The ending was as sudden as it was violent, poor Jorge Masvidal’s head twisted in grotesque fashion, his chin propelled into his own shoulder thanks to the force of welterweight champion Kamaru Usman’s blistering right hand. Masvidal, who spent the entire week preceding the bout questioning the champ’s punching power, even expressing sympathy to a man born without magic in his fists, hit the mat so hard he woke himself up, a problem Usman solved quickly with a series of brutal hammerfists.
Masvidal, announcer Joe Rogan had told us throughout the broadcast, was impossible to hurt, an indestructible fighting machine who could be gamed for 25 minutes, maybe, but never finished. But no man is immune to the inherent weaknesses of the human vessel—and Masvidal was no exception.
It was the perfect ending to the perfect night of fights at a kinetic UFC event held in front of thousands of rabid fans for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic changed all of our lives. UFC 261 had begun with a barnburner between Ariane Carnelossi and Nia Liang and concluded with Usman’s zinger of a straight right, one of the perfect punches in the sport’s history.
For long time fans, or anyone who had studied Masvidal’s fights for a sign of weakness, it was more than just a punch. It carried with it the echoes of history, familiar in a way that was more than a little eerie.
In 2008, with our beloved Pride Fighting Championships discarded into the trash bin of history, Japanese mixed martial arts continued forward as best it could. Two promotions emerged to fight the good fight—Dream and the Sengoku Raiden Championship, dueling ships attempting to weather the storm. Sengoku found the first port in that post-Pride storm, a spot on Fuji TV, long the home of Pride itself, a powerful network in a nation still dominated at the time by terrestrial television.
It’s the promotion’s third event that springs to our attention in the aftermath of UFC 261, its first at Saitama Super Arena, 30 kilometers north of Tokyo. The futuristic design of architect Dan Meiss, the Arena was one of the world’s great venues, equipped with a moveable section of seats that allowed it to become a comfortable space for more intimate events or expand to seat 36,500 for mega-shows of the kind Pride promoted.
The arena here was half full—the promotion, like Dream, never managed to recreate the energy of Pride and both operated like shadows of that promotion, never emerging into the light as a separate entity. Within four years both would be dead.
But that’s a story for another time. Our focus here was on the second bout of the night, a mostly under-the-radar match between internet sensation Jorge Masvidal, a kind of bootleg Kimbo Slice who emerged onto the scene after some minor notoriety as a YouTube street fighter, and jiu jitsu specialist Rodrigo Damm. A former wrestling champion in Brazil, Damm was expected to take the fight to the mat and work his magic on the mat. Instead, it was a straight right hand that ended the night for Masvidal, a punch that looked like the clay from which Usman formed his own knockout blow.
For “Gamebred,” the illusion of being among the world’s best fighters likely came to an end the moment his head bounced off the canvas. He rose to fame after a win over Darren Till in London, not thanks to his exploits in the cage, but because of a backstage encounter with Leon Edwards where he coined his catchphrase “three piece and a soda.” Masvidal (35-15), a charismatic presence with a keen sense of the moment, became a Diaz style cult figure and a legitimate drawing card in a sport less dictated by traditional metrics of success than most.
A transition into extreme right wing politics and Trump culthood kept his name in the headlines, but with that gimmick DOA after the election and a record of just 3-4 in the last four years, a course correction and a return to the middle of the card seems overdue.
Usman, now 19-1 (14-0 in UFC), appears on the opposite trajectory. He’s already beaten the top three contenders in the UFC’s house ranking system and six of the top ten. If he clears out the division, the hyperbole already placing him above the great Georges St-Pierre in the welterweight hierarchy may transition into fact—the Nigerian Nightmare may indeed be the best fighter to ever compete at 170 pounds.