There were 12 fights, including the preliminaries, during UFC 157, which took place on Saturday night in Anaheim, California.
But it wasn’t the main event—the UFC’s first ever women’s contest featuring bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey and her opponent Liz Carmouche—that proved to be the most enthralling fight on the night.
Not that that fight didn’t deliver. There were plenty of tense moments throughout that match before we witnessed the dread-inducing sight of Rousey claiming another armbar victory.
It wasn’t the co-main event either, which, in the end, was a dull, listless contest between top light heavyweights Dan Henderson and Lyoto Machida.
The show-stealing fight, in fact—as so often happens at UFC events—wasn’t even on the main card. The three-round war between Dennis Bermudez and Matt Grice split the judges and got the UFC’s vote for ‘Fight of the Night’.
It was well earned.
The two featherweights went back and forth for most of the contest, but the fight was most remarkable for the beating Grice took in the third round.
Grice must have felt he had a good shot at winning the fight because it looked to be going to decision. He had clipped Bermudez early in the fight and could conceivably have stolen the second round. But in the third, Bermudez spent almost two minutes battering Grice.
For large parts of the round Grice looked dazed and out of it, but in the direst moments he was able to come back and fight on. Bermudez was, for his part, relentless right up until the final bell. Looking as fresh and as powerful as he did in the first round, Bermudez swung for the finish and almost got it.
No other fight on the card produced such a gutsy display as this one.
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