Another fight weekend is in the books. This past weekend gave us a rare Saturday night off from UFC competition, and was highlighted by Bellator’s return to action and debut on Showtime. The main event, the second of two quarterfinals in Bellator’s featherweight grand prix tournament, turned out to be yet another showcase for the violent talents of champion Patricio Pitbull, who choked Emmanuel Sanchez unconscious with a guillotine within the first round.
That sets up a hotly-anticipated showdown with undefeated rising star A.J. McKee in the finals, a match I cannot wait for. I’ll have more on this matchup and the tournament that has transpired this week, but for now, here’s a look at three fighters outside the main event who boosted their stock this past week:
Jason Jackson
The only thing that could stop welterweight Jason Jackson on Friday night was himself. I’m talking literally. In Bellator 255’s co-main, a matchup between Jackson and fellow highly ranked 170er Neiman Gracie, Jackson was, quite simply, bigger and stronger. 6-foot-1 with a reach that was listed on Saturday at 78.5 inches, the Jamaican overpowered Gracie in almost every clinch position, shut down the BJJ black belt’s submission attempts, and kept him at range on the feet.
Only it all almost went awry midway through the first round, when Jackson nearly took himself out of the fight in fluky circumstances. After stuffing and reversing a Gracie takedown attempt, Jackson somehow injured his own eye by scraping it against the cage fence, allowing Gracie to take advantage and take his back.
Fortunately, Jackson was miraculously able to keep out of danger, even when Gracie turned him over into mount, get back to the feet and reassert control. Even so, he was a compromised fighter in there with the scion of the most decorated family in grappling history. The left eye was swollen from that point on, and Jackson admitted after the fight that he didn’t really start to regain his full sight until sometime in the third round.
A one-eyed fighter with a Gracie on his back should get choked out 10 times out of 10. Jackson was strong and sharp enough that it didn’t matter a bit on Friday. Jackson actually managed to win the round in which he was injured, the judges obviously considering the fact that Gracie ended up in those dominant positions due to a strange, self-inflicted wound, not due to any successful work of his own – while Jackson controlled the clinch and the stand-up. Gracie managed to take Jackson down in the second and win the round based off top pressure, but again, Jackson was able to fend off Gracie’s submission attack, seemingly easily.
Fully settled back in by the third, Jackson took the thing home, using effective range striking, takedown defense and powerful top control to seal up a unanimous decision. I mentioned on Friday’s preview that Jackson’s greatest skill is knowing exactly how to use his frame and his physical gifts to his advantage in the cage – perhaps he picked up a few pointers from Kamaru Usman, his former teammate for several years at Sanford MMA in Florida. It’s not necessarily an entertaining skill to watch all the time, but it wins fights. Jackson is, quite simply, big as shit for welterweight, but there are plenty of fighters who are big for their weight class that don’t know how to exploit that. Jackson has turned it into an incredibly difficult obstacle for his opponents to overcome.
Gracie, who implemented a ruthless wrestling attack on Jon Fitch – quite an accomplished wrestler himself – in his last time in the cage, found out just how hard it is to assert any kind of grappling advantage against Jackson, who was just too strong for him. He also fared well on the feet, showing that he knows how to win at range, effectively using the jab and moving out of the way of Gracie’s pushes forward. This jives with everything we’ve seen from Jackson in Bellator, as he’s started to bubble under as one of welterweight’s top contenders.
After dropping his debut to three-time NCAA national wrestling champion Ed Ruth, by way of a very controversial split decision, Jackson has gone 4-0 against a decent strength of schedule: UFC vets Kiichi Kunimoto and Jordan Mein, a dominant performance against former UFC champion Benson Henderson, and a convincing win against the No. 3-ranked Gracie in which his fluke injury was the main obstacle he faced. He’s putting himself on hard mode against top-ranked fighters and getting the job done anyway.
There are some big, big fights in Jason Jackson’s future. Good thing that he’s just as big as the moment.
Even in a promotion that’s very well known for bizarre shit happening all the time, the Bellator heavyweight division is particularly snakebit. Nothing seemingly ever goes right: whether it’s idiotic no-contests and disqualifications in big fights, or the division’s big hopes simply turning out to not be that good. One of those big hopes was Tyrell Fortune, a powerful and athletic former Division II national champion wrestler who was groomed to be Bellator’s next homegrown heavyweight star.
Fortune has spent his entire pro career with Bellator, debuting in 2016 and running out an 8-0 record by exploiting the same advantage: he could take you down and beat you up once you were on the ground. Along the way he discovered he had some real pop in the stand-up game as well, and began to fall in love with his striking. Then, in his first chance at someone with any kind of name, UFC veteran Timothy Johnson – coming off two straight first-round KO losses – knocked him silly with a right hand.
It’s taken Fortune a while to recover from that defeat. His return fight, against 6-foot-8 Jack May, ended in a no contest when Fortune destroyed May’s balls with a knee. He then gassed out and looked very underwhelming against Said Sowma in November, a decision I thought Sowma deserved. But on Friday, in a rematch with May – who served as a late replacement for No. 8-ranked Matt Mitrione – Fortune showed just how good he can be when he keeps it simple.
This was the equation that helped so many people fall in love with Tyrell Fortune in the first place. Extremely quick and athletic for a 250-pound man, Fortune has a takedown that not very many at this level can stop. Once he got May on his back, his ground-and-pound attack was downright ruthless, bringing down a flurry of elbows that was impossible to withstand. It was a back-to-basics performance from Fortune, and exactly what we all wanted to see.
Fortune has struggled in the past with his cardio and despite his power, isn’t skilled yet enough on the feet to reliably contend with more experienced fighters. This, right here, is what he’s really good at, and it’s exactly what he needed to finally regain the momentum that he lost last year. In such a serially weird division, it’s a breath of fresh air to see what happens when everything finally goes right for a change.
Over the course of 12 undefeated years, Khabib Nurmagomedov built his legend as mixed martial arts’ all-time greatest lightweight based off a grappling ability that was unmatched. Khabib was one of the proudest products of Dagestan’s fabled wrestling tradition, and his father, Abdulmanap, will go down as one of MMA’s most storied sambo trainers. Now, a new Nurmagomedov has hit the scene: Khabib’s cousin Usman, who ran his perfect record to 12-0 with a unanimous decision win over Mike Hamel in his Bellator debut.
Usman comes from that same background, that same tradition, and his last name is Nurmagomedov. Naturally, you’d expect him to fight something like Khabib: attacking and dominating his opponents with the grappling talent that runs in his blood. Naturally, you’d be completely wrong. Apparently, Usman simply doesn’t like wrestling. He’d rather do cool kicks, and it turns out, he’s awesome at it.
Nurmagomedov showed off the full breadth of his striking skill on Friday night, dominating Hamel from bell to bell. Hamel is himself an accomplished wrestler, and an explosive and aggressive athlete. He wanted to put pressure on his undefeated opponent from the jump, and put a significant mark on his resume: outwrestled a Nurmagomedov. He never got the chance, as Usman completely controlled the range of the fight and never let Hamel do a single thing he wanted.
Usman Nurmagomedov loves to kick: watch him fight, and you’ll see a hundred different types of kick for as long as it lasts. He employed his kicks expertly to keep Hamel at range, and every time Hamel pushed forward, Nurmagomedov was popping him with a very educated jab, or ripping him with straight one-twos aimed directly at the middle of Hamel’s forehead. And in the few occasions Hamel was able to get him into any type of clinch… buddy, he may not like to wrestle, but the guy’s last name is Nurmagomedov. He knows what he’s doing.
To Hamel’s credit, even though Nurmagomedov busted him up all night, he never gave up. Hamel kept pushing forward, kept doing everything he could to vary his entries and get Nurmagomedov off his rhythm. It was the exact type of test Nurmagomedov needed at this point in his career: while he was largely finishing regional Russian talent in the first round or two, he needed to be put up against a great athlete who wasn’t going to go away easily. Nurmagomedov passed with flying colors.
When I previewed Bellator’s 2021 season last week, I mentioned Nurmagomedov as one of several great Russian talents who could break out this year: names like Magomed Magomedov and Khalid Murtazaliev, both of whom snagged impressive wins on Friday. Even among that pack, Nurmagomedov stands out. That he does it in such a different way than his famous cousin only sweetens the deal.
The Big Fight 