Yahoo Sports Will any of the fighters from UFC 236's violent slugfests ever be the same?
The Daily Double hit on Saturday, as UFC 236 ended with a pair of epically violent championships bouts.
Israel Adesanya and Kelvin Gastelum put on a memorable slugfest in the co-main event in what surely will be the Fight of the Year for 2019. Each man went down to the canvas and had to summon a desire to keep going after taking the best his opponent had to offer.
When it ended, a huge fifth round lifted Adesanya to the win and gave him the interim middleweight title.
That, though, was just the co-main event of UFC 236 at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
Featherweight champion Max Holloway and Dustin Poirier were up next in a battle for the interim lightweight belt, and damned if they didn’t nearly equal Adesanya and Gastelum.
Poirier admitted that after getting off to a big early lead, Holloway began to get to him in the third and that he was in trouble.
“There was a time in that third round I got hit with a couple of good shots and I was hurting,” Poirier said. “I looked at Max and he was throwing a lot of volume and he hurt me some more. I felt the fight was slipping away, man, but I dug down. I said, ‘[Expletive] it. If I’m going to go out, you’re going to have to put me all the way out.’ ”
Like Adesanya, he persevered and left the Octagon with a belt around his waist.
It doesn’t seem fair to call either Gastelum or Holloway losers, though; they spilled their blood and pushed themselves to peaks they might not have been certain they could reach in going after the title.
When the fights were over, they were four very beaten up and weary men.
Seeing each of them afterward made one wonder if any of them would ever be the same. History has proven that every fighter, no matter how tough, no matter how skilled, has his or her limits. There are only so many of these kinds of battles one can take.
They suck the life slowly out of a fighter. As a group, UFC fighters are up there with rugby players and rodeo cowboys as the toughest people alive. They absorb insane amounts of punishment and not only come back for more, but also egg on the crowd in the process.
Adesanya is poised to become perhaps the UFC’s next big superstar, following the path that went from Royce Gracie to Tito Ortiz to Chuck Liddell to Georges St-Pierre to Ronda Rousey and eventually to Conor McGregor.
Adesanya has that certain something about him, starting with immense talent. He’s unique in the way that he can use his limbs to dole out punishment, but he’s a clever and charismatic guy who can attract a crowd and keep it mesmerized, whether he’s in the cage fighting or behind a microphone talking.
But if you saw him after the fight, his sixth in 14 months in the UFC, you saw a guy in need of a long rest. His eyes were slits; his cheeks were swollen and puffy, his lip fat. He looked like five guys mugged him in an alley.
And he was the winner!
Holloway had a huge gash on his forehead and blood covered his face like it used to stream down the faces of legendary ex-pro wrestlers Terry Funk, Abdullah the Butcher or The Iron Sheik. They would nick their foreheads with a blade to start the blood flowing, understanding that when it mixed with their sweat, it would look a lot worse than it was.
Holloway, though, didn’t nick himself with a blade. He got his cut courtesy of a knee to the face.
It was remarkable the way he smiled after the fight as he chatted with UFC TV analyst Joe Rogan while his face was swollen and misshapen.
Hopefully, each of them returns healthy and none the worse for wear after a long rest.
But the history of the fight game tells you that at least one of them, and maybe all of them, will never be quite the same again. They won’t be as quick, they won’t take shots as well, they won’t react the same.
Adesanya and Poirier have extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead of them. Adesanya will have to put his interim belt up against Robert Whittaker, who is the champion but couldn’t fight Gastelum in February when he got sick after the weigh-in and ultimately needed to be hospitalized.
When Whittaker is healthy and ready for action, he’ll meet Adesanya for the undisputed belt.
Poirier will have to fight Khabib Nurmagomedov, who has at this point lapped the field in an incredibly deep and gifted lightweight division. Nurmagomedov remains suspended as a result of his actions following UFC 229 in October, when he leaped over the cage to get at Dillon Danis, a corner man for McGregor.
That figures to be a difficult fight.
These fighters literally put their lives on the line each time they walk through the cage door. They’re wired differently than the rest of us and they willingly put themselves in harm’s way for our entertainment. In some regards, they’re like policemen and firemen, who run toward trouble as everyone else goes the opposite direction in search of safety.
In the best-case scenario, all four of them return to the cage with no issues, with no obvious effects of such a traumatic night.
But if one or any number of them don’t look quite right the next time out, think back to that night in Atlanta and you’ll understand why.
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