Hyden's Take
HYDEN BLOG: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from UFC Fight Night 65
May 13, 2015 - 12:35:33 PM HYDEN BLOG: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from UFC Fight Night 65

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By: Frank Hyden, MMATorch contributor

UFC Fight Night 65 was this past week, here's my rundown of the event.

UFC Fight Night 65

GOOD: James Vick submits Jake Matthews

Matthews was winning the first round and then Vick turned things around. Matthews got poked in the eye, and after it was checked out, Vick just went after him and locked on the nice guillotine for the first round submission. Nice comeback for Vick.


GOOD: Sean O'Connell stops Anthony Perosh

Perosh looks slow and like he's taken too much of a pounding in his career. O'Connell came out and just teed off on him. The ref gave Perosh multiple chances to fight back, too many chances in my eyes, but he just couldn't.


GOOD: Robert Whittaker stops Brad Tavares

Whittaker came out and dropped Tavares early. He followed up and dropped him again. Whittaker turned the lights out for Tavares in a damn impressive finish. Tavares is a pretty tough guy and Whittaker walked through him. Holy crap. Whittaker definitely deserves a step up in opponent ranking his next time out.


UGLY: Stipe Miocic stops Mark Hunt

The first round was fairly good. Nothing great, but it was pretty good. Things started falling off in the second round, and it was all downhill from there. The fight should have been stopped in the third round, as Miocic was just beating on Hunt at that point. Somehow the fight was allowed to continue, though. The fourth round was even worse as it was obvious to anyone with eyes that Hunt was done. Even more incredibly, the fight was allowed to continue into the fifth round. That was just absurd. Both guys were exhausted, but Miocic was able to mouth enough of an offense output to force the ref to stop the fight halfway through the fifth round.

There's several things I want to touch on with regards to this fight. First, the cageside physician, the ref, and Hunt's corner should all be ashamed of themselves and fired from their jobs. How in the hell was this fight allowed to continue? Let's go down the list.

The referee's number one job is to stop the fight at the appropriate time. It's true that there is some room for interpretation there, but it's pretty basic. If one of the fighters is getting their ass kicked so badly that they can't defend themselves, you stop the fight. The referee gets an UGLY.

The ringside physician has only one job, to determine if the fighters are able to fight. If Mark Hunt's eye is swollen shut and prevents him from seeing out of it, he's not able to fight. The cageside physician gets an UGLY.

Hunt's cornermen are there to give their guy support, advice, and help when he needs it. How they can sit there and watch him take this ass-kicking and not throw in the towel is ridiculous. There was no magic comeback coming. Hunt wasn't going to catch Miocic with some thundershot that ended things, not in the third, fourth, or fifth rounds. If Hunt was going to land such a shot, it was going to be in the first or second round, not later in the fight when he was too tired to lift his hands up or even stand. Hunt's cornermen get an UGLY.

The final UGLY is reserved for Hunt himself. What has to go wrong in your head for you to not admit defeat? This is like LeBron James demanding to stay in a game when his team is down fifty points with two minutes remaining. The main difference, though, is that LeBron isn't taking a physical ass-kicking the likes of which will lead to physical debilitation later in his life. You have to be smarter than that.

I used to believe that you have to protect athletes from themselves but I don't anymore. We're talking about grown men here. Mark Hunt is a man, he's 40. You got to know it's over. You chalk it up as a loss and you move on. Unless the thought process was that you were hoping that Miocic was going to break his hands on Hunt's head and have to forfeit, there was no other outcome except a Miocic win. The UGLY that Hunt gets here isn't nearly as bad as the ones the ref, cageside doc, and cornermen get, but it's still an UGLY. It's still something that Hunt should know better then to do. There's life after your fighting career that you have to think about.

As a fan, I don't want to see that. I don't want to see a guy get beaten into a pulp. I don't want to have to think about if a guy is going to suffer permanent brain damage as a result of a fight. It kind of takes the fun out of watching a fight when you see a guy getting the hell beat out of him. Yes, fighting is dangerous but it doesn't need to be barbaric. I want to watch a fight, not torture-porn.


Comments and suggestions can be emailed to me at hydenfrank@gmail.com and you can follow me on Twitter at @hydenfrank