MACHIDA TKO’S EVANS AT UFC 98

When golf legend Jack Nicklaus was still a young upstart in the sport and only starting to tear up PGA courses, legend Bobby Jones commented following ‘The Golden Bear’s’ 1965 Master’s win that ‘he plays a game with which I am not familiar’.  Following his absolute destruction of Rashad Evans in the main event of UFC 98, there are likely a few MMA fighters saying the same thing about the new light heavyweight champion Lyoto Machida.  Machida completely befuddled Evans en route to a 2^nd round TKO victory after which “The Dragon” looked as if he’d barely worked up a sweat. 

The fight started slowly, with each man trying to get a feel for his opponent and wait him out to see ‘who blinked’ first.  Evans, who prefers to counter punch, quickly began to become uncomfortable with facing an adversary who didn’t come right at him.   Late in the first round, Machida went on offense with frightening suddenness, flooring Evans with a nice straight right hand.  Evans was able to recover and survive, but it only delayed the inevitable as Machida used another right hand to send his opponent down again and did so for the third time in the fight with a crisp combination that displayed the handspeed that hadn’t before been seen from ‘The Dragon’.  Evans gamely tried to fight back, but a final right hand from the Shotokan Karate master left him out cold.

After the fight UFC announcer Joe Rogan proclaimed the start of ‘the Machida era’ and this is not just mere hyperbole.  Machida is unlike any fighter before him, rooted in mastery of traditional martial arts but with the versatility of a modern MMA competitor.  He’s essentially a “Mortal Kombat” character come to life—in a more realistic cross disciplinary comparison he shares many of the same characteristics as boxing great Floyd Mayweather, Jr. as he combines insane handspeed, underrated stopping power and nearly impenetrable defense into an unorthodox and extremely lethal package.  Like Mayweather, he’s a tough opponent to prepare for as there’s simply no way to replicate his skill set in sparring.   In another similarity with boxing’s recent ‘pound for pound’ king, Machida has been bred to fight since birth.  His father is a first generation Japanese –Brazilian and a Shotokan Karate legend, Yoshizo Machida.  He began training in his father’s discipline at the age of 3 and by the time he was 12 years old had earned a black belt.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about Machida is that he’s only now reaching his full potential as an MMA fighter.  In other words, he’s only going to get better which is a scary prospect for opponents given the fact that he’s never lost in MMA competition.  Early in his UFC career he had a reputation as a ‘boring’ fighter, but in his recent bouts he’s shown a downright lethal ability to end fights—he stopped Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou at UFC 79 with an arm triangle choke, and blitzed Evans and previous foe Thiago Alves with punishing punching combinations en route to TKO victories.  The so called ‘boring’ fighter has in the process earned two UFC ‘knockout of the night’ bonuses by virtue of his evolving power punching skills.

Machida will very likely face Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson in his first light heavyweight title defense and, with all due respect to the PRIDE/UFC veteran, it’s difficult to see him faring much differently than Evans did.  One thing working in ‘Rampage’s’ favor is his greater experience and a resume filled with high level opponents of various fighting styles.  Still, everyone comes back to the fundamental reality that no one has ever really seen a fighter quite like Machida before.