Watch: Unreal KO by MMA fighter while he was on his back
As a general rule of thumb in combat sports, as soon as you’re on top of your opponent and have him flailing on his back trying to survive, it is only a matter of time before the referee will stop the fight and you’ll have your victory.
But if someone told that to Niko Price, it’s pretty clear he didn’t believe it.
Price disproved that very thesis statement in a fantastic knockout of Randy Brown at UFC Boise Saturday night.
Not since Isaac Newton got brained by an apple have the laws of physics so clearly found physical demonstration:
Brown had Price on his back, landing some decent punches and clearly having the upper hand.
Price, however, managed to get his left leg free and hooked it behind Brown’s head.
What you’ve got there is an anvil.
And any good anvil deserves a hammer, or in this case a series of hammer fists — punches with the side of the fist that, when the head is braced in place, land with full force.
Which brings to mind another truism of combat sports:
“The punch that knocks you out is the one you didn’t see coming.”
When Price was on the ground, he was literally rolling with the punches, moving his head to deflect and reduce the force of the incoming blows. The punches were landing, but not doing real damage.
After all, a knockout is just a concussion by another name. For that to happen, the brain, mounted like a Jell-O mold inside the skull atop a fairly stiff spring — for our purposes, that’s what the spine and neck muscles are here — has to have its movement arrested violently by a surface it can’t move with.
Move your head with a punch and it’s essentially getting out of the way of the brain; no slamming against the inside of the skull, no brain damage, no knockout.
But with the head held in place and no effort at all made to move the head or brace for the blow?
By the third punch, Brown had been put to sleep.
It took six punches before the referee finally put a merciful end to one of the most spectacular reversals in MMA history.
It was a brilliant display not just of the awesome power of the laws of physics but of Price’s ability, even while on his back, to create enough room for himself and brace his other shoulder against the ground to create leverage to use that hammer fist against his foot anvil to achieve the desired result.
And it also may have unintentionally just taught everyone in MMA gyms why you should never, when you’re in the dominant position in the ground-and-pound game, let the other guy get a leg free.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
