so stunning in the Munhoz showing. At this point, even a loss to Aldo is something to be very proud of — a sign that a fighter was relevant enough and skilled enough to get a chance at one of the most incredible talents the sport has ever known, someone openly admired by his contemporaries and yet completely inimitable by an industry that spent years trying to emulate his success. Jose Aldo has set a new standard for both greatness and skill in mixed martial arts, and there’s reason to think that neither will be met for a very long time.