Mickey Gall finally coaxed a little bit of attitude out of Sage Northcutt during the first round of their co-main event bout at Saturday’s UFC on Fox 22.
In the second round, Gall wheedled a submission out of Northcutt, too.
The rear naked choke victory was Gall’s third win this year and only turned up the heat on what might be the strangest career going right now in the UFC.
All things being equal, Gall shouldn’t even be fighting in the Octagon at this stage of his professional life. Yet here he is, 3-0 in the world’s premier MMA organization after walking through another of the UFC’s handpicked stars.
With just four pro fights under his belt—all of them wins and all coming during the last 13 months—he remains impossibly young and ridiculously green by the UFC’s usual standards.
After defeating Northcutt, however, it’s conceivable he’s also on his way to becoming one of the promotion’s most intriguing young talents.
There is still a lot we don’t know about Gall. Each of his UFC wins have come over opponents just as inexperienced and unproven as he is. But if nothing else, as Bleacher Report’s Patrick Wyman pointed out on Saturday, he’s off to a good start:
Gall talked himself out of obscurity and into the big time when he called out CM Punk on an episode of Dana White’s Lookin’ for a Fight reality show filmed in late 2015.
The UFC president seemed to like the kid’s—and you’ll have to excuse this vocabulary choice—gall and signed him to a contract specifically to be the debut opponent for the 38-year-old former professional wrestler.
When Gall and Punk finally met on pay-per-view at UFC 203 in September, Gall won by quick-and-easy choke just two minutes, 14 seconds into the first round. Immediately afterward, he called out Northcutt, saying the UFC’s sunniest star was “corny” and that he wanted to “punch the spikes out of his hair.”
Northcutt accepted and agreed to temporarily move up from lightweight to welterweight in order to make it happen.
Unfortunately, that gambit did not work out for him.
Gall tried to bait Northcutt with trash-talk during the lead-up to the bout, but the always-positive 20-year-old Texan wouldn’t take the bait.
Once they were in the cage, however, Northcutt appeared to show a bit of an edge.
After Gall scored an early takedown and succeeded in keeping him on the mat for much of the first round, Northcutt finally worked his way to his feet with a bit under two minutes left on the clock. Northcutt waved for Gall to stand with him, but as Gall attempted to change positions, Northcutt struck him with a hard hammerfist to the face.
The two spent the rest of that round exchanging words between punches and kicks. That bad blood spilled over into the beginning of the second, but Gall cut things short when he floored Northcutt with a wild overhand right that landed behind the ear.
Gall followed Northcutt to the mat and after a brief period of jockeying for position, secured the choke and forced him to tap out just 1:40 into the stanza.
It was Northcutt’s second loss in three fights and his second this year while fighting as a welterweight. All told, he’s 3-2 in the UFC and will have to work hard moving forward to justify the hype the UFC stirred up around him after signing him in the fall of 2015
Once again, Gall had a name ready to call out during his postfight interview with UFC color commentator Brian Stann.
“I’d like to welcome back Dan Hardy,” Gall said inside the cage. “If he’s coming back he says he wants to come back for a marquee fight. I think I’m a marquee fight right now.”
This call-out was particularly out-of-the-blue, given that Hardy hasn’t fought since 2012 after being diagnosed with a heart condition. In recent months, Hardy made some noise about wanting to return to action, but still needs to be medically cleared. He currently works as a broadcaster on many of the UFC’s overseas events.
For his part, Hardy appeared to take the challenge in stride:
Still, you can’t blame Gall for trying.
Talking his way into one big fight after another has worked wonders for him so far.
On a four-bout main card Saturday that was designed to showcase a new crop of stars to the UFC’s network TV audience, he might emerge as the most memorable.
He’ll have to keep winning in order to keep the momentum building and it remains to be seen if matchmakers can continue to scrounge up opponents with comparable experience and skills.
In a strange way, however, Gall appears to be slowly transforming himself into a fighter the UFC might like to promote—all by continuing to beat fighters the UFC would probably like to promote.
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