Uh-uh. He smiles again.

“At that moment there’s nowhere to run,” said the UFC Middleweight Champion. “If you trained, you trained; if you didn’t, you’re screwed.”

Then again, when you’re facing the middleweight division’s most feared striker, you can train eight hours a day for 12 weeks and still be screwed. Just look at ‘The Spider’s list of victims – Rich Franklin, Chris Leben, Tony Fryklund, Jorge Rivera, Jeremy Horn, Carlos Newton, and Mach Sakurai – and you can’t help but be impressed.

But mere names on a fight record mean nothing if you haven’t seen him live, and for UFC fans, they finally got their chance to see Silva in action twice last year as he blew through Leben and Franklin in less than a round each.

The Franklin bout was particularly revealing, as the 31-year old from Curitiba locked his hands around the back of the then-middleweight champion’s neck in October and proceeded to put on a Muay Thai clinic, complete with vicious knees to the body and head and clinch work that had to be seen to be believed. By the 2:59 mark of the round, there was a new champion at 185 pounds.

“It’s just more responsibility,” said Silva when asked how life has changed for him since October 14th, but his first and most pressing responsibility as a UFC champion is to defend his title, which he will do this Saturday in the main event of UFC 67 against Travis Lutter. All of a sudden, the Brazilian is no longer the hunter – he is now the hunted. To some, that can be an unnerving prospect. To him, it’s
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all the same.

“I feel pretty normal about it,” he said. “It’s all just part of the game.”

When asked to elaborate, Silva explains, “It’s always dangerous when you’re the owner of the belt. Everybody’s gunning for you. So I’m not really too focused on what his (Lutter’s) strengths are. I’m more focused on making my strengths better to make him worry about me.”

And if you’re human, you have to be worried about the speed, accuracy, and power of Silva, something you don’t truly grasp until you’re locked in the Octagon with him. But what some don’t realize is that Silva also earned a Black Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Lutter’s specialty, and though many observers don’t think the champion can hang with the challenger on the mat, Silva disagrees.

“I’m a black belt in jiu-jitsu and for people that don’t know that, of course, I like to stand up and bang, that’s my forte,” he said. “But I train jiu-jitsu every day, and if it goes to the ground, I’ll take the fight there. I’m not concerned.”

You get the impression that nothing fazes the champion too much; that he’s not only a world-class fighter, but a spiritual samurai who looks at the fight game as part visceral combat and part mental chess. Anderson Silva won’t make bold predictions, won’t claim that he will be champion of the world forever. He will just fight and live for today, and if he does that, he believes his reign will continue.

“Basically, having the belt right now is just a moment in time,” he admits, “and you’ve got to stay hungry, stay motivated, and stay humble. I take every fight as just another fight because a lot of times, when you stop fighting, people forget about you. So I know that this is just a moment in time and I’m staying focused on keeping the belt as long as I can.