Heading into the cage on Saturday night, the disrespect Jan Blachowicz felt was palpable. The 38-year-old UFC light heavyweight champion had completed one of the sport’s greatest ever rags-to-riches stories when he knocked out Dominick Reyes for the title in September: his reward was to be set up as a stepping stone for a fighter angling to become the UFC’s new top star.

Much of the pre-fight promotion ignored Blachowicz in favor of the challenger, Israel Adesanya, the undefeated middleweight champion trying to become one of a very exclusive club of fighters to hold titles in two UFC weight divisions. Adesanya, who had never fought at light heavyweight before, immediately bypassed several deserving challengers to receive a title shot when he announced his intentions to fight at 205. He was everything Blachowicz is not.

The Nigerian-born, New Zealand-raised Adesanya is charismatic, an entertaining and eloquent interview, and fights with a style and flair you don’t often see in mixed martial arts. He comes with a perfectly marketable backstory: a shy kid from far away who was bullied growing up, became interested in martial arts through Tony Jaa movies, and through martial arts found his calling and became a worldwide superstar. Adesanya was an excellent pro kickboxer before committing himself to MMA full-time, entered the UFC with considerable hype, and delivered on every bit of it.

Blachowicz’s situation is much different. Blachowicz grew up in Poland, entering MMA when the sport was nearly nonexistent in continental Europe. He lost his first pro fight to someone no one’s ever heard of. Almost immediately upon reaching the UFC in 2014, he was scuffling: Blachowicz lost four of five UFC fights between April 2015 and April 2017, putting himself at considerable risk of losing his spot. No fighter in the 21st century had had a five-fight stretch with four or more losses and gone on to win a UFC title. (The only two to do it, Frank Shamrock and Maurice Smith, took lumps as rookies thrown into the deep end of the Pancrase submission wrestling torture chamber in the 90s, back when “MMA” was barely even a concept.)

Out of nowhere, Blachowicz somehow managed to unlock his Legendary Polish Power and became a champion. He partly credits his stunning career turnaround to finding the dead body of a man who had hung himself in a forest near Warsaw. (Supposedly, according to Polish myth, touching the rope of a hanged man is good luck.) He also got really into Tony Robbins. Whatever the secret is, Blachowicz entered UFC 259 with a belt around his waist, but his combat sports story meant that he didn’t have nearly the same fanfare as Adesanya.

You can see the different when you watch them both fight. Adesanya is long, fluidly athletic, moves with lightning speed and at times seems to have the perfect counter for every move his opponent makes. Blachowicz reoriented his entire game around the power in his fists, and the power is indeed crushing – but he fights with little of Adesanya’s subtlety, often banking his hopes on landing the one big blow.

Going into the fight, Blachowicz, the champion, was a considerable betting underdog. And true, his path to victory, at least on paper, seemed improbable. Blachowicz has been winning fights with his power, but good luck landing clean on Adesanya. The shocking part about Saturday’s fight is that Blachowicz never landed the big shot. Jan Blachowicz engaged Israel Adesanya in a technical, ranged striking battle – and won.

Sure, Blachowicz used the weight disparity between him and the longer, skinnier Adesanya – who showed up with a pizza at weigh-ins and tipped the scales at five pounds below the light heavyweight limit – to strong effect, powering through with huge takedowns in the fourth and fifth rounds and managing to keep Adesanya on his back. The last even earned him a 10-8 round on two scorecards. Blachowicz would have won even without them. On Saturday, Jan Blachowicz was the better striker than Israel Adesanya. I still can’t believe that’s a real sentence that I just typed.

Blachowicz fought an incredibly smart fight for five rounds, outlanding the middleweight champion almost two-to-one and never letting Adesanya get into a flow. Adesanya is an incredibly cerebral striker, and Blachowicz never once fell into his trap. He removed his powerful rushes forward from his gameplan, erring on the side of caution by getting out of range when Izzy feinted. He got into range, used his jab or a quick combination, then got back out. When he needed the boost on the scorecards, he timed his takedowns brilliantly. This wasn’t the kind of fight Adesanya, or anyone for that matter, expected from Blachowicz. This wasn’t how he was supposed to win. He came in underestimated. That’s probably why he felt so disrespected.

Adesanya’s fantastic length, movement, creativity and vision combine to create a package that seemed impossible to defeat in a striking battle over a five-round fight. But Blachowicz by and large won the stand-up exchanges – he came out ahead on every single metric, and landed the stiffest blows of the fight. Blachowicz fought Adesanya at his own game and won.

Blachowicz’s crushing power is always going to be his calling card, but he showed on Saturday that he’s a whole lot more than that. And now, no one is ever going to disrespect him again.