Mark Hunt asked the referee to stop the fight after Fabricio Werdum landed that thunderous flying knee in their UFC 180 interim heavyweight title bout.
That’s according to a pretty key witness: Werdum himself. The new champion revealed the nugget in a Portuguese-language video interview with the UFC, which was translated by Bloody Elbow.
“I was able to hit him with the knee, and after that happened, a thing that no one saw was that he asked the referee for the end of the bout,” Werdum said in the interview. “When he was knocked down, he said that it was enough, and the referee didn’t listen, so I had to hit him a few times more.”
The official video highlights are not conclusive or comprehensive though there does appear to be a still image in which Hunt is looking toward the referee after being knocked down and may be saying something.
It’s impossible to tell for sure even with the full video. Unless Hunt—or maybe referee Herb Dean—confirms the action, we’ll probably never know to a certainty.
Werdum is now very clearly one of the two or three best heavyweights on planet Earth. He hasn’t lost since rejoining the UFC in February 2012, going 5-0 in that span.
The UFC wasted no time setting their sights on Werdum’s next fight, a title unification bout with lineal beltholder Cain Velasquez, who was originally supposed to face Werdum at UFC 180 before falling injured.
Hunt replaced Velasquez on fairly short notice. Despite being a substantial underdog, the knockout artist from New Zealand acquitted himself well in the match, knocking Werdum to the floor with a thunderous punch and even landing a takedown. He probably won the first round before Werdum took it out of the judges’ hands in the second round.
Werdum and Velasquez are, at the moment, set for their unification fight in June.
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