Another fight weekend is in the books, headlined by Saturday’s weekly UFC card from Fight Island. In the main event, Brian Ortega returned from a two-year layoff to submit one of the performances of his life, showcasing staggeringly improved striking to earn a chance at featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski.
I’ll have more on Ortega’s masterpiece this week, but as always, here are looks at three fighters outside the main event who boosted their stock on Saturday:
With his unanimous decision win over the Korean Zombie on Saturday night, Brian Ortega earned himself a UFC title shot. He might not have been the only one. With her first-round knockout of Katlyn Chookagian in the co-main, former UFC strawweight champ Jessica Andrade looks to have locked up a look at flyweight queen Valentina Shevchenko.
If you’ve ever held a UFC championship belt – no matter when it was, at what weight class, and for how long – it’s always going to be easier for you to get another shot than the average fighter. That’s just the nature of the beast. It’s easier to promote champion vs. champion (or former champion) bouts. But Andrade absolutely earned this shit on Saturday, blasting Chookagian with the ol’ Bas Rutten liver shot and sending the division’s No. 1-ranked contender packing.
In doing so, Andrade made history as the first woman to win fights in three different UFC weight classes. It seems like a million years ago, but Andrade actually started at 135, as one of the original crop of female fighters signed in a time where bantamweight was the only women’s weight class in the UFC. Moving down to strawweight ignited Andrade’s career – she’s one of the strongest women in the UFC, regardless of weight class, and her power was a huge difference-maker at 115. Last May, she won the title with an unforgettable slam KO of Rose Namajunas, but only held the belt for three and a half months before dropping it to the brilliant Weili Zhang.
Andrade was a strong fighter at 135, and made it to the mountaintop, however briefly, at 115. In the end, 125 may end up being her most natural fit. Although she’s been in the UFC about as long as the UFC has employed female MMA fighters, Andrade is still just 29 years old, with plenty of good years left. She looked awesome against Chookagian, a seasoned veteran who has established herself as one of the division’s best with her ranginess, good technical striking, cerebral approach and ability to clock unanimous decisions by keeping the fight exactly where she wants it.
But despite all her skill and experience, Chookagian couldn’t keep Andrade off her. Andrade may only be 5-foot-1, but she’s jacked and explosive, and she took down Chookagian multiple times and stung her on the feet before ending her night with those punishing body blows.
You came away from the fight feeling that Shevchenko-Andrade had to be the next fight to make. Shevchenko will be back in the Octagon next month, as she defends against serial weight-misser Jennifer Maia, whom Chookagian outpointed just last November. There’s not a lot of fights between the women’s pound-for-pound elite that haven’t already been done, but Shevchenko and Andrade have never met before in the cage – and if the performance we saw on Saturday is any indication, that could be a really, really good one.
I wrote last week about how 24-year-old Jimmy Crute has been thrown to the wolves since signing with the UFC in 2018 – despite the fact that the Aussie light heavyweight is still one of the youngest fighters in the organization, he seemingly hasn’t had a single easy fight since day one.
By and large Crute has risen to the challenge, establishing himself as one of the sport’s very best prospects at 205 pounds. But I don’t know if he’s had a showing like the one he had on Saturday night, when he destroyed fellow promising youngster Modestas Bukauskas with a devastating right-right-left combo:
On a night defined mostly by decisions, Crute’s KO of Bukauskas was one of the most explosive moments of sudden violence we got. We’re watching Crute grow up in front of our eyes, and we may see him at the top of the division sooner rather than later.
Crute is a good athlete with plenty of natural pop, but he’s largely been regarded as a grappler, and a very good one. Going into this fight, Bukauskas was the one who was considered a real threat on the feet. But if we’re seeing Jimmy Crute grow into his striking promise and really begin to trust himself in the stand-up, the light heavyweight division is going to have to look out.
I’ve seen what I need to see. Let’s get Jimmy Crute a ranked opponent next, and see where this kid goes from there.
In the three top fights of the night, we saw Ortega, Andrade and Crute all turn in extremely impressive performances that left you extremely bullish on their futures. But the single most dominant showing of Saturday night belonged to Korean middleweight Jun Yong Park, who controlled Welshman John Phillips from bell to bell.
Phillips is a heavy-handed tough guy with tons of experience and plenty of quick knockouts on his record – he is, as his countrymen would say, a proper hard bastard. But during his UFC run, his weakness has been made clear: you can take him down and bully him. He was most recently seen being turned into a turnstile by Khamzat Chimaev in July, in one of the fights that launched the Chimaev hype rocket. Park obviously watched that tape.
Park took Phillips down in the first round, and then again in the second round, and again in the third round. In all three rounds, he stayed on top and stayed busy, landing punches over and over and over again. The final statistical margin was ABSOLUTELY LUDICROUS: Park outlanded Phillips 260-13, one of the most outlandish differences in history.
In doing so, Park set a record for most strikes landed by a UFC middleweight in a three-round fight, a mark set 10 years ago by former title challenger Chael Sonnen, who made a living out of performances just like that. Park could have conceivably dominated Phillips any more without actually stopping him – not a bad performance for someone who isn’t even really a wrestler.
Park is actually a stand-up fighter, best known for his sharp boxing and ability to take a punch. He didn’t employ those skills whatsoever on Saturday, but he showed that he can go out of his comfort zone to execute a winning gameplan, which is an ability that should never be understated. Many extremely talented fighters have faltered because they can’t do just that.
So while I would have liked to see the “Iron Turtle” and Phillips throw down on Saturday, I welcomed watching Park plant the Welshman on his back for 15 minutes. It was an excellent performance, and it may prove quite meaningful for his future.
The Big Fight 