Anthony ‘Showtime’ Pettis is a former WEC lightweight champion, and former UFC lightweight champion. Pettis defeated Benson Henderson via Submission of the Night on 31 August 2013 to become the UFC lightweight champion. That was the second time they fought. The first was on December 16, 2010 at WEC 53. It was the fight of the year, and also saw Pettis defeat Henderson for a title.
Pettis is known as a dynamic striker and in the first fight executed perhaps the most famous kick every thrown inside a cage. It’s called The Showtime Kick.
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Pettis’ is a protege of kickboxing legend Duke Roufus, who revealed to MMAFighting that the kick was conceived years before the world saw it, and practiced diligently.
“He had the heart and the courage to do it,” said Roufus. “That’s the thing that makes great athletes great.”
“To his credit, anyone could have great ideas, but to have the guts to pull it off in the fifth round was incredible. He could’ve slipped and fell and given up a bad position. It was risky. But you know what? There’s a saying: Fortune favors the bold.”
“There’s lots of different techniques we do. We try to be as creative as possible. If there was no creativity, they’d still be running the option and the wishbone in football. I want to train my fighters to be hard to fight. Not only because they’re aggressive and strong, but because they have a style that’s hard to prepare for.”
Pettis started training Taekwondo at five years of age. He earned his 3rd degree black belt in Taekwondo before the age of eighteen and credits his success in MMA to the martial art.
Pettis currently trains at Roufusport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But it started with Taekwondo.
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“I was kind of a lost cause for a bit there when I lost my pops,” said Pettis to CagePotato of his father’s death from violence in 2003. “Fighting was the way out. Once I lost my pops, nothing else mattered. My mom did her best to keep me in line, but I was walking the edge. I was just going through the motions of life for the next year or two, and I was still in high school. When you’re in high school, you’re still finding out who you are and who you want to be, but when he died, it was hard for me to even finish school and figure out what I was going to do with myself. But I committed myself to fighting two or three years after that.”
“Coming from a taekwondo background, a lot of my kicks and strikes are flashy to other people. Most mixed martial artists now are either, like, kickboxers with jiu jitsu or wrestlers with boxing. I’m a Taekwondo guy who learned kickboxing and has some good ground skills. I don’t feel the need to be flashy, but once I know I got the other guy, that’s when I can do my regular moves: my jump kicks, my spin kicks. They’re my kind of regular stuff that’s been working my whole life.”
