Midnight Mania! A Career Ending Knockout Loss?

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Alex Pereira fought well at UFC 287 last weekend (Sat. April 8, 2023). The Brazilian striker was doing real damage to Israel Adesanya’s lead leg, hampering the lanky kickboxer’s movement and seemingly hurting him midway through the second. When Pereira attempted to follow up with a flurry — very similarly to how he finished their first MMA fight — it was Adesanya who struck back, stunning then finishing “Poatan” with a pair of heavy right hands.

Pereira has been quick to move forward from the loss, announcing that his next bout will take place at Light Heavyweight. For now, the Pereira vs. Adesanya rivalry is indeed over, and there’s a slew of 205-pounders lining up to introduce Pereira to the division.

Will it be the same Pereira that quickly ran through the Middleweight division? Tristar coach Firas Zahabi isn’t so confident. Coach to top MMA fighters like Georges St. Pierre, Rory MacDonald, and one half of tomorrow night’s main event, Arnold Allen, Zahabi has been in the game a long now, and he’s concerned Pereira won’t come back the same from the knockout.

“I think that that knockout, the way he fell, the way he was out, the way he got hit three times – that could be one of those career-ending fights,” Zahabi said on his YouTube channel (via MMAJunkie). “Like, he might win a few fights, lose a fight – he might never be the same.

“Once you get knocked out really badly like that – like for instance, I’ll tell you, when Aldo got knocked out by McGregor, he was never the same again. When Georges TKO’d B.J. Penn, when he gave him that beating (at UFC 94) – it was just a really bad beating – he was never really the same again.”

It’s worth-mentioning that Pereira was stopped twice in his kickboxing career, though both defeats are listed as technical knockouts rather than a total loss of consciousness like what happened at UFC 287. As we recently saw with Kamaru Usman, a bad knockout at 35 years of age can absolutely change a fighter, and there’s no real way to tell until Pereira is back in the cage.

Insomnia

Twitter is a crazy place.

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Slips, rips, and KO clips

Jumping switch kicks are so cool when they land.

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Morozov definitely lost control of the elbow but somehow managed to recapture it. Impressive!

Random Land

Ice climbing an iceberg …

Midnight Music: New Black Thought track courtesy of MMAmania’s true resident hip-hop head, Liddell’s Mohawk:

Sleep well Maniacs! More martial arts madness is always on the way.