Gerald Meerschaert's UFC Farewell Was Painful — His 12-Finish Record Still Stands
GOATIFYGerald Meerschaert's final UFC appearance ended with the kind of sequence he had spent almost two decades trying to avoid: an opponent on top, unanswered punches and a referee stepping in. Julius Walker stopped the veteran at 3:35 of round two at UFC Vegas 122 on October 10. Moments later, Meerschaert took off his gloves. The gesture confirmed what a sixth consecutive defeat had made increasingly difficult to deny: the 38-year-old was finished competing.
That ending tells only one part of his story. The same fighter leaves with 60 professional bouts, 12 UFC middleweight finishes and a submission résumé that made him a danger even when the scorecards were turning against him. His farewell deserves to be measured against both realities.
The light heavyweight gamble could not reverse the final slide
Meerschaert's move to light heavyweight was a late attempt to change the circumstances of a difficult run. He had spent most of his UFC career at 185 pounds, where his opportunistic grappling could turn a seemingly lost exchange into a submission. By May 2026, however, a defeat to Jacob Malkoun had stretched his losing streak to five. A four-pound miss at the middleweight weigh-in added another complication. The October meeting with Walker at 205 pounds offered a different weight cut and a chance to show that the veteran still had something left.
Walker made the experiment brutally short. The younger fighter repeatedly brought Meerschaert to the floor, established top position and used punches to make his advantage count. Meerschaert looked for openings from underneath but could not create the sustained threat that had rescued him in earlier fights. Walker had been stopped in each of his two previous outings in 2026, so this was a meaningful rebound for him as well as a harsh ending for his opponent. The referee halted the contest at 3:35 of the second round.
There was a revealing symmetry in the matchup. Meerschaert's reputation had been built on surviving difficult moments and finding a submission after an opponent seemed to be in control. Against Walker, the control never meaningfully changed hands. The old route back into the fight was blocked, and the veteran's experience could not manufacture a reversal. This was not a single unlucky exchange; it fit a longer pattern of increasingly difficult nights.
The slide had begun with a submission loss to Reinier de Ridder in November 2024. Further defeats followed in 2025 and 2026, including the Malkoun decision. At 38, with the weight-class change failing to unlock a new chapter, retiring was a coherent response to the evidence rather than an impulsive reaction to one loss. His final fight will be remembered for the gloves on the canvas, but it also showed how quickly the sport can close the space in which a veteran's signature skills once worked.
Twelve middleweight finishes remain the defining achievement
Reducing Meerschaert to his final losing streak would erase the trait that made him memorable: he could finish a fight without ever looking like the more athletic or technically polished striker. He arrived in the UFC in December 2016 with years of regional experience and immediately won his first two appearances by first-round submission. The pattern persisted. Opponents who stayed close enough to wrestle, scramble or clinch often found that the veteran needed only one mistake.
His 2021 campaign supplied a particularly clear example. He submitted Bartosz Fabinski, Makhmud Muradov and Dustin Stoltzfus in succession, proving that his finishing game remained dangerous against very different styles. The sequence was not built on overwhelming speed. It relied on timing, patience and a willingness to keep hunting positions after exchanges that appeared to favor the other fighter. That approach made his bouts unusually hard to judge by momentum alone.
The most dramatic late-career evidence came in 2024. A rear-naked choke against Bryan Barberena brought him level with Anderson Silva's longstanding mark for UFC middleweight finishes. Five months later, Meerschaert absorbed punishment from Edmen Shahbazyan, survived a dangerous stretch of ground strikes and then turned the fight with an arm-triangle choke. The comeback pushed his divisional finish total to 12, ahead of Silva's 11. It was an achievement rooted in persistence as much as technique.
Meerschaert also finished his UFC career with 11 middleweight submission victories, sharing that divisional record with Demian Maia. Across his professional career he compiled 37 wins and 23 defeats, with 35 victories coming inside the distance. The headline numbers matter, but they do not fully capture why fans watched. Even in fights where he was losing minutes, the possibility of a sudden finish kept the outcome alive. That was his particular contribution to the middleweight division.
Not every chapter was triumphant. He faced elite opposition, including Khamzat Chimaev, and the losses accumulated sharply in his final years. But a career spanning nearly twenty years cannot be graded only by its last six results. The submission record is durable evidence of a specialist who repeatedly found ways to win in a division full of bigger names and more conventional contenders.
The farewell pointed toward a life beyond the Octagon
There was no elaborate retirement ceremony. After Walker's victory, Meerschaert spoke with Michael Bisping and acknowledged that he had enjoyed a remarkable run. He referred to the records he had set, admitted that a move to 205 pounds might have come earlier, and accepted that competing indefinitely was impossible. The tone was grateful rather than bitter. He said he would miss the job, even while making clear that he was ready to stop doing it.
His comments afterward also offered an unusually practical glimpse of what comes next. Meerschaert said he had opportunities to earn a living outside fighting and described a move toward corporate work connected to air conditioning and HVAC. The exact position was not publicly detailed, so it would be premature to portray a specific employer or business arrangement as settled. What was clear was his desire for a different daily routine and a more predictable way to support his family.
Retirement in combat sports is more than a ranking decision. It means leaving behind the training camps and the public test of stepping into the cage. Meerschaert had fought professionally since 2007, long before the UFC reached its present scale. He earned his place, stayed for nearly a decade and became a divisional record holder. A conventional career will be a profound change, but it may offer the stability that fighting never could.
The image of his 2024 win over Barberena is a useful reminder of what he is leaving behind. That night, his grappling instincts produced another improbable finish and a place alongside Silva in the record book. Two years later, his farewell came after the opposite kind of fight. Both scenes belong to the same career. One explains why he mattered; the other explains why he decided it was time.
Meerschaert did not get a storybook final victory, and Walker deserved the win that ended his own difficult stretch. But the veteran leaves with a distinction that will outlast the result at UFC Vegas 122: he turned an unglamorous, relentless submission game into a divisional record. His last act was not another comeback. It was recognizing when the next one no longer made sense.
