These Insane Knockouts Could Settle Debate Over Whether MMA or Boxing Is More Brutal
Saturday night saw some of the craziest KOs in recent memory…which do you think is scarier?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvz-yM3N0oI
If you’re a fan of watching men getting their skulls rocked so hard that they fall to the ground unconscious, Saturday was a good day for you.
Two fights that night, one in the boxing ring and one in the UFC Octagon, produced vicious knockouts that we’ll still be talking about at the end of the year.
First up is Edson Barboza’s. The Brazilian UFC fighter squared off at UFC Fortaleza with Beneil Dariush, and with three and half minutes left in the second round, perfectly timed a flying knee that instantly ended things.
The flying knee is clearly the highlight of this clip, but credit the ref too. He busted out a MLB-worthy slide to prevent Dariush from taking any more punishment.
Next up is David Lemieux’s scarily brutal third-round knockout of Curtis Stevens on HBO’s Boxing After Dark. The lead-up to this fight was full of bad blood and Lemieux was thinking about that in the ring.
After punishing Stevens in the first round, Lemieux’s left hook found his face in the third and sent him straight to the mat, unconscious. Stevens left the arena on a stretcher and with a valuable lesson learned. “I had to make an example out of him,” Lemieux said after the fight. “You don’t need guys to degrade you.”
And since both of these guys had been previously knocked out by middleweight boxing kingpin Gennady Golovkin, it looks like Lemieux has firmly re-established himself as a top contender, while one wonders if Stevens will ever really be the same again.
If you prefer absurdist novelty to brain-rattling brutality, then there was another KO moment worth noticing this weekend: an incredibly rare double knockout at a smalltime MMA event in Missouri.
Drink it in. It’ll be a while until you see another one of these.
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