For a decade now, the UFC light heavyweight division has proceeded along a steady track. The great Jon Jones ruled the division for the entirety of the 2010s, reigning unquestioned as the best 205-pounder in the world – even when he wasn’t holding the title because of personal failings, arrests and drug test failures, he represented the pinnacle of light heavyweight MMA.
Last year, Jones finally relinquished his spot atop the mountain to move up to heavyweight, and the championship was taken by Jan Blachowicz, a smart veteran whose title reign has been characterized as much by intelligent gameplanning as it has been by his explosive knockout power. Blachowicz seems to have something in his arsenal to beat almost anyone near the top of the rankings, and could be set for a long title reign.
Plenty of weird stuff has happened at 205 over the last several years – mostly involving Jones – but the real No. 1 spot has changed hands at a glacial pace. It may take a real wild man, a chaos agent like Jiri Prochazka, to blow the whole thing wide open.
Anyone who watched Prochazka through his long and successful run in the Japanese promotion RIZIN knew exactly what they had on their hands: an unorthodox, relentlessly entertaining striker with seemingly endless cardio and a habit of blocking punches with his face. He seemed born for insane fights and crazy knockouts. I mean, this is a guy from the Czech Republic, in 2021, who professes to live by the samurai code. He’s crazy, but in a good way – the way that gives us cool highlights.
All that’s well and good when you’re knocking out Fabio Maldonado and Brandon Halsey (watch the Halsey fight, it was insane on a number of levels), but it was anyone’s guess how it would translate when he signed with the UFC last summer. Instead, we got a classic Prochazka display upon his debut against Volkan Oezdemir: he got rocked a bunch of times and didn’t go down in a wild first round, then smashed Oezdemir unconscious with a right hand early in the second.
And against two-time former title challenger Dominick Reyes on Saturday night, Prochazka gave us perhaps the wildest fight and craziest KO of a career that has seemingly been nothing but. Although Reyes had his skeleton turned to jelly by Blachowicz’s Legendary Polish Power last September, the 31-year-old American gave a strong accounting of his chin in a fight that was 10 minutes of pure action.
Prochazka seemingly has little concern for his brain’s health, and charged in again and again throwing heat-seeking punches from odd angles. Reyes ate many of Prochazka’s power shots and didn’t go down, and had plenty of his own moments, including a huge upkick in the second round that many speculate actually put Prochazka’s lights out for a second.
But here’s the secret that people are starting to learn about Prochazka: for all his wildness, for all the energy his style burns, his cardio is truly amazing. We first got a look at just how special it is at the end of 2015, when Prochazka became one of just two men to beat current Bellator champion Vadim Nemkov. At the time, RIZIN put fighters in impossibly grueling 10-minute first rounds – after a brutal back-and-forth pace, Prochazka hops up to go back to his corner at the end of this double-length round, seemingly raring to go. Nemkov is so exhausted he can’t even stand.
Few fighters can fight with the amount of energy Prochazka fought with against Reyes and not gas out. Prochazka was absolutely not gassing out. He kept coming, and coming, and coming, whacking Reyes with all kinds of ammunition and eating Reyes’ desperate and brilliant counters. When the knockout came, it seemed almost academic. It only made it sweeter that it came in such an unusual manner: a spinning back elbow that only someone with Prochazka’s particular strain of madness could conceive of in that moment.
In doing so, Prochazka has seemingly secured the next look at gold after Blachowicz defends his title against the unkillable Glover Teixeira in September. Blachowicz will enter as the favorite, and rightfully so: after becoming the first fighter to solve Israel Adesanya earlier this year, there are few fighters who I’d trust more to conceive of and execute the right gameplan to overcome an unorthodox force like Prochazka.
But Prochazka’s presence presents a kind of high-variance chaos factor that simply does not exist anywhere else in this division. Many of the previous crop of light heavyweight contenders, like Reyes and Thiago Santos, need to rebuild themselves after some high-profile losses. Meanwhile, Aleksandar Rakic looks like one of the best young 205ers in the game, but wins over a recently resurgent Anthony Smith and Santos were both frightfully boring and have damaged his standing among fans.
Prochazka gives you everything you could want: a unique, entertaining style, an interesting personality, a slew of highlights, and most importantly, wins. 12 in a row, in fact, 10 straight by knockout. And in a division that has been relatively boring over the last decade, he’s providing a spark of life that we so desperately wanted.
The Big Fight 