This was a video game come to life, leaping in with combinations that were pre-programmed from hundreds of hours of training your fingers to twitch like hummingbirds on a sugar rush, at 185 lbs per man, covered in nothing but a sliver of nylon and leather gloves.
I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I’m terrified of every flinch. This isn’t surviving violence, and it isn’t thriving in it, this is ignoring it. This is Gastelum getting dropped in the 24th minute, plopping down, and sitting up to grab a leg and never stop digging and searching for some kind of solution. The referee was criminally negligent in not stopping this fight with 3 seconds remaining, such was the unanswered hammering of elbows Israel unleashed.
The scores didn’t matter and the word Interim didn’t sully it one bit, Israel Adesanya won the greatest fight in UFC MW Title Fight History and his unification bout with Robert Whittaker will be the stuff of legend in the land down under.
And we still have Max vs Dustin. Jeezuz.
