- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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The UFC is trying to get Mackenzie Dern into the batter's circle again, and who could do anything more interesting on a Saturday than watch.
also not to doublepost, but I want to get this out on schedule before I run off to work, so
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 59: CARD SUBJECT TO CHANGE
SATURDAY, MAY 20 FROM THE DARKEST DUNGEON THAT IS THE UFC APEX ARENA IN LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
PRELIMS 1 PM PST/4 PM EST | MAIN CARD 4 PM PST/7 PM EST
Traditionally, when a fight card loses its main event and gets a new one quickly and shoddily crammed into place, I photoshop a silly poster together. To be entirely honest, it's often one of my favorite parts of this whole silly thing that I do.
I had initially planned to do it for this event. I had grand designs in my head of a big poster with a good 80% of its surface area taken up by the marketing giant that is Mackenzie Dern, and Angela Hill peeking in from the corner, taking up space the UFC begrudgingly allows her.
And then I didn't. Maybe it felt overly disrespectful, or maybe the concept just didn't seem funny in practice.
Or maybe I just cannot bring myself to get that emotionally invested in another abrupt, weirdly-matchmade main event built from a fight the UFC never intended to be a main event.
I'm not fatigued by the sport. But I sure do feel fatigued by everything around it.
i also got tired of waiting for wikipedia to update the drat card
MAIN EVENT: WE WILL BOOK THIS MACKENZIE DERN CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH OR DIE TRYING
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Mackenzie Dern (12-3, #8) vs Angela Hill (15-12, #14)
Two months ago, Raquel Pennington was supposed to fight Irene Aldana. The UFC wound up rescheduling the fight and booking the (also rescheduled) Marlon Vera vs Cory Sandhagen fight as a headliner instead, with Pennington and Aldana rebooked as this card's main event. Logically, it was a sure-thing title eliminator--Raquel Pennington is ranked #2 at Women's Bantamweight and has its longest winning streak, and Irene Aldana, at #5, is coming off two knockout victories.
But the UFC refused to commit to either woman getting a title shot with a victory. All the title hype went instead to the threematch nobody asked for, Amanda Nunes vs Julianna Peña 3, with the championship's future thereafter left uncertain. One month out from the fight, disaster struck: Peña broke her ribs in training and the UFC was out a main event. For once, though, it shouldn't have been a difficult problem to solve. Pennington is, after all, ranked #2 in the division and is conveniently available.
The UFC did not pick her. They picked Irene Aldana. Fun fact: Irene Aldana's last two losses? Holly Holm and, uh, Raquel Pennington. But Aldana punches people more than she wrestles them, and thus. Pennington was first slated to get a replacement opponent, and then announced as the backup fighter should Nunes or Aldana be unable to fight.
And this is how we begin to approach tonight's main event. The last time we talked about Mackenzie Dern was this past Fall when she fought Xiaonan Yan. At the time, I said this:
But Marina Rodriguez is still the #3 in the division, and she's on a four-fight win streak, and her last two victories were over both of these women, so she's on deck for a title eliminator, right?
No, my friend, she is fighting the #8-ranked Amanda Lemos, winner of one straight fight, at a random fight night next month that the UFC currently doesn't even advertise on its website.
Mackenzie Dern, whom she beat, is fighting Xiaonan Yan, whom she beat, to get into pole position for a title shot. ...if Dern wins. Because, after all, Xiaonan is riding a two-fight losing streak, so she'd need another win.
But Mackenzie'd be fine.
For some strange reason.
All of those things, unfortunately, came true. Marina Rodriguez went on to get smoked by Amanda Lemos a month later, ending her title hopes. Amanda Lemos, despite being the clear #1 contender, has been radio silent for half a year. (The day after I wrote this, the UFC announced Lemos is getting a title shot. I'm leaving it here as a monument to my timing.) The UFC talked up Mackenzie Dern's title potential should she beat Xiaonan Yan--despite Dern herself saying she needed another win first!--and when Yan pulled the upset and beat her, the UFC became strangely quiet about her future. It wasn't until Yan's knockout victory over Jéssica Andrade earlier this month that any chance of her having a title opportunity came up.
But, fortuitously, the UFC had a women's main event fall apart and they wanted a women's fight to fill it. And they just happened to have Mackenzie Dern vs Angela Hill booked as the co-main event on the previous week's card. And, hey--who better to main event, right?
There was one other thing I said last time around and I want to touch on it again.
And it doesn't make me feel any better about it, because I don't want to talk about the value Mackenzie Dern's million Instagram followers bring to her career, I want to talk about her being a good loving fighter. I want to talk about her ridiculous twenty-two grappling championships and the ways she easily submits very, very tough people. I want to talk about her losing her undefeated streak to Amanda Ribas and responding by finally tightening up her striking game in the hopes of never getting blown out of the water again.
I still feel this way. I still have a deep-seated respect for Mackenzie Dern and her grappling skills. I still appreciate her attempts at improvement. I still believe in her title aspirations.
But Michelle Waterson-Gomez and Luana Pinheiro were stuck on ESPN prelims back in April. Xiaonan Yan beat Mackenzie, and she got a midcard berth--on a pay-per-view, at least, but still sans spotlight. On that same card, Marina Rodriguez, who beat both of them, was stuck getting outgrappled by Virna Jandiroba while curtain-jerking the preliminary card.
Meanwhile, this is Mackenzie Dern's third main event in her last four fights. And she lost the other two.
The UFC's marketing pressure behind Mackenzie Dern overshadows Mackenzie Dern herself. Her grappling is best-in-class, but that aforementioned striking she tightened up after losing to Amanda Ribas never really progressed past 'slightly tighter.' It's still loopy, it's still loose, and it's led to her getting outstruck on the feet by everyone she faces. What's worse, her wrestling hasn't adjusted to the upper echelons of the division. Despite being easily the best grappler at Women's Strawweight, she boasts one of its worst grappling stats: A total takedown accuracy of 11%. Statistically speaking, 89% of the time Mackenzie Dern tries to take you down, she's going to fail.
When you're fighting Angela Hill, that's a problem.
Angela "Overkill" Hill, despite the sport's best efforts to break her, has steadfastly refused to go away. She's from the inaugural Women's Strawweight class in the UFC, having jumped over from Muay Thai and joined The Ultimate Fighter 20 at just 1-0 as a professional back in 2014, and within a year she was, uh, out of the UFC as a 2-2 fighter. She was raw and green and had a lot of trouble with aggressive grapplers and it cost her. But she rifled off four straight wins in 2016 out in the mecca of women's MMA, Invicta FC, and after a reign as its strawweight champion the UFC came calling--as much for her fighting as for the fanbase she'd earned by being fun and charismatic and dressing like Street Fighter characters at her weigh-ins.
And now everything was great forever! Except, y'know, for the losing. Despite her well-earned status as a fan favorite, Angie found herself losing more often than winning. Heading into this fight, she's 10-12 in the UFC.
Which is unfortunate, because realistically, she probably shouldn't be.
Angela Hill's career carries one of the darkest curses of combat sports: The judges not liking your style. She's a fast, accurate, defensively sound striker, known for picking her spots and executing efficiently and tactically, and unfortunately, you can express that in shorthand as 'judges think you're losing when you move backwards.' There are five separate fights in Angie's UFC tenure where at worst 50% and at best 90% of media scored decisions in her favor that she ultimately, and often inexplicably, lost. That dismal 10-12 record could, very easily and realistically, have been 15-7. Angela Hill could have been a top ten fighter for the last five years.
But we live in this sin-cursed Earth, where she has only now scored back to back wins for the first time since 2020.
The UFC doesn't dislike Angela Hill. She's great at self-marketing, she's a fun, talented fighter, and she has kept herself relevant despite being constantly poo poo upon by the combat sports gods. They're extremely glad she got a couple wins under her belt, because it means they can credibly book her against top ten opponents again.
But there is no great mystery about why she got booked into this specific top ten fight.
I want Angela Hill to win this fight. She's very tricky to take down, she's got fast hands, and she's very good at aiming her kicks. She soundly outclasses Mackenzie Dern on the feet, and in any kind of prolonged striking exchange she has every advantage in the world. But the thing is--her opponents typically do, eventually, get her down. Mackenzie's striking is still far too open and her wrestling is still far too loose, but she also doggedly pursues both, and a great part of Angie's smart defensive striking comes from her willingness to work back to the cage--and that's what gets her grounded.
Angela Hill is going to make Mackenzie Dern look very silly for a period of time in this fight. Mackenzie Dern is going to eat some counters and fail at least a couple single-legs. But she is, eventually, going to get Angie on the mat, and that's when things get unfortunate very quickly. MACKENZIE DERN BY SUBMISSION.
CO-MAIN EVENT: HYPE AND FLUFF
 MIDDLEWEIGHT: Edmen Shahbazyan (12-3) vs Anthony Hernandez (10-2 (1))
Every time Edmen Shahbazyan fights I feel compelled to write a Star Wars title crawl about his origins in the sport coming from the teachings of Edmond Tarverdyan and his Glendale Fighting Club, which is most famous for either making or ruining Ronda Rousey depending on whose side of a long and now years-old debate you fall on, and as a fighter with a dozen-plus bouts under his belt, I cannot imagine how annoying it must be to find yourself constantly thought of in reference to one of the biggest coaching scandals in UFC history. Especially when you left the school an entire goddamn year ago.
Shahbazyan was so anointed as a future world champion that he was nicknamed "The Golden Boy," and as any fan of professional wrestling can tell you, pre-selling someone that hard almost always means setting them up for a fall. An 11-0 run up the ranks--including a real impressive knockout over the incredibly tough Brad Tavares--ended in a precipitous three-fight losing streak. The hype train well and truly off the tracks, Edmen left the cradle of Edmond's poorly-administrated love and joined up with Xtreme Couture in 2022, and it paid off, as he beat the brakes off Dalcha Lungiambula and proved himself a new fighter, free of all his old woes!
Except that said woes came from well-traveled wrestlers with high-level experience and Dalcha Lungiambula was a brawler who was about to be cut after losing four fights in a row. But, y'know. Who's counting.
Anthony "Fluffy" Hernandez is also still stuck on poo poo that happened two years ago. At the outset of 2021 the MMA world didn't think much of Hernandez if they thought about him at all: He was 1-2 in the UFC, he'd just been knocked out in forty seconds by Kevin Holland, and his most memorable feat as a competitor in the public eye was losing his Contender Series win for the cool crime of smoking weed. The fanbase wasn't there and the UFC thought very little of him, which is why he seemed like a very safe lay-up for the recently-signed Rodolfo Vieira, one of the best grapplers in the world.
And then Hernandez jabbed him up, scrambled out of his grapples, and shocked the world by choking him out. Suddenly, the world knew him and was very, very interested in whatever he was going to do next.
Which was: Nothing! Thanks to a hand injury and a bunch of bad luck, Hernandez was on the shelf for the entire next year. When he DID make his return it was for a long-tormented fight that went through no less than three replacement fighters. And he won! He beat Josh Fremd, and five months later he submitted Marc-André Barriault. He's on a three-fight winning streak. But no one's really noticed, and most people still just think of him as The Guy Who Choked Out The Black Belt.
Two fighters, both trying to break free of the more memorable parts of their past and get embraced for their present. Who's got it?
ANTHONY HERNANDEZ BY DECISION. Edmen looked better in his last fight, but we're not that far off from seeing him struggle against persistent wrestling assaults. Hernandez is incredibly persistent with takedown attempts, and worse, he's good at using striking pressure to keep opponents from comfortably defending them. If Edmen can keep the fight standing and outwork Hernandez it'll be a huge feather in his cap, but while I'm not sure Hernandez will get the submission, I do think he'll make Edmen grapple long enough to drop two rounds.
MAIN CARD: HANG ON, LOOPY / LOOPY, HANG ON
CATCHWEIGHT, 120 LBS: Emily Ducote (12-7) vs Lupita Godinez (9-3)
Emily "Gordinha" Ducote was on track to be a forgotten flyweight journeywoman before an extremely wise drop to strawweight turned her into a champion. Her hard kicks and accurate if low-volume punching served much better at 115 pounds, and after winning and defending Invicta's strawweight title she, like most regional champions, cashed in her belt for a UFC contract. And she looked good! Her debut against Jessica Penne was a one-sided affair that left Penne barely able to walk courtesy of fifty-one deeply unpleasant leg kicks. Unfortunately, she then ran into Angela Hill, who was much better at the exact same gameplan. Ducote ended the fight exhausted, bleeding, and outstruck 190 to 76. Admittedly: Not a great look if you're trying to win your way into the rankings. She's tough as hell, but she's up against the perception of being stuck under a ceiling, now.
Lupita "Loopy" Godinez is a prospect who is on a mission to personally depress me. Godinez burst onto the scene in 2021 as one of the most energetic wrestlers in the entire division, a madwoman who would chain takedowns into takedowns into other, different takedowns in her desperate urge to get fights to the ground. And it worked, most of the time! She was an inexhaustible wrestling machine and it won three of her first five UFC fights, and probably should have won four, but judges hate wrestling. Unfortunately: So does Loopy! For reasons I cannot possibly fathom and have chosen to chalk up to Dana White-hired snipers threatening her family, after averaging 10 takedown attempts per fight across her first five fights, Godinez has given up her gifts. She shot a measly three takedowns against Angela Hill--predominantly a striker!--and an even smaller two in her last outing against Cynthia Calvillo.
I would pick Loopy in a heartbeat if I thought she was going to embrace the greatest martial art and return to chain-wrestling people until she ragdolled them. I'm deeply afraid the extravagant lifestyle knowable only to UFC fighters making a cool $20k per fight has gotten to her and made her forget her roots. But I believe in you, Loopy. Use the force and double-leg the leg kicker. LUPITA GODINEZ BY DECISION.
WELTERWEIGHT: Andre Fialho (16-6 (1)) vs Joaquin Buckley (15-6)
Here, we have the battle of falling prospects seeking handholds on the quickly-passing mountainside by way of beautiful violence. Andre Fialho jumped into the UFC last year as a late replacement against Michel Pereira and, even in loss, earned a fanbase by outperforming expectations and even taking a round off the UFC's #15 welterweight. He cemented his role as a violenceweight prospect by carrying out two quick, first-round boxing-based executions. By the summer, Fialho was flirting with a ranking himself. He was, of course, immediately smote for his hubris. Jake Matthews and Muslim Salikhov knocked him out in his last two fights, and one of 2022's most interesting prospects is now entering his 2023 trying to stave off a three-fight losing streak.
Joaquin Buckley is living proof that the power of doing extremely cool poo poo remains alive and well in combat sports, but it, too, has limitations. Hundreds of thousands of people would not recognize Joaquin Buckley the fighter, but they would recognize the guy who crushed someone with a one-legged jumping spinning back kick to the face from a Twitter video they saw that almost certainly had a thrash metal song playing in the background. It was an instant star-making performance. Or it would have been, had he not gotten his head kicked off two fights later. Much like Fialho he turned his fortunes around and managed to get a couple wins under his belt, but much like Fialho he spent the back half of 2022 getting beat up, ultimately ending in a December bout with Chris Curtis that saw him get knocked out two or three times in thirty seconds.
The conventional wisdom has Buckley as a relative favorite, and I'm not inclined to disagree. Fialho has faster and slightly more accurate hands, but Buckley hits much harder, and as good as Fialho is, he's been getting clipped even in his winning efforts. Getting clipped by Joaquin Buckley is bad for your health. JOAQUIN BUCKLEY BY TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Michael Johnson (21-18) vs Diego Ferreira (17-5)
The continuing presence of Michael Johnson is a persistent strain on the fabric of reality. The patch on Michael Johnson as a fighter used to be that for all his inconsistency and unfortunate losses he was the guy who beat Beneil Dariush and Edson Barboza and Dustin Poirier--but now, even those victories are so old that remembering how strange they are in the context of his career is, itself, an act of nostalgia. "Michael Johnson beat Dustin Poirier!" was an observation you made in 2018 to reflect on how wild it was that he had to struggle to beat Artem Lobov. That was seven fights ago; he lost five of them. Jonathan Brookins, the man who beat Michael Johnson to win The Ultimate Fighter 10, has been retired for more than six years. In fact, almost everyone from that season is now retired. At least one of them is dead. The uncertain waveform that is Michael Johnson refuses to collapse, even as its origin point disappears into history.
Diego Ferreira feels like nearly as much of a missing puzzle piece. Ferreira, at one point, claimed one of the best winning streaks in the lightweight division: In six consecutive fights he beat a nearly-undefeated Olivier Aubin-Mercier, became the first man to knock out Jared Gordon, crushed a hot prospect in Kyle Nelson, beat the thoroughly underrated Rustam Khabilov, outright retired the extremely dangerous Mairbek Taisumov and choked out a former champion in Anthony Pettis. It was a fantastic run. And it ended more than three years ago. Ferreira missed the other eleven months of 2020, fought three times in 2021 and lost each time, and went right back on the shelf, too injured to compete. Here, in May of 2023, Diego Ferreira hasn't fought in a year and a half, he turned 38 this January, and he hasn't won a fight in forty months.
Like so many things, it's a series of questions we won't know the answers to until both men are in the cage. Michael Johnson is still one of the fastest, most dangerous punchers in the division, but he also gets tired and discouraged. Diego Ferreira is a danger in every facet of the game, but his game hasn't been truly effective in a long time. I'm leaning towards DIEGO FERREIRA BY DECISION but it really is anyone's guess which version of Ferreira--or Johnson--shows up to this fight. Flip a coin and watch the fireworks.
PRELIMS: SLAVA CLAUS TAKES A SUMMER VACATION
LIGHTWEIGHT: Maheshate (9-2) vs Viacheslav Borshchev (6-3)
The UFC's got big fuckin' plans for Maheshate. They are very proud of their tall-yet-lightweight big-punchman from China and they would love to use him as a spearhead for further expansion into the market. Which is why they're real, real mad that Rafa Garcia ended his winning streak by wrestling the crap out of him in his last fight. After teeing him up for a solid Contender Series win and a perfectly-executed credible sacrifice in Steve Garcia in his UFC debut, the time has come for damage control. And thus: Viacheslav Borschchev, aka "Slava Claus," Team Alpha Male's kickboxing champion. Slava had a similar trajectory to Maheshate's--successful knockout artist gets brought through the Contender Series, wins a dominant UFC debut, then gets the poo poo wrestled out of him--but Borschchev's suffered it twice, and is trying to avert the dreaded three-fight losing streak.
And god dammit, I believe in Slava Claus. Maheshate's almost certainly the bigger puncher, but there's a reason Borshchev's last two opponents have desperately dragged him to the ground: He's really, really loving good at hurting people. Even after getting grounded and pounded for two straight rounds Borschchev nearly knocked Mike Davis out in the final round of his last fight. Maheshate's aggression could easily play against him, and I'm kind of hoping it does, because I would like nice things to happen. VIACHESLAV BORSCHCHEV BY DECISION.
WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT: Karolina Kowalkiewicz (14-7) vs Vanessa Demopoulos (9-4)
Karolina Kowalkiewicz's 2022 was one of the precious few feelgood MMA stories of the year. After a great start to her career and a near-miss championship fight in 2016 Karolina hit the skids just about as hard as a fighter possibly can without getting bounced from the UFC, dropping five straight fights, going more than four years without a victory, and strongly considering retirement. After a ten-month hiatus, she came back in 2022 and promptly ran up a two-fight winning streak, retiring Felice Herrig and outworking KSW title challenger Silvana Gómez Juárez. For her efforts, she now gets to fight Vanessa "Lil' Monster" Demopoulos, a hard-grappling strawweight who would be staring down a 2-2 UFC record were she not the beneficiary of one of the division's most irritatingly common prizes: A dodgy split decision against the ever-shat-upon Jinh Yu Frey that Demopoulos definitely should have lost. Her grappling chops make her a real threat to anyone on the ground, and their common opponent is a direct demonstration: Where Kowalkiewicz struggled with Juárez and ultimately couldn't put her in real danger, Demopoulos snatched an armbar and tapped her out in half a round.
Karolina has always succeeded by mixing her striking and wrestling, and this is a fight where, realistically, her best chances come from completely ignoring her own versatility. Demopoulos is a real danger on the ground, but not only is she not a great striker, she's giving up almost half a foot of reach. I ultimately believe in KAROLINA KOWALKIEWICZ BY DECISION but I'm bracing myself for disappointment.
WELTERWEIGHT: Orion Cosce (8-1) vs Gilbert Urbina (6-2)
It's a battle of the lost prospects of 2021. Orion Cosce made "hah, that's cute" levels of news when he and his brother Louis both won contracts on the same episode of the Contender Series, which is definite proof of its very legitimate goals, and unfortunately, the good news pretty much stopped there. Louis Cosce dropped two fights over the next two years and was released shortly thereafter; Orion got knocked out by Philip Rowe in his first UFC fight and is still with us solely because he was matched up with BLOOD DIAMOND, the City Kickboxing star who was 100% guaranteed to take the world by storm and most definitely did not just get double-legged to death. Cosce's opponent, Gilbert "The RGV Bad Boy" Urbina, is a fellow denizen of the island of lost toys: He was technically a finalist on The Ultimate Fighter 29, but only because Tresean Gore, who knocked him out in two rounds, injured his knee. Urbina proceeded to put up a decent round against Bryan Battle before getting choked out, and, uh, that was almost two years ago, now.
Once again: Not sure what you do with that. Urbina didn't look bad against Battle--up until, you know, he lost--but he was ultimately outgrappled, which is a bad indicator when you're about to fight a pure wrestler. Of course, Cosce struggled to take down the aforementioned wrestling-deficient kickboxer and didn't even come close to submitting him. Will two years have been enough time for Urbina to shore up his game? Will Cosce have trouble dealing with a much bigger opponent? GILBERT URBINA BY DECISION because I am hoping Urbina, who already didn't look bad, will come back from his hiatus better.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Ilir Latifi (16-8) vs Rodrigo Nascimento (9-1 (1))
I will be honest with you: This fight is almost certainly going to be terrible, and I am looking forward to it anyway. Ilir Latifi is a human brick who was already kind of short for the 205-pound division, and yet, somehow, he looks perfectly bodily at home as a 5'10" heavyweight, which is the surest sign yet that Heavyweight is a vortex of unreality through which all is stretched and compressed into meaninglessness. Really, though: At Light-Heavyweight he was getting crushed by Ryan Bader and Volkan Oezdemir, and one fight later he went the distance with--and nearly beat--Derrick Lewis. Rodrigo Nascimento has had a much less successful and even less fun tenure--in his last three fights he got knocked out by Chris Daukaus, beat Alan Baudot only to have the win removed thanks to his failure to disclose a Ritalin prescription, and just scraped a split decision off of Tanner Boser.
Then again: Ilir Latifi's penultimate fight was, also, a split decision victory over Tanner Boser. He also seemed to want to retire after beating Aleksei Oleinik, and generally when a fighter starts to talk about retirement, coming back becomes progressively harder. Still: ILIR LATIFI BY DECISION. He is simply too wide.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Chase Hooper (11-3-1) vs Nick Fiore (6-1)
In the mid-2010s, having already seen the end of the Conor McGregor days on the horizon, the UFC secretly invested in a startup that specialized in cloning. They took Conor's DNA and they mixed it with various samples from the corners of America in the hopes of cultivating an army of Ameroconors to carry their brand into the future. Some of them panned out--Sean O'Malley is about to fight for a world championship--and some, like Bryce Mitchell, have dealt with DNA breakdown. Chase Hooper, formerly known as Subject #E0B0FF, hit the wall sooner than most. His youth, his idealism, and his inherent rejections of the Irish boxing influences forcibly conjoined to his blood have all contributed to a struggling career and, this past October, the first knockout loss of his life. Nick Fiore is here to see if the research unit can be salvaged. He's a canary in a coalmine--a goat tied to a post--a chair in an IKEA where Mark Coleman is wild-eyedly searching for legs to dive on.
He's here to pass the reactivation code that makes Chase Hooper win and also get a tattoo of a lion riding a gorilla on his chest. For sake of the future: Let us pray. CHASE HOOPER BY SUBMISSION.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Victoria Leonardo (9-4) vs Natália Silva (14-5-1)
This is, in all likelihood, going to be a murder. Last November I was very excited about the UFC debut of one of my favorite prospects, a grappler named Tereza Bledá, against a similarly fascinating prospect in Jungle Fight champion Natália Silva. I said it was a genuinely interesting clash of genuinely interesting prospects and whoever emerged would be a fascinating competitor for the flyweight division. Ultimately I picked Bledá, and ultimately, I was wrong: Bledá took the first round, but Silva took over in the second and ultimately finished her with a spinning back kick in the third. Her countergrappling, her striking and her finishing instincts were all entirely on point. But, fun fact: She was actually supposed to make her debut back in 2021 against Victoria "Fury" Leonardo, a newly-signed Invicta veteran and Contender Series winner. Injuries and bad timing ultimately scrapped the fight, and now, in 2023, they've decided to rebook it--with Silva now a dominant 2-0 in the UFC, and Leonardo a less impressive 1-2, both losses having been violent stoppages.
With respect to Victoria Leonardo, who is a very good competitor: There is a reason they're booking their exciting new prospect who got an incredible headkick knockout against the struggling woman who's lost to headkick TKOs multiple times in the last three years. The UFC smells money, and they're probably right. NATÁLIA SILVA BY TKO.
WELTERWEIGHT: Takashi Sato (16-6) vs Themba Gorimbo (10-4)
There's this deep-seated hope amongst the longterm, hardcore fanbase that, one day, a Japanese fighter will hold UFC gold. 17 countries can boast UFC champions; all Japan has are the two UFC Ultimate Japan one-night tournaments in the 1990s, and my friends, I am a huge championship nerd, and if I could count Kazushi Sakuraba as a UFC champion for winning the first one, trust me, I would. Each generation sees a handful of Japanese prospects who look promising, but only four have ever made it to title contention, none have won, and most fail before they get there at all. Takashi Sato got off to a promising start in the UFC with two knockout losses and an extremely understandable loss to now-#2 Belal Muhammad, but his last three years have been nothing but loss, including a forty-four second headkick loss to Bryan Battle. It is, thus, feeding time. The UFC has hopes for South African champion Themba "The Answer" Gorimbo, but some wrestling deficiencies, some grappling errors, and some well-placed elbows led to a submission loss in his debut fight this past February, sinking his hype train into the mud before it could leave the station.
And I'm still picking against him. Maybe I want to hold onto some prospect hope awhile longer or maybe I'm just not convinced his striking and wrestling are up to the task. TAKASHI SATO BY TKO.
Fights start in an hour.
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May 20, 2023 20:07
