The beauty of mixed martial arts is that the unexpected can happen at any moment. One second, you’re dancing around the octagon, dominating your opponent with an arsenal of attacks, and just when you think everything is going your way—when you truly believe that you’ve somehow obtained faster-than-human reflexes—you’re staring up at the ceiling.
What happened? Well, mixed martial arts did. In this sport, it only takes a momentary slip of concentration to taste bitter defeat; sometimes, you can’t even comprehend that you were knocked out cold, Jet Li style by a move that shouldn’t have worked but did.
Here are six standout moments in MMA when moves traditionally reserved for Hollywood actually worked against professional mixed martial arts fighters.