On This Day — November 13: Holloway Outlasts Rodríguez in a Fight of the Night Classic at UFC Fight Night 197
On November 13, 2021, the UFC Apex hosted a featherweight fight so good that it made the rest of the card — a card that tied the UFC record for knockouts — feel like a supporting act. And eleven years earlier, on the same date in Germany, the quietest contender in middleweight history ground out the win that finally, after years of waiting, put him in a title fight.
On November 13, 2021, the UFC Apex hosted a featherweight fight so good that it made the rest of the card — a card that tied the UFC record for knockouts — feel like a supporting act. And eleven years earlier, on the same date in Germany, the quietest contender in middleweight history ground out the win that finally, after years of waiting, put him in a title fight.
2021 — Holloway and Rodríguez go to the well
Max Holloway was supposed to be passing a torch. The former featherweight champion, beaten twice by Alexander Volkanovski, met Yair Rodríguez — all spinning kicks and improvisation — in a fight widely read as the changing of the guard. Instead it became a 25-minute argument that the guard had not changed. Holloway's volume is a weather system: 230 significant strikes landed — the two men threw more than 750 significant strikes between them — with takedowns mixed in, long stretches fought at a pace that assumes the other man will eventually stop answering. Rodríguez, to his permanent credit, never stopped. He took the first round on several cards, survived the middle-round storm, and in the fifth opened Holloway up with an elbow and charged like a man who thought the fight was still winnable — which, on the cards (49–46, 48–47, 48–47), it nearly was.
Holloway held on, and both men were taken to hospital; their post-fight photograph might as well be the fight's official portrait. It was the obvious Fight of the Night, on a card that was itself an anomaly: eight knockouts, tying the UFC's single-event record, with nine of eleven fights ending early. "If you want to be the best, you've got to beat the best — and the best is 'Blessed,' baby," Holloway said, through a swollen face. The win set him on the road to a third Volkanovski fight; the loss somehow raised Rodríguez's stock more than most men's wins do. November 13, 2021 is what a Fight Night is for.
2010 — Okami's long wait ends in Oberhausen
UFC 122, at the König Pilsener Arena in Oberhausen before 8,421 fans, was a card from another UFC — Spike TV, $60,000 bonuses, and a main event between two men perpetually one win from Anderson Silva. Yushin Okami and Nate Marquardt fought a title eliminator with almost no highlight-reel moments at all: Okami pressed, clinched, controlled the fence, and took the unanimous decision 29–28, 30–27, 29–28 by being the aggressor in a fight neither man could set alight.
It was not a classic. It was something rarer in retrospect — a hinge. Okami, the last man to hold a win over Silva (a 2006 disqualification in another promotion), had been the division's nearly-man for four years, winning fights too quietly to be marketed and losing only to the very best; the Oberhausen decision finally cashed the ticket, sending him to Rio the following August for the rematch at UFC 134. Marquardt, a former title challenger himself, would cycle through two more promotions' worth of chances; Okami got one night in Silva's cage, which is what the whole card had been about. Germany's own Dennis Siver supplied the card's finish of note, submitting Andre Winner with a rear-naked choke in the first round for Submission of the Night.
Also on this day
- 2021, Las Vegas: Khaos Williams knocked out Miguel Baeza with a counter right hook in the third round — Performance of the Night.
- 2021, Las Vegas: Andrea Lee battered Cynthia Calvillo to a corner stoppage after two rounds — the night's other Performance of the Night.
- 2021, Las Vegas: Marcos Rogério de Lima knocked out veteran Ben Rothwell in 32 seconds.
A featherweight classic at the Apex, a grinder's breakthrough in Germany: November 13 rewards the men who simply refuse to leave.
