In the main event of XFC International 3 in São Paulo, Brazil, Luis “Sapo” Santos squared off with Alfredo Morales. At 1:34 of Round 3 Sapo drove a front snap kick right up the middle, and Morales dropped like a stone.
The front snap kick is the first kick taught in most karate schools. However, in the first decade and a half of mixed martial arts, the kick was widely believed to be of no notable importance. However, in 2011 Anderson Silva landed one on Vitor Belfort to devastating effect, and months later Lyoto Machida landed a Karate Kid-style Crane jumping front kick on Randy Couture. When UFC president Dana White went to speak with Couture, a tooth fell out. Karate (and the front snap kick) were back.
It must be said that Sapo needed no inspiration to use the kick – he knew it his entire life. After fighting from 2000-2019, he currently coaches at American Top Team headquarters in Coconut Creek, Florida, USA, and is married to fellow fighter Carina Damm.
Please note, the front push kick remained in use from the beginning of MMA, and before for generations of Vale Tudo in Brazil, and since time immemorial in Muay Thai, among other combat sports.
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, like this one:
Content re-published with permission from the copyright holder.
***CHECK OUT ALL THE HOLY F@$%ING $#!* STORIES***
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 in all, so site traffic remains robust. That’s likely how you found this.
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About XFC
XFC is a premier international MMA promotion, based in Florida, USA, which has put on events since 2007, across the USA and Brazil, with forays into Europe.
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