If that’s it for Carlos Condit, he’s a bigger man for seeing it

VANCOUVER – If Saturday night was the last time we see Carlos Condit in a cage, there’s no shame in any of it. Condit didn’t fare well against Demian Maia. He lasted just a minute and 52 seconds. He took at least one jarring shot on the ground, he admitted, before succumbing to a rear-naked choke. After he took Robbie Lawler the distance back in January at UFC 195, a fight that plenty of people thought he won, there was a feeling he might feast on the 38-year-old Maia. It didn’t work out that way. It was the first time he’d been submitted in a decade.Afterwards in the post-fight press conference, Condit sat among the four victors from the UFC on FOX 21 main card, and he stared a million miles into something not in the room. When the questions came around to him, he gave honest answers, shrugging his shoulders while acknowledging the cruel nature of the fight game, before unpacking the burden as plainly as possible. He said he didn’t know if he belonged at this level anymore. It was all very real, his answers, nothing to do with typical fight game delusion. It was just Carlos telling a roomful of winners and their smiling factions that the storm clouds — the same that would one day surely gather over all of them — were now hovering over his head. That was a dose of reality, the kind that snaps you into consciousness and makes you remember exactly what it is you’re looking at. The battles have caught up to him. Condit has publicly searched out his limits for years, and now here he was airing his discoveries with such frank poignancy. I don’t know if I belong here anymore.Hard not to appreciate a man so devoid of excuses.The truth is, Lawler may have …

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