Holloway said in the Countdown special that a king goes to another King's village and takes him out. Holloway lived up to his words. He went to the notoriously hostile Brazil/crowd/UFC event, and stopped Aldo convincingly in 3 rounds. I saw Aldo's mouth open toward the end of the 2nd round and I started to get worried. Holloway clipped him with a back to back 1-2, 1-2 and once Aldo was hurt/wobbled, Holloway kept the top pressure on. It was actually flawless to watch Holloway give Aldo enough room to move, yet Holloway stayed in position to continue peppering shots, rather than say set the hooks, take the back and potentially give Aldo time to recover/get his wind back. It looked like pure fatigue on top of getting wobbled that did him in. Toward the end I was yelling at the screen for Aldo to turn and give up mount to just not have the ref step in and I honestly think Aldo chose to get finished there rather than have the stoppage come with him mounted. I'm not a mind reader, but that's what I saw and interpreted.
Borrachinha faced a woefully understkilled opponent and walked him down and chopped him down.
Belfort showed a few brief flashes of what makes him Belfort, but he is done against anything other than mid-level guys on their way downhill.
He's not the same without TRT, let's just call it what it is, ala Dan Henderson.
Claudia exposed the lack of grappling prowess of Karolina who looked like she literally grapples with low level white belts in preparation for a #1 Contender bout. THIS was a co-main event. No one get butthurt that I'm taking her to task because she's a woman, but it was embarrassing to see the holes in the game of someone being billed ahead of Vitor Belfort, a *(&^ing legend in the sport. Belfort was winning the UFC HW tournament at UFC 12 when Karolina was 12 years old. I get it, the UFC is doing blah blah blah for women's MMA but it's also silly and it looks it when you have that fight as a co-main when the ending is just a honest assessment of the lack of depth in some of the women's divisions and even at the "top tier" of such divisions.
Medeiros pulled out a win via early stoppage, but the way Silva's head hit the canvas, is always gonna be tempting for a ref to stop it, that being said, argh, it was a competitive fight up until that point and Silva continues his hot and cold ways of winning and losing in sequence.
Antonio Carlos Junior picked up a stoppage in front of the home crowd to continue his semi-quiet ascent up the rankings of his weight class and Marlon Moraes went the way of Branch and underwhelmed in his WSOF departure to UFC debut. Moraes and Assuncao both were content to spend two rounds having not much more than glorified sparring and I don't feel sorrow for an MMA fighter with a solid grappling pedigree who shoots 1-2 times in a 3 round fight and loses a narrow decision. You want to bounce around and throw a kick or a punch at a time and pivot and circle and move? The decision may not go your way, bro. So many ways to win in MMA and you elect to waste solid minutes of time on the clock inside the cage circling and moving and feinting and blah blah.
At any rate, it was a decent card and I enjoyed the fight if nothing else than moderately. Part of me wanted Marquardt to win just so Belfort will maybe hang it up, but despite some recent violent stoppage losses, Belfort seems content to continue plugging along. And, to be honest, he's a grown man who's been fighting for decades so he can do as he pleases. He's paid for the right to decide when he's done on his damn terms.
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