By Dave Meltzer,

Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira and Randy Couture, who meet in Saturday night’s UFC 102 main event, are two of the three (with Fedor Emelianenko) most decorated and accomplished heavyweights in mixed martial arts history.

Couture, the former UFC heavyweight champion, and Nogueira, the former PRIDE champ, nearly met on several occasions. Then as now, a straight scouting report would look something like this:

Both have decent technical boxing and footwork. Couture’s head movement is superior. Historically, Nogueira has the better chin and probably quicker hand speed, although that may not be the case today. Neither has strong one-punch knockout power. Couture has excellent clinch work and dirty boxing, using his skills garnered in international Greco-Roman wrestling competition as his base and using it to fire off shots from close range. Couture’s wrestling is superior and he is great at keeping top position and punching from that position, but he is not a strong submission finisher. But if the fight goes to the ground, Couture has to watch out for Nogueira’s great submission game, perhaps the best of any heavyweight in history.

But most likely, for both men, their biggest challenge on Saturday night won’t be the skills of their opponent. It’ll be the realities of themselves.

Couture is 46. Sure, those who cite his age as the reason to expect his physical decline have been wrong for a decade now. People scoffed at his age and wrote him off from the early stages of his career in 1997. One day, they’ll be correct.

Nogueira is 33, a year younger than Couture was when he debuted. But Nogueira has been in more wars along the way.

If you watched both men’s most recent fight, even though both lost, Couture put up a competitive showing in losing the UFC heavyweight title to Brock Lesnar on Nov. 15. Lesnar was also 60 pounds heavier going into the cage. Lesnar’s strength, wrestling, was the same as Couture, only Lesnar is younger and stronger.

Nogueira, on the other hand, was not competitive with Frank Mir in his last fight on Dec. 27, when he was stopped for the first time in his career, on a second-round TKO. Granted, he was nowhere near 100 percent, coming off a staph infection and a knee injury that would have led most sane men to cancel the fight.

His movement wasn’t there, his reactions were slow, and the chin that withstood ridiculous punishment in the past was no longer there as he was dropped three times by Mir. But even in his prior fight with Tim Sylvia, which he won via submission, he was knocked down and was slower to recover than he had been in the past.

The key to Nogueira’s success is his ability to survive major beatings, wait for the opponent to either tire or make a mistake, then capitalize with a quick submission. That happened with Sylvia, Mirko Cro Cop and Bob Sapp in three of his most memorable wins.

Nogueira was run over by a truck at the age of 11 and was not expected to survive. He spent four days in a coma and was hospitalized for nearly a year. Nogueira has noted that, after going through that ordeal, being knocked around by big punchers is not as traumatic to him as to most people.

“I’m 33 years old and I have a lot to do in my career still,” said Nogueira. “I know I’m still young and feel healthy,” he said. “I still feel my body when I fight, I’m very competitive. You know I love the sport. You know I think the sport is just getting that right now the UFC is growing very much and I’m very happy to be part of that. And for sure I want to have a couple of more fights and show a lot of good skills for the fans for sure.”

Even after comparing skills and wills, which both men have displayed in abundance their entire career, the key to this fight may be simply who has the most left physically.

“You know, bad fights happen,” said Nogueira [31-5-1, 1 no-contest], who was the first PRIDE heavyweight champion. “You know it’s not every fight you’re going to be 100 percent.”

“In the last fight I had a bad injury in my left knee,” he said. “And you know, I couldn’t feel like I could train for the fight. Three weeks before the fight I was in the hospital [with the staph infection]. And that’s a low point for sure in my career.”

Nogueira claims he’s rejuvenated and feels the best that he has in the past four years. Couture (16-9, but that is a misleading record for a man who has been in a record 16 championship fights during his career) looks in incredible condition for any age, and claims he’s still improving as a fighter.

“I have to perform way better then the last match,” said Nogueira. “We feel like I worked [trained] way better than I worked in my last match, too. You know, I feel like I had to work more. I took the fight very seriously. You know my opponent is very good, very sharp. So, for sure, I feel like I have to do way better than I did in the last match. That’s how I’m feeling for this match. I worked very hard. I worked maybe two or three times more than I worked in my last match.”

If that’s the case, this will be a heavyweight showdown that could put the winner in line for a championship match. This fight never took place previously because during what most would consider each man’s peak, they fought for different organizations. Couture was a three-time heavyweight champion in UFC, and Nogueira was champion, and then the longtime top heavyweight contender, in PRIDE.

However, at three points they came close. On February 24, 2001, when both men were in an eight-man one-night tournament with the RINGS organization in Japan, they were on opposite sides of the bracketing and seemingly on a collision course to meet for the championship. But Couture was upset in the semifinals by Valentijn Overeem, the older brother of Strikeforce heavyweight champ Alistair Overeem. Nogueira then beat Overeem to win the tournament.

In late 2007, they were on target to meet for the UFC heavyweight title Couture held, but Couture quit the organization before the fight was signed over problems not related to facing Nogueira. Nogueira won the interim title in Couture’s absence, beating Sylvia.

When Couture and UFC settled their differences, many expected the two to meet again as UFC devised a four-man tournament, with Mir and Lesnar, to unify the titles, but instead Couture and Nogueira both lost.

Advance ticket sales for Saturday’s match were disappointing, with a little more than 10,000 sold as of early in the week in a nearly 20,000-seat arena. But sales picked up after discount offers this week. The gate should still be in the $2 million range, which will be a combat sports record for the Northwest.

It’s a lock Couture will be the overwhelming crowd favorite even though Nogueira came off as nothing but likeable to the UFC audience during a season as a coach on “The Ultimate Fighter” reality show.

Couture grew up in Everett, Wash., and lived 13 years of his adult life in the Portland area where he coached wrestling at Oregon State and had a long run as one of the best Greco-Roman wrestlers in the country. He established the original Team Quest with fellow national champion wrestlers Matt Lindland and Dan Henderson in nearby Gresham, Ore., before leaving for Las Vegas a few years back.

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