(Props: Zona de Ataque)
OK, watch the above video and please tell us if you can figure out what in the Sam Hell just happened. Evilasio Silva and Claudinei Angelo met at JF Fight Evolution in Juiz de Fora, Brazil, on Saturday and things were going as MMA fights normally do — both men fighting inside an enclosed space — until, for some reason, Angelo decided he had had enough.
“When Angelo clearly spat his mouthpiece to recover from the punches, the referee refused to stop the fight,” wrote MMA Fighting’s Guilherme Cruz, who first brought this strange fight to our attention. “Angelo went on and asked for a ‘time out.’ Silva and [the referee] didn’t understand what he was asking for, but Angelo decided to quit. The door was locked, so his only way out was jumping off the fence and leaving the arena.”
And, he did. Now, we didn’t see the entire match and Cruz has more description of what happened before Angelo decided to hit splitsville, but it doesn’t seem as if the quitting fighter was upset about some supposed unrecognized fouls on the part of his opponent or anything like that.
Angelo simply broke free from the clinch, tried to call a time out by making the sign with his hands that is universally recognized in sports where participants are actually allowed to call time outs, tried to open up the cage, and when that failed, he climbed the chain-link and then walked out of the arena. As Angelo did that, boos cascaded down on him from the confused crowd.
This might be the strangest scene in a cage since Paulo Filho started having a conversation with his accountant during his second fight against Chael Sonnen. We don’t know what Angelo was feeling, but it didn’t appear as if he was in any particular danger or taking an inordinate amount of punishment. Also, it isn’t as if this was his MMA debut. The guy is a veteran and it is bizarre for him to suddenly want nothing to do with a fight.
What’s your best guess, ‘Taters?