Featherweights Sergio Quinones vs. Castle Williams fought Thursday night on the main card of Tachi Palace Fights 30. The fight will go down as a win for Quinones via choke at 4:37 of Round 1. However, it will also be remembered as an infamous example of referee failure.
Quinones applied a Darse choke and Williams appeared to go slack to a certain extent, but kept moving. The referee Jason McCoy lifted the fighter’s arm, which dropped to the mat. However, the ref could see more than is shown in a single-camera video, and allowed the fight to continue.
Then Williams clearly goes out completely. After long moments the referee again lifts the fighter’s arm again and releases it, only to have it drop like cooked spaghetti. The ref still doesn’t stop it, but instead immediately grabs the arm again and finally calls a halt to the action.
https://twitter.com/ZPGIFs/status/827367052486782978
As an aside on verbiage, the first competitor to notably use the choke was Leonardo Vieira, around 2000. He was at the time competing for Alliance, but would go on to found Checkmat. Vieera’s email adress at the time was Leobrabo@ and thus the choke became called the Brabo Choke.
However, this was for gi. Renzo Gracie black belt Joe D’Arce learned the choke from New Zealand John Danaher, and tapped out a number of people at Marc Laimon’s CobraKai in Las Vegas, so they came to refer to it as a Darse (rhymes with farce). And for the record, D’Arce’s name is pronounced sort of like D-R-C, not “darse.” From there, the choke entered MMA, and so when the choke it done in a fight, it is called a Darse.
Returning to wanting judging, that may not even be the worst reffing of the last day. At SFL 2017: Metro Mayhem: Gujarat Warriors Vs Bengaluru Tigers in Delhi, India on Friday night (Friday day in the USA) Hanna Kampf defeated Pooja Tomar via submission, but along the way gave a textbook example of what a lack of intelligent defense looks like.
https://twitter.com/ZPGIFs/status/827525478625992704
Both videos are courtesy of the ever tremendous Zombie Prophet. Follow him HERE, or suffer the consequences.
