At RXF 15 Bucharest MMA All Stars, in Bucharest, Romania, heavyweights Robert Orbocea and Raul Sabou squared off, for six seconds. Sabou, seen in red fight shorts, lunged in with a ferocious left hook. It landed, and sweat flew from Orbocea’s face.
Then Sabou dropped, insensate. How did it happen?
As Sabou lunged in, Orbocea faded back, and with his left arm extended awkwardly delivered a fist to the button. What looks at first like the result of a chin made of the finest, most fragile crystal, or maybe a partisan sniper in the audience, is actually part of an Eastern European boxing technique called Casting.
It works, as you can see.
The Original Phantom Punch
The original Phantom Punch took place on May 1965 in one of the hotspots for boxing worldwide – Lewiston, Maine. Muhammad Ali had a rematch with Sonny Liston, landing a right in the first that few saw land. Ali then stood over a prone Liston screaming at him to get up. You have seen the image.
After the fight, Ali said the strike was Jack Johnson’s secret Anchor Punch, and that he learned it from actor Stepin Fetchit.
It’s a chop, so fast you can’t see it, said Ali. It’s karate. It’s got a twist to it. Just one does the job.
One does the job indeed.
How HOLY F@$%ING $#!* is The Heart of MMA
Lorenzo Fertitta, then the co-owner of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), was once asked by The Atlantic magazine to explain what makes mixed martial arts so compelling. He said it came down to three words, two of which aren’t fit for publishing.
“… there’s the holy s*** factor. Actually, they said ‘the holy f***ing s*** factor.’ It happens at every fight, explained Fertitta. At least one or two times in every UFC show, whether you say it out loud or you say it to yourself, you go, ‘holy s*** did that just happen?’ I mean, you might see somebody do a flip, get kicked in the head, get knocked out with a punch. At some point, you’re going ‘whoah, did that just happen? Did I really just see that?’ That’s the nucleus of what our product is.
MixedMartialArts.com scours the sport to find those HOLY F@$%ING S#!* moments from across the globe, and bring them to you.
Content re-published with permission from the copyright holder.
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About The UnderGround at MixedMartialArts.com
The UnderGround was launched in August of 1998, when mixed martial arts was so new it didn’t have a name, by Kirik Jenness, David Roy, and Gabriel Smallman. In the beginning, it was primarily a vehicle to market The Fighter’s Notebook, the first book on MMA, authored by Jenness and Roy. A message board was added as an afterthought, but it quickly became the centerpiece of the site.
The UG became a place for fighters, coaches, fans, all of us, to virtually hang out, and the site grew and grew into an online community. Ultimate Athlete magazine named it the 8th most important thing in the history of MMA, saying, if not for The Underground … the sport might have died, as PPV buys had sunk to such abysmal levels.
The url changed from SubmissionFighting.com, to MixedMartialArts.com, to MMA.tv, and finally back to MixedMartialArts.com. The site expanded in a number of directions. It offered for a time the second largest instructional DVD effort, with titles by Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell, among dozens of others. A full line of UnderGround fight gear thrived for years. In 2008, it was selected by the Association of Boxing (and Combative Sports) Commissions as the official records and suspension keeper for the sport, a role that continues to this day, and has expanded into administering the rankings for the UFC, Bellator MMA, and BKFC.
Eventually, the social network arose, an easier way for fighters to connect with fans. Luckily, we know jiu-jitsu – how a smaller entity can use leverage to survive against a larger adversary. We built up a robust social network, over 5,000,000 followers on the social network, so site traffic remains robust. That’s probably how you found this.
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About Romanian Xtreme Fighting
Helmed by Sebastian Vieru, Real Xtreme Fighting (RXF) is the largest MMA promotion in Romania. The show has held over 40 events since 2012, and has partnered multiple times with MMA’s most global organization, BRAVE Combat Federation.
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