2020 will go down as an absolutely catastrophic year for a variety of reasons, but at the end of the day, we still had some darn good cage-fightin’. And with the UFC’s final event of the year wrapping up this past Saturday, we can just about close the book on the year that was in mixed martial arts. As the first part of my look back on the last 365 days of MMA, I’m giving out my major awards in the sport for 2020.
Fighter of the Year: Deiveson Figueiredo
Before UFC flyweight champion Deiveson Figueiredo took to the cage for his final title defense of the year against Brandon Moreno earlier this month, I wrote that with a win, the Brazilian would have the honor of Fighter of the Year 100 percent in the bag.
He didn’t win, instead battling Moreno to a majority draw. The award is still his, by a long shot. Figueiredo wasn’t just the most active UFC star of the year – where most other UFC champions only fought once, maybe twice, Figueiredo fought four times – he emerged as one of the most dangerous pound-for-pound fighters in the sport, and may have saved a flyweight division that at the beginning of the year seemed like might be limping towards dissolution.
Figueiredo entered 2020 as a talented fighter rising up a 125-pound division that received little mainstream attention and was often publicly scorned by UFC president Dana White. He left it as the first UFC fighter in 15 years to headline two consecutive pay-per-views. And he was only able to do all that because he’s a violent, violent man.
Figueiredo started the year by bathing in the blood of longtime UFC flyweight contender Joseph Benavidez – not once, but twice – and securing the flyweight division a convincing champion that it desperately needed. He then flexed his muscles in November by choking out Alex Perez, a brilliant rising talent, in less than two minutes.
But if that wasn’t all, Figueiredo then immediately turned around and saved a UFC 256 that was desperately in need of a new main event, agreeing on just three weeks’ notice to face the No. 1 contender in his weight class, Moreno. These are things that simply do not happen at the championship level! What ensued was an instant classic, a five-round brawl on the shortlist for Fight of the Year, and one where Figueiredo would have won by unanimous decision if he hadn’t been docked a point for booting Moreno in the nuts in the third round.
If that kick lands six inches higher, we’re talking about Figueiredo’s 2020 as one of the best single years ever for a UFC fighter. No UFC flyweight has ever competed in four title matches in one year – the closest Demetrious Johnson ever came was when he defended his belt three times in 2013, beating John Dodson, John Moraga, and Benavidez.
All four of those fights have been entertaining, violent and memorable, and he’s come away from every one looking like a million bucks. And he’s given a threatened division a new cornerstone. Can’t do much better than that.
Breakthrough Fighter of the Year: Kevin Holland
All of that would also give Figueiredo a convincing argument for the title of Breakthrough Fighter of the Year, considering most casual UFC fans probably hadn’t heard of him before the year started. But this year, this award was really a two-horse race.
It was stunning to watch Khamzat Chimaev‘s sudden rocket rise from complete unknown to a star worthy of headlining a UFC event – he’ll be main-eventing a Fight Night card against Leon Edwards early next year. Winning three fights in comically dominant fashion, setting the modern UFC record for quickest turnaround between wins, and publicly becoming a favorite of Dana White will do that for you.
But the quality of Chimaev’s wins leaves something to be desired. His first two victims, John Phillips and Rhys McKee, have since looked subpar in subsequent UFC appearances, and they have an overall combined 1-7 UFC record. And while his quick KO win over veteran Gerald Meerschaert was awesome, we weren’t doing backflips when Ian Heinisch did the same thing to Meerschaert just three months before.
Only one fighter has combined Chimaev’s level of activity, talent and entertainment while also beating higher-quality fighters. That would be Kevin Holland, the lanky, trash-talking middleweight who has emerged as the fighter perfectly suited to the COVID age, and who could promise to be one of the UFC’s next great superstars.
Earlier this month, Holland tied a UFC record with five wins in this calendar year, all of which have come since May. Holland has become an ever-present fixture on these empty-arena shows, a shining light in our dreary home-bound lives. Not only has he built up a big highlight reel, he’s become a guy you can’t miss – his fights are always fun, he’s always talking shit, and the skills he puts on display are always tantalizing.
Holland has four wins by stoppage, three in the first round. In August, he sniped Joaquin Buckley with a laser right hand in the third round, knocking Buckley’s mouthpiece out of his head – considering the year Buckley is having, that win looks better and better as time goes on. In September, he beat heavy-handed Briton Darren Stewart in a relentlessly entertaining brawl where both guys yelled at each other for 15 minutes. But the big highlight was days ago, when he stepped up to fight grappling legend Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza, a longtime top contender and a massive leap in competition.
In the biggest fight of his career, Holland earned an absolutely outrageous Knockout of the Year contender, knocking Jacare out cold while sitting on his ass.
He’s young, entertaining, brash, engaging, he fights all the time, and he can do things like that, that you’ve simply never seen before. Throw all those ingredients into a pot and you have a star being born.
Fight of the Year: Weili Zhang vs. Joanna Jedrzejczyk
2020 has been defined by empty arenas. We’ve gotten used to it – it’s just a fact of life, a necessary evil if you want to continue putting on sporting events during a pandemic. But there’s nothing like hearing the roar of a crowd during a classic moment. And while we’ve had some fantastic fights since the pandemic started – Figueiredo-Moreno and Dan Hooker–Dustin Poirier come to mind – they’re always going to be lacking the ambiance, that little extra oomph, that a great fight in front of a full crowd will have.
And we did have some events in front of full crowds this year, at least for the first couple months. And as it happens, in that short window, we had one of the best UFC fights of the century – almost certainly the single best women’s MMA fight of all time. In early March, in the last UFC event held in front of a crowd, strawweight champion Weili Zhang and the great Joanna Jedrzejczyk went to war for five rounds in what will go down as the most memorable fight of the year.
The fight was a display of two of the best strikers in mixed martial arts at their absolute peak, dishing out and walking through unimaginable amounts of punishment. Zhang, the greatest fighter to ever come out of China, put on the performance of her life, wowing with her technical ability and her unstoppable pace.
Joanna, the former strawweight champ who, from 2015-17, put together one of the most impressive title runs in women’s MMA history, absorbed so many Zhang punches that by the end of the fight, her forehead was so ridiculously swelled that it looked like she was midway through budding into a second Joanna. She walked through every bit of it, never stopped coming, and pushed the champion to her absolute limit.
All of it was done in front of a roaring, sold-out crowd in Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena, just days before the pandemic would become real to most in America. It was the last moment like that we’d get to share together for a very long time. With over 15,000 people urging them on, Zhang and Joanna pushed a thrilling, breakneck pace for 25 minutes. Zhang took home a split decision victory, but that night, everyone who watched it was a winner.
Hopefully, someday soon, we’ll get to experience something like that again.
Knockout of the Year: Joaquin Buckley vs. Impa Kasanganay
Really, this year, there was simply no other choice.
Joaquin Buckley’s impossible spinning taekwondo kick was not only the knockout of the year, it’s universally ranked as one of the greatest knockouts of all time. It was so amazing that it immediately inspired me to write up my own all-time UFC KO rankings – I had Buckley’s kick No. 2. Many would have it No. 1, and I won’t argue.
UFC fans – really, sports fans in general, since ESPN replayed the knockout incessantly in the days after – have seen this knockout a million times since it happened. Somehow, it makes even less sense now than it did then. The bewilderment I felt the first time I saw it remains, and I think it’s going to be a long time before I forget the feeling of seeing this happen live. It was like a delayed reaction: Buckley does something weird that happens so quickly that you don’t quite understand it, there’s a second of pause, and then all of a sudden Kasanganay’s eyes roll back into his head and he falls unconscious to the canvas. In that moment, confusion gives way to complete shock. It was unbelievable.
It reminds one a bit of Anderson Silva‘s epic front kick knockout of Vitor Belfort, where you had someone try a technique that really hadn’t been ever seen before, and it worked to a stunning effect. But while the front kick has since become somewhat commonplace – we’ve had a number of front kick to the face knockouts since then – I somehow doubt this spinning back kick is going to be implemented into people’s regular repertoire.
It’s entirely possible that we never, ever see something like this again. And it just reminded us that this sport is still showing us things that are completely new. It doesn’t get much better.
Submission of the Year: A.J. McKee vs. Darrion Caldwell
Speaking of things that are completely new! UFC flyweight Jimmy Flick nearly stole this award on Saturday with his flying triangle submission win over Cody Durden, only the third time that submission has ever been successfully pulled off in UFC history. But for this award, we’ll head outside the UFC for the latest moment of magic produced by Bellator’s brightest young star, A.J. McKee.
Bellator’s Featherweight Grand Prix was interrupted by COVID, but finally got back underway this fall. One of the more interesting bouts on the ledger was the meeting of McKee, the undefeated prospect who had established himself as one of the world’s best rising 145-pound fighters, and Darrion Caldwell, the former bantamweight champion moving up in weight.
Many, like myself, were concerned with how McKee would do against an aggressive wrestler like Caldwell who wouldn’t mind grinding out a decision win. The answer: he tapped him out with a neck crank from guard that was different from anything we had ever seen before. Neat!
The submission was a marvelous piece of invention from a fighter so talented that he’s basically just rubbing it in your face. That technique, which is known as the “100%,” is usually used to set up a sweep in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and is rarely used to actually tap someone out. McKee hung on tight and had the squeeze strength to actually finish it.
That submission would be incredible on its own, even if it didn’t come in the semifinals of a big tournament and in the biggest fight of the fighter’s career. But it was. And it’s going to go down as the best submission we saw in all of 2020.
The Big Fight 