We’re not sure if Mamed Khalidov has been workshopping any nickname ideas, but as the unofficial authorities on this subject, we’d like to suggest “The Compactor.” Because for the past two or so years, Khalidov has been making his living collecting the UFC’s trash and shredding them into bite-sized pieces before disposing of them like yesterday’s leftovers. In this regard, his victory over TUF 3 winner Kendall Grove was a success, as he secured a rarely seen achilles lock to put Grove away inside the distance. But in a way, the win was one of Khalidov’s less impressive performances in recent memory. I mean, he even let Grove get to the second round for Chrissakes, and considering UFC veterans like Rodney Wallace, James “WHY ME?!” Irvin, Matt Lindland, and Jesse Taylor couldn’t make it out of the second minute, it really makes you wonder just why Khalidov decided to dick around for as long as he did.
We kid, we kid. In his last six fights, Khalidov has scored two victories by knockout, one by armbar, one by kneebar, one by guillotine, and one by the aforementioned Achilles lock. The man is as close to a human Swiss army knife as you will ever find, and once the UFC offers him a contract worth more than the paper it’s printed on, expect to see him making waves stateside.
Unfortunately, the video of his fight with Grove in unembeddable, so you’ll have to go here to check it out.
We’re not sure how Rodney Wallace fandangled his way into a middleweight title shot considering he was knocked out by none other than Mamed Khalidov in his last KSW appearance, but be that as it may, Wallace found himself riding a two fight win streak heading into his match against 18-3 Michal “Magic” Materla. Unfortunately for Wallace, his second appearance under the KSW banner would go even worse than the first. Materla only needed one punch — specifically, the first one he threw — to send Wallace crashing to the mat like a farm plow stuck in a rut. Face down, ass up, that’s the way Michal likes to fuck Chuck.
A few follow-up hammerfists sealed the deal, and the newly crowned middleweight champ now finds himself on a six fight win streak that includes victories over UFC veterans Jay Silva and Matt Horwich, the latter of which squared off with fellow UFC vet terry Martin just beforehand.
When you read this headline, did you think it was Terry Martin who would end up on the wrong end of the first-punch KO? No one would have blamed, for your reasoning was undeniably sound, but Martin would actually succumb to an even more demoralizing loss than usual at the hands of Matt Horwich last Saturday.
Despite being taken down early, Horwich — who is looking like Roy Nelson’s meth-dealing cousin nowadays — utilized his superior grappling background to pull out a late first round TKO stoppage over Martin. And we say TKO in the loosest sense of the term, as Horwich managed to follow an omoplata sweep with some of the honest-to-God weakest ground-n-pound punches we have ever witnessed. Still, the defeat had to be somewhat of a moral victory for Martin, in that he wasn’t completely zombified by the time the fight was over like every other one of his 8 (T)KO losses. I hope that dude likes smoothies, because that’s all he’s gonna be eating in the future if he keeps this up.