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CagePotato Presents: The 10 Best UFC Brawls of the Year (So Far)

(This photo and all photos after it via Getty)

It’s the halfway-ish point of the year, which means that we are a mere six or so months away from handing out our annual Potato Awards in categories such as “MMA Fail of the Year”, “Media Shill of the Year”, and the always coveted “Krazy Horse Bennett Arrest of the Year.” But because you Taters have been good this year, we’re going to allow you to open one present early: Our definitive ranking of the best UFC brawls of the year, so far.

It’s been a rocky year for the UFC, to say the absolute least. Pay-per-view numbers are tanking, fan interest is waning due to market oversaturation, and even the promotion’s new video game has been plagued by (albeit hilarious) technical issues. But the great thing about the UFC/MMA in general is that all can be forgiven with a few great fights, and these 10 brawls are undoubtedly the kernels of corn hidden amongst the soggy floor-turds that the UFC has been shitting out this year.

To repeat: This list is only dedicated to the best *brawls* of the year, which implies a fight in which both participants take their fare share of licks. TJ Dillashaw vs. Renan Barao was a one-sided beatdown, albeit a brilliant one-sided beatdown, and therefore bears no mention here. Except that I just mentioned it. God damn it.

Let’s just get to the top 10 brawls of the year, nearly all of which contain links to full fight videos for your viewing pleasure…

#10 — Kevin Souza vs Mark Eddiva: TUF Brazil 3 Finale

(Check out Souza vs. Eddiva in its entirety here.)

A classic example of two guys with more heart than brains (or defensive capabilities) leaving it all in the octagon, Kevin Souza vs. Mark Eddiva opened up the FS1 prelims for the TUF Brazil Finale in a huge way.

Watching Souza vs. Eddiva was kind of like watching two women play Tekken for the very first time, in that both fighters only seemed to understand how one button on their controllers worked — for Eddiva it was leg kicks, for Souza it was the overhand right. These two techniques were traded with absolutely zero setup for two highly entertaining rounds, earning both men a $50,000 “Fight of the Night’ bonus in an evening of otherwise unmemorable decisions and memorable-for-all-the-wrong-ways squash matches. It was Souza, however, who walked away from the fight victorious via an always rare standing TKO.

(This photo and all photos after it via Getty)

By Jared Jones

Let’s just get to the top 10 brawls of the year, nearly all of which contain links to full fight videos for your viewing pleasure…

#10 – Kevin Souza vs Mark Eddiva: TUF Brazil 3 Finale

(Check out Souza vs. Eddiva in its entirety here.)

#9 — Yui Chul Nam vs. Kazuki Tokudome: Fight Night 37

The utter ass-whooping that Kazuki Tokudome suffered in the first round of his fight with Yui Chul Nam at Fight Night 37 was comparable only to Maynard-Edgar 1 in terms of its lopsidedness. From the opening bell, Nam blitzkrieged Tokudome with big right hands both in the clinch and on the break, wobbling his Japanese counterpart multiple times in the process. Had Tokudome been that one French guy from TUF 11, he would have surely quit on his stool between rounds.

But as was the case in Maynard-Edgar 1, the second round told a different story entirely. Tokudome scored a huge double leg takedown in the opening stanza, then utilized some heavy top control to peck away at the South Korean with short shots from above. While not able to inflict nearly as much damage on his opponent as he received in the first round, Tokudome arguably earned a 10-8 of his own in the second thanks to his complete positional dominance. “Askrening”, I believe it’s called.

The first half of the third round was much of the same for Tokudome, who despite having both his eyes nearly swollen shut by the strikes of Nam, continued to dominate with top control. But you can never keep a good Nam down, as they say. “The Korean Bulldozer” (awesome nickname, BTW) was eventually able to reverse the position and secure a takedown of his own, which was apparently all he needed to earn a split decision win.

The Greatest Fights in MMA History Tournament: Vote Now in the Finals!

It all comes down to this. The semifinal round of our Greatest Fights in MMA History Tournament is in the books, and two finalists have emerged after a pair of close battles…

– Dan Henderson vs. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua 1 defeated Forrest Griffin vs. Stephan Bonnar 1, with 55.6% of the vote. And so, a recent epic replaces an older one in the pantheon of all-time great MMA fights. Had to happen eventually.

– Don Frye vs. Yoshihiro Takayama defeated Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen 1, with 52.8% of the vote. I’m surprised it was this close. Kudos to Silva vs. Sonnen 1 for making it competitive, and for their scrappy underdog run in this tournament overall.

So which fight deserves to call itself The Greatest Fight in MMA History — Henderson vs. Rua 1 or Frye vs. Takayama? Vote now, and come back on Wednesday when we reveal the winner!

It all comes down to this. The semifinal round of our Greatest Fights in MMA History Tournament is in the books, and two finalists have emerged after a pair of close battles…

So which fight deserves to call itself The Greatest Fight in MMA History — Henderson vs. Rua 1 or Frye vs. Takayama? Vote now, and come back on Wednesday when we reveal the winner!

The Agony of Being an MMA Fan

(Indeed, all life is pain.)

By Adam Ackerman

I was reminded of something on Sunday night. Not only that I haven’t been to church in decades, but also that it can really hurt to be a fan of a specific fighter. I felt a sense of anger, sadness, and frustration when Mauricio “Shogun” Rua was knocked out by Dan Henderson. I haven’t felt that in years, not since June 26th, 2010, when Fedor Emelianenko suffered his real first loss. That night, I realized it may be better to be a fan of the sport of MMA, and not of individuals. Don’t get me wrong, I still have my favorites, but I try to look at every fight objectively and analytically.

It’s difficult not to put feelings and emotions into a fighter’s performance, because fighting is such an emotional sport. Fighters can’t always win, and don’t compete often. If seeing your favorite guy or gal win makes you happy, and watching them lose makes you sad, you could be in for one hell of a roller-coaster ride.

Being a fan of a fighter is not like being a hockey fan. The Red Wings can lose 15 games in a row and they could still go on a winning streak and make it to the playoffs. No big deal, they have a chance one or two times every week to start over. Not so much in this sport.

(Indeed, all life is pain.)

By Adam Ackerman

If a fighter loses a few in a row, he may have to find a new promotion to fight for, or a new career altogether. So if you place any kind of emotional stake in your favorite fighters winning every time they stare down an opponent, you will be let down quite often. To me, it just doesn’t seem like a wise emotional investment to make. I thought that I had that behind me, but I guess not.

I expected Shogun to win his rematch with Henderson on Sunday, despite the closely contested slugfest they had over two years ago. Dan was coming off of three losses in a row, and I felt Mauricio had the upper hand. He is over a decade younger, is coming off of a knockout win and is a technically superior striker. For two rounds, he nearly proved me right, but seeing him lose the way he did, and in a fight I felt he should have won was devastating.

I suppose I should completely detach myself emotionally from all fights, undeterred by any opinions or preferences I may have. That, or I can let myself enjoy the emotional roller-coaster that goes along with being a fan — let it lift my spirits on the way up, and crash to the bottom as it always does. Ultimately, MMA still has the ability to make me feel, even if those feelings aren’t always pleasant. And that’s not a bad thing, is it?

UFC Fight Night 38: Shogun Rua and the Blurry Line Between Success and Failure

There is a moment at UFC Fight Night 38 when all Mauricio “Shogun” Rua’s dreams are about to come true.
It’s late in the first round, and he’s defending a frenzied attack from Dan Henderson. A few seconds earlier, Henderso…

There is a moment at UFC Fight Night 38 when all Mauricio “Shogun” Rua’s dreams are about to come true.

It’s late in the first round, and he’s defending a frenzied attack from Dan Henderson. A few seconds earlier, Henderson buckled his knees with a counter left hook and now has him backed against the fence, unloading with a right hand, an uppercut, a knee.

For a few beats, things look bleak, but this is Shogun’s world as much as Hendo’s.

When his opponent whiffs on a wild haymaker, Rua strikes with a winging right-left combo that sends Henderson down like an old man grasping for the handrail. Rua swarms him, landing two more lefts before Henderson’s body goes stiff, his hands fall to his sides and his chin floats up in the air for the taking.

Herb Dean darts in, assuming that classic referee pose: Yeah, I’m about to stop this.

This is it. The moment. Rua is about to score his second straight win in the Octagon and maybe a couple lucrative Performance of the Night bonuses as well. He’s about to take the next step in his late career resurgence, inching his way back up the light heavyweight ladder and re-establishing himself as a force at 205 pounds.

Except the moment never comes. Dean takes the longest of looks from a step away, but ultimately elects not to stop the fight. Henderson recovers, scrambles to his feet and then stalls out the rest of the round from his guard when Rua drags him back down.

So they fight on, and a bit less than seven minutes later, Rua is knocked out.

After dominating nearly every inch of their two-plus rounds together, he gets caught by a blistering right hand early in the third. He crumples and rolls, his nose spreading awkwardly to one side, and this time, Dean steps in to wave things off.

Suddenly, Rua is a loser. In a snap—the time it takes to tie a shoe—his world shifts 180 degrees. Without warning, the dominant question about his future is changed, from what’s next to: What’s left?

Like we needed another reminder that fortunes can turn on a dime in this cruel sport. As if we’d forgotten how you can spend an entire fight winning, winning, winning, until suddenly you’ve lost.

That’s just the way it goes sometimes. It’s nobody’s fault, really, but try telling that to Shogun Rua this week as he recuperates from a broken nose, knowing he let one slip away after pretty thoroughly handling Henderson for 10 minutes of an 11-and-a-half-minute fight.

Where once Rua was poised for a restorative victory, he’s now a man on the verge of nothing besides facial surgery and a potential six-month medical suspension. Maybe retirement.

And things were going so well for him early on.

He lashed Hendo with leg kicks, stuffed his feeble takedown attempts and mostly made his striking attack look ineffective and one-dimensional.

After pushing the fight to the brink of a stoppage in the opening stanza, Rua again floored Henderson in the second. This time it was an uppercut that put Hendo on the canvas with 2:50 left in the round. Again, though, Rua got tangled in Henderson’s guard and was unable to deal any significant damage before the horn.

Still, he was certainly up two rounds to none headed into the third, where Henderson fell back on the ace he always has tucked up his sleeve. The explosive power of the former Olympic wrestler finally found its mark a minute in, reducing all of Rua’s momentum to rubble and dashing the sunny future we were all planning for him in the process.

If he had pulled it off, Rua would’ve been duly showered with praise. With two straight wins, he would’ve put some much-needed distance between himself and the back-to-back losses he suffered to Alexander Gustafsson and Chael Sonnen in 2012 and 2013, respectively. He would’ve been slated for a future fight against someone in the light heavyweight top 10—maybe a returning Rashad Evans or even the winner of Anthony Johnson vs. Phil Davis.

Instead, we now see him as potentially done at 32 years old. He’s 1-3 during the previous 18 months and—while Henderson enjoys some time off—Rua is left making his thank-yous in the saddest possible tweet.

Shogun remains a relatively young man, but after a 12-year, 31-fight career and multiple knee surgeries, we’ve unanimously concluded that his best days are behind him. For a short while, he was UFC champion, and during his 12-1 stint in the Pride organization, he was one of the most terrifying figures in the MMA landscape.

He wouldn’t have recaptured those glory days with a win over Henderson, but at the very least, he would’ve bought himself some more time. He would’ve ensured himself some bigger paydays or, if he chose, the luxury of ending his career on a high note and on his own terms.

Instead, he’s looking at an awful long climb back to anything resembling relevance. While he makes it, he may well be haunted by the missed opportunities of this fight.

Maybe if he could’ve kept Hendo down when he had him hurt in the first.

Maybe if he could’ve avoided getting snared in the guard when he stunned him in the second.

Maybe if he could’ve grabbed those dreams when the moments presented themselves, before—in a flash—they were gone for good.

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Hendo vs. Shogun: The Lost Art of the Sneaker

I want to take a look at something that is both painfully absent from most fights and very much in vogue at the moment following Dan Henderson vs. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua II: striking out of the clinch.
I said on Monday that body work is criminally under…

I said on Monday that body work is criminally underused in MMA, but striking on the exit from the clinch is underused everywhere.

First, let’s take a look at how the knockout came about. Henderson was getting worked over handily by Rua, who was actually looking like he understood his striking advantages. He refused to trade Henderson right for right.

Henderson looks bad at distance. He is slow and cumbersome in closing the gap, and it served to make Shogun look like the much better fighter and help him evade punishment. If an opponent is standing in front of Henderson, he’ll uproot the lead leg with the inside low kick and then drop the hammer with his right hand.

If an opponent isn’t within distance to do that, though? Hendo will clumsily run across the ring, miss his target and keep running past. He never looks more like a 40-year-old man than when he is fighting an opponent who keeps his distance.

Henderson’s squatting stance and tendency to stand almost side on—loading up his right hand and taking almost all the power out of his left—also make him susceptible to low kicks. Rua’s better connections were nothing like the kicks of his heyday, but they buckled Hendo’s legs, and the American MMA legend struggled to come back with anything while recovering his stance.

One thing that looked brilliant throughout the fight was Shogun’s jab. In the first match, when all he threw were right hands, Henderson answered with a right hand each time that consistently landed. But the jab cuts so tightly inside an opponent’s right hand that it will beat it 90 percent of the time.

Additionally Henderson keeps his head so far off line to his right that to slip inside Shogun’s jab and throw the right hand over the top (in a cross counter) would be a large movement and far too slow to beat the jab.

Shogun’s jab cut Henderson in half and left Hendo’s big weapon (his right hand) on the outside of Shogun’s shoulder, behind which he tucked his chin.

The jab stopped Henderson from throwing counter rights, which allowed Shogun to have success with his own right hands when he sprinkled them in occasionally. In the first fight, he tried to take advantage of Henderson’s bent-over posture, but because he never set his punches up, it worked out like this:

In this match, Shogun’s jab and low kicks had Hendo worrying and holding back his right, which allowed Rua to land a headache-making uppercut according to plan.

Henderson knew that he had to close the distance to be effective, but his standard setup (inside low kick to right hand) wasn’t cutting the mustard. So he started trying to duck in on Shogun’s hips. Here’s an attempt in the first round:

And here’s a horrible attempt in the second:

In the third, Henderson ducked under as Shogun moved in and stuck to him. Turning Shogun around as he looked to break free, Henderson landed his money punch.

The Sneaker is a punch described by Jack Dempsey in his classic Championship Fighting. In boxing, punching on the break is illegal if the referee does the breaking. But many boxers forget that if the clinch is broken by the participants, it is entirely legal to punch on the break.

Some savvier boxers (Roberto Duran especially) would body punch their way into a clinch a few times, each time going limp as if to say, “OK, we’ll break.” As soon as the opponent broke without the referee actually saying anything, bam!—in would come the right hand or the left hook.

It’s essentially a sucker punch—hitting the opponent when he isn’t thinking about fighting—but the results can be remarkable.

Henderson also turned Shogun around to meet his right hand, and boxing has similar examples of fighters doing the same thing. Georges Carpentier famously used to “waltz” his opponents into punches. Here’s a nice example of Gerald McClellan throwing his right hand, acting as if to enter a clinch, and then turning his opponent and coming up with a left hook. He puts the exact same principles in action, and they work wonderfully:

Striking out of the clinch has always been undervalued, and it saved Henderson’s bacon in this match. The flagrant hammerfists to the back of Shogun’s head as he turtled probably finished the fight (which is a shame; it seems like anything is legal if the other guy is already hurt), but without the clinch, turn and right hand, Henderson would have likely been diced up at range all night and gassed by the end of the third as he always is.

I’ll leave you with another beautiful example of striking out of the clinch in MMA. Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic defends Fedor Emelianenko‘s judo and feels pretty good about it until he gets his bell rung by a hook on the exit:

Pick up Jack’s e-books Advanced Striking and Elementary Striking from his blog, Fights Gone By. Jack can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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Dan Henderson Still Odd Man Out at 205, Despite Win over Shogun Rua

Dan Henderson couldn’t solve all of his problems with a single punch at UFC Fight Night 38—just the most pressing of them.The right hand that turned Mauricio “Shogun” Rua’s nose into a gentle S-curve abruptly boomeranged H…

Dan Henderson couldn’t solve all of his problems with a single punch at UFC Fight Night 38—just the most pressing of them.

The right hand that turned Mauricio “Shogun” Rua’s nose into a gentle S-curve abruptly boomeranged Henderson back into the world of the living on Sunday, after 10 minutes where he looked on the verge of riding his battle-scarred shield into retirement. It snapped his three-fight losing streak, put him back on the map in the light heavyweight division and likely ensured him at least one more relevant fight.

But that single punch wasn’t a cure-all.

If the community’s reaction to Hendo’s third-round KO of Rua dictate anything it’s that perhaps the MMA industry has evolved beyond the point where we’ll greet an unexpected win by a 43-year-old fighter by gladly shouting, “He’s back!”

We seem obliged to take a more measured approach these days—more like Henderson in those first two rounds. Most people are opting for a wait-and-see approach on Hendo’s future, which is probably a good thing, though it certainly leaves the man himself on uncertain ground.

Even bathed in the glory of double Fight Night bonuses, Henderson’s prospects in the jam-packed 205-pound ranks don’t look particularly rosy. Not to answer his Toby Keith walkout music with a Jerry Reed reference, but the former Pride champion still has a long way to go and a short time to get there.

That one eruption of thrilling offense aside, we still don’t really know how much gas is left in the tank.

For one thing, there are the ramifications of the recent testosterone replacement therapy ban to consider. Henderson had been granted a temporary stay leading up to the Rua bout, but now he’ll have to begin the process of transitioning off TRT and figuring out what’s next. If half of what we’ve read about that journey is true, it doesn’t stand to be a very fun experience.

Supposing the aging former Olympian can come up with a way to soldier on, it will still be amid a light heavyweight class that won’t be taking applications for new title challengers before this time next year.

Provided everything moves according to plan—meaning no rematches, no injuries, no questionable decisions—champion Jon Jones is already booked up through 2014. He’ll fight Glover Teixeira at UFC 172 next month. The winner of that fight will take on Alexander Gustafsson this summer, and the winner of that fight is believed to be headed for a date with Daniel Cormier around New Year’s.

At that rate, Henderson—who will turn 44 in August—would need one, maybe two more victories to recapture the standing he enjoyed in the division as recently as September of 2012. That’s when he was scheduled to fight Jones for the 205-pound title before his knee injury forced the cancelation of UFC 151.

Nobody really expects him to once again reach those heights. It seems his advancing age and the 0-3 slump he suffered during 2013 have lowered our expectations for him. Maybe that makes us cynics. Maybe it makes us realists. Or maybe it just makes us fans who no longer want to see our favorite fighters carry on too long.

As it stands, it’s difficult to discern exactly what kind of contributor Henderson can be moving forward. A dependable, bankable spectacle fighter? A gatekeeper? A member of the senior tour, sentenced to live out his fighting days taking on the Shogun Ruas, Antonio Rogerio Nogueiras and Cung Les of the world?

That’s all decent work if you can get it, but any of it would seem like a sad ending for a fighter as great and well-liked as Henderson.

Clearly, his stock is up a bit in the wake of his win over Rua, but exactly how far the momentum can carry him very much remains to be seen.

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