THE PUNCHSPORT REPORT FOR DECEMBER

We have almost survived another year of violence.

We've made it, my friends. Amidst weight misses, broken shoulders and a pandemic that's definitely 100% over, we have made it through another long year of MMA. We lost the big main event for this month before it even started, so kick back, relax, pour yourself a glass of nog big or little depending on preference, stay up late for the JMMA New Year, and look at it as a very, very tired victory lap before we all tuck in for a month-long winter of no UFC.

THIS MONTH'S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS

• UFC on ESPN: Thompson vs Holland, December 3

• UFC 282: Procházka vs. Teixeira 2Błachowicz vs Ankalaev, December 10

• UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs Strickland, December 17

• Bellator 289: Stots vs Sabatello, December 9

• Bellator MMA vs Rizin, December 31

• ONE on Prime Video 5: de Ridder vs Malykhin, December 2

• ONE 164: Pacio vs Brooks, December 3
  

IS THERE ANY NEWS

Shockingly and abruptly, Anthony "Rumble" Johnson passed away on November 13, 2022. Johnson is one of those people who's surprisingly difficult to write about, in that every story about him paints a different picture of his life. As a person, he's recalled by virtually every peer who ever crossed his path as a kind, wonderful friend they loved dearly, but he also had recurring issues with domestic abuse across multiple partners, anger management across the spectrum and just kind of being a dick in public. As a fighter he was a terrifying knockout artist with an amazing record who fought for the UFC championship twice, but that undeniable fact is also an example of just how insane this sport can be, as despite being a credible light-heavyweight and heavyweight contender Johnson spent the first half of his career fighting 30+ pounds lower at welterweight, where he cut so much water weight he would show up to weigh-ins looking positively skeletal--a habit that stopped only when it became inconvenient for the UFC that he began regularly failing to make weight because his body simply couldn't handle it anymore.

But it wasn't his weight-cutting or his mileage that killed him in the end, it was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, because the world is random and cruel. Anthony Johnson was one of the most devastating fighters in the history of combat sports, the kind of impossible powerhouse that could walk off a retirement layoff and destroy a top-ranked contender with a punch so casual it looked like he was brushing dirt off a doily, and there is something deeply strange and incorrect in thinking about him dying from a random disorder in a hospital bed.

I didn't know Anthony Johnson, and I cannot tell you if he was a good person. But I can tell you 38 is entirely too goddamn young to die of anything. Fuck cancer and rest in peace.

In a much less tragic but only slightly less surprising bit of news that broke just before the end of the month, Jiří Procházka, the Czech striker who took the UFC by storm, became the top light-heavyweight in the world after a fight of the year candidate and was poised to run the match back and cement his legacy as a defending champion in just a few short weeks, announced that he was instead relinquishing the UFC championship and going on a prolonged injury hiatus. He reportedly tole a hole in the muscles of his shoulder in what the UFC is calling one of the worst injuries they've ever seen thanks to a bad landing on a throw while training, and the timetable for his recovery is almost certainly in excess of a full year. Spirit bomb your well-wishes for a quick recovery to Jiří and hopefully the light-heavyweight division he returns to in 2024 will be friendly.

After spending a year away from competition while fighting the Russian invasion of his homeland, and after successfully recapturing his hometown of Irpin, Amosov will return to mixed martial arts competition and reunify the Bellator welterweight championship with interim champion Logan Storley on February 25th at Bellator 291. This will be a rematch of the very close bout they had in 2020 that Amosov won. Hopefully he gets some time to actually train and prepare.

So James Krause--formerly UFC fighter "The" James Krause--has had kind of a bad month. First, former student Megan Anderson accused the fighter-turned-trainer of cheating on his wife with some of the female fighters he trained. Second, one of his most-heralded fighters, Darrick Minner, was dealt a devastating third consecutive UFC loss after his already-injured leg gave out within seconds of his fight beginning, raising considerable questions about how Krause, the UFC and the Nevada State Athletic Commission allowed him to compete in that state. Third, Krause was formally placed under investigation by two separate state gaming integrity agencies after it arose that in the hours leading up to the fight there was a sudden, substantial betting shift towards Minner's opponent Shayilan Nuerdanbieke to not only win, but win by a first-round TKO, as though someone close to the fight had leaked Minner's injury, whiich is a very bad look when you are, say, Minner's head coach, and you, uh, run your own MMA gambling podcast and Discord network to dispense both overt and surreptitious gambling advice. Krause has been banned from cornering any UFC fighters while the investigation is ongoing and he has quietly closed his discord and his podcast and is no longer updating any social media. Hilariously, this has now snowballed hard enough that just this morning of our beautiful December 1st, the UFC was completely banned from all sportsbook activity in the province of Ontario until the situation is resolved. James Krause, your post-fight career is so much more interesting than your fight career.

On the back of a two-fight winning streak over the last three years--one of them to a visibly overweight Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, the other to Timothy Johnson, the only fighter to ever get knocked out in the UFC by a man wearing a diaper--Fedor Emelianenko, the somewhat tarnished but still-alive legend, is singing his swan song. He'll rematch Ryan Bader for his Bellator Heavyweight Championship and to avenge Bader's thirty-five-second knockout victory over him at Bellator 290 on February 4th, and has vowed that, win or lose, his 48th MMA fight will be the final tilt of his career. As always: I'm rooting for whatever's funniest.

MONTHLY RETIREMENT CORNER

After seventeen years of competition and one last knockout loss, Frankie Edgar has finally called it a day. I waxed poetic about my personal feelings on Frankie already for the UFC 281 writeup and no one needs to hear me bleed openly about the inspiration I took from him as a fighter, so let us instead focus on the man and say: He did everything. He ground his way through the regional scene before MMA took off, he spent a staggering fifteen years in the UFC and was ranked in the top fifteen for nearly all of them, he destroyed a legend and built his own. He fought a half-dozen world champions across three weight classes. He won the UFC lightweight championship when everyone thought he was too small and too weak and, years after his prime, he went the distance with two of the three best featherweight fighters of all time. He fought on the first UFC card in New York after it was finally legalized again and he main-evented the first time the UFC ever want to Busan and he main-evented the UFC's first trip to the mecca of Japanese mixed martial arts, the Saitama Super Arena, since the dissolution of Pride. It was a legendary career, and while it could probably have ended a little sooner to save him repeated concussions, being too tough to quit was always a Frankie Edgar thing. He leaves the sport at 24-11-1.

Brad Riddell has sort-of retired. The New Zealand-based brawler got off to a thundering start after his 2019 UFC debut, racking up four very impressive victories, enshrining himself as a must-see fighter and punching his ticket to the top fifteen. And unfortunately, that's where things ran ground. Rafael Fiziev knocked him out, and then Jalin Turner choked him out, and this past month the embattled Renato Moicano outclassed him and choked him out again. In the first eight years of his MNMA career he went 10-1; in the last eleven months he went 0-3. After his loss to Moicano, Riddell quietly put a post up on his instagram announcing his intention to step away from mixed martial arts--as he says it, having competed in some form for the past fourteen straight years, he's tired and doesn't have the heart for it anymore, and needs to leave "until the fire comes back." In some ways, I hope it doesn't. Brad Riddell made a name for himself and got out with his health intact; I cannot help hoping he keeps it. Until that day, if ever it comes, Riddell retires with a 10-4 record in mixed martial arts, a 59-10 record in kickboxing, and an 0-1 record in boxing we're going to forget happened.

Zhalgas Zhumagulov is the first fighter in a very long time to retire out of sheer frustration. His UFC signing in 2019 was welcomed by the MMA community--he was a 13-3 regional champion with victories over multiple UFC veterans, and two of his three losses were controversially close split decisions. Which makes it unfortunate that his UFC tenure was primarily defined by controversially close split decisions. Zhumagulov went a distressing 1-5 in the UFC, but three of those five--his bouts with Raulian Paiva, Jeff Molina and Charles Johnson--were nearly unanimously scored for him by the media and met with confusion and anger when judges, as they do, disagreed. After his most recent bout, the aforementioned Johnson fight, Zhumagulov won on 12 out of 13 media scorecards even after getting poked in the eye and kicked in the balls twice, somehow still lost a split decision, and announced his retirement after the show, explicitly calling out terrible judging as the culprit. Unless someone manages to coax him back into competition, he leaves the sport at 14-8.

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WHAT HAPPENED IN NOVEMBER

The month started with November 5th's extra-cursed UFC Fight Night: Rodriguez vs Lemos. The card lost its main event and two main card fights, one of them getting scratched the day of the event, and four people missed weight. (It would've been five, but Shanna Young got under the limit by chopping off her hair.) It was, once again, violent. Tamires Vidal made a successful debut by nuking Ramona Pascual with a flying knee to the liver, Jake Hadley choked out Carlos Candelario, Polyana Viana overcame her grappling urges to instead punch Jinh Yu Frey out in under a minute, Mario Bautista tapped a long-missing Benito Lopez, and Johnny Muñoz Jr. and Miranda Maverick managed decisions. On the main card, Grant Dawson ended Mark Madsen's undefeated streak with a rear naked choke, Tagir Ulanbekov dominated and guillotined Nate Maness, we had silly limb times again when Darrick Minner broke his leg just seconds into a fight with Shayilan Nuerdanbieke, Neil Magny overcame the odds to choke out Daniel Rodriguez, and in the main event, Amanda Lemos scored an upset standing TKO over Marina Rodriguez.

We switched over to Japan for Rizin Landmark Vol. 4 later on November 6th. Rizin's b-show series was, well, the b-show, but there was still fun to be had, most notably with Yuta Kubo knocking out Keisuke Okuda, Alan Yamaniha continuing his give-and-take record by beating Yasuhiro Kawamura, Cally Gibrainn knocking out the former sumo Takakenshin, Kiyoshi "Samurai Mark Hunt" Kuwabara sadly knocking out the legendary Ikuhisa Minowa, Chihiro Suzuki defeating vicious leg murderer Masakazu Imanari, and in the main event, the kickboxing-turned-MMA rookie Ron Hiramoto defeated the much more experienced Satoshi Yamasu.

And then November 12th brought us the big show for the month, UFC 281: Adesanya vs Pereira, which immediately became one of the best UFCs of all time. You basically have to name every fight to cover the highlights, but I'll try to pick and choose: The prelims saw Carlos Ulberg nuke Nicolae Negumereanu, Michael Trizano flatline Choi Seung-woo, Karolina Kowalkiewicz and Andre Petroski win scrappy, impressive decisions, Erin Blanchfield absolutely destroyed Molly McCann, Ryan Spann quite possibly ended Dominick Reyes' career with yet another knockout, and Renato Moicano choked out Brad Riddell in one round. The main card was even better: Dan Hooker won an extremely funny bout against an overmatched Claudio Puelles despite almost getting his leg torn in half in the first round, Chris Gutierrez tragically knocked out Frankie Edgar one last time in his retirement bout, Dustin Poirier and Michael Chandler went to war and Poirier wound up with the submission victory. In the co-main event, Zhang Weili fulfilled the expected prophecy by absolutely destroying Carla Esparza to once again become Women's Strawweight Champion, and in the main event, Alex Pereira overcame a two-round deficit and what seemed like sure defeat to knock out Israel Adesanya with just three minutes left in the fight, becoming the new Middleweight World Champion in the process.

The five-event sprint of the following week started with Invicta FC 50 on November 16th. To be honest: It was kind of a bummer. Invicta was hoping for a big show and a fabulous one-night tournament to celebrate their 50th event and crown a big new strawweight champion, but unfortunately, it was one of those nights where nothing quite worked the way they hoped, from competitors falling through to almost all of the fights being interminable, clinch-centric decisions to their production itself rebelling, as their lighting rig cast a sickly pallor on the entire event and their onscreen graphics software crashed and refused to work, meaning most of the event didn't even have an onscreen clock. The most memorable part of the night wasn't even the fighting itself, it was undercard curtain-jerker Elise "The Piece" Pone playing mindgames by screaming every time she threw a clinch knee and spending her between-round breaks standing motionless and staring down her resting opponent. But former UFC competitor Talita Bernardo scored a victory by kimura in the co-main event, and the strawweight tournament itself ended with Valesca "Tina Black" Machado taking two decisions and becoming Invicta's new 115-pound queen. Hopefully her first royal decree is a clock that works.

The very long and shockingly cursed weekend began on November 18th--rather, I'm picking one of the day's parallel events at random--with Bellator 288: Nemkov vs Anderson 2. The undercard was Bellator's usual morass of people you've never heard of, with fighters like Laird Anderson, Sullivan Cauley, Archie Colgan and Killys Mota, which I promise are all real people, picking up victories that Bellator itself may not even have bothered to record. The main card carried a little introductory interest--Levan Chokheli defeated Roman Faraldo, Daniel James did some heavyweight stuff to Tyrell Fortune and Timur Khizriev defeated late replacement Daniel Weichel in a fight no one will remember in a few days--but everyone was there for the two title matches. The co-main event saw Patricky Pitbull make his debut as a defending champion more than a year after his title victory, and he immediately lost it in an incredibly long, incredibly one-sided fight to your new Bellator Lightweight Champion, Usman Nurmagomedov. No, Bellator at no point shut up about Khabib. The main event was the re-run of Vadim Nemkov's light-heavyweight championship defense AND Bellator's Light-Heavyweight Grand Prix Tournament final against Corey Anderson, and where in their first meeting Anderson was seconds away from clear victory before a foul ended the whole thing, the rematch saw Nemkov dominate the majority of the fight with takedown defense, jabs and leg kicks (and one cool spinning kick). Corey Anderson continues to be one of the unluckiest dudes in the sport.

The curses rolled straight on with ONE on Prime Video 4: Abbasov vs Lee, as a bunch of people missed weight and failed hydration including headliner and defending welterweight champion Kiamrian Abbasov, making him the incredibly unlikely third and hopefully final fighter to lose a championship on the scale in 2022. The prelims were something of an anticlimax--Jonathan Haggerty, Ruslan Emilbek Uulu and Liam Nolan all won somewhat disappointingly uneventful decisions and the one submission grappling match of the night saw Danielle Kelly immediately crushing a woefully outmatched Mariia Molchanova--but the main card delivered. Kim Jae Woong destroyed Kevin Belington, Cosmo Alexandre executed Juan Cervantes and Stephen Loman put a hellacious three-round beating on former kingpin Bibano Fernandes, who despite being in his forties and looking progressively more outmatched in recent years announced his intention to stay in the sport for years and years to come. The co-main was a deeply educational study in weight classes, as ONE Strawweight Muay Thai Champion and one of the best in all of Europe in his weight class, Joseph Lasiri, went up to Flyweight to challenge one of the sport's scariest fighters, ONE Flyweight Muay Thai Champion Rodtang Jitmuangnon, who proceeded to beat him handily for five rounds in a method that could almost be called outright disrespectful, as he simply ignored most of Lasiri's offense while walking him down and beating the shit out of him. The main event saw ONE's promotional golden boy Christian Lee finally make good on the company's repeated attempts to make someone in his family a double champion. As with everything in ONE, it wasn't without a little controversy--Abbasov had him out on his feet in the first round and could easily have had a standing TKO ruled in his favor--but that makes it all the more impressive that Lee fought back from being essentially knocked out and beat a horribly gassed Abbasov down three rounds later. Lee is now ONE's lightweight and welterweight champion, making him the king of one division where he has yet to fight most of ONE's ranked competitors and another ONE has never bothered to make rankings for despite it existing since 2014.

Their double-show tendencies continued, as later that night/very early the following morning depending on your location they held ONE 163: Akimoto vs Petchtanong. As the non-Prime shows tend to be it was lower-key than its predecessor, but that, too, was harmed by the weekend's weight issues, as women's star Seo Hee Ham refused to continue on to her fight with Itsuki Hirata after the latter failed three separate weight and hydration tests. The card went on with ten fights and resulted in a bunch of traumatic finishes: Bianca Basilio choked out Milena Kaori in a grappling match that didn't even last a minute, Ahmed Mujtaba choked out Abraao Amorim, Ahmed Krnjic out-kickboxed Bruno Chaves, and the main card followed with just a mess of knockouts. Kwon Won Il kneed Mark Abelardo to death, Aung La Nsang scored a slightly goofy ref stoppage over 2008's most interesting middleweight Yushin Okami but he was also effortlessly beating him up so it was fine, Saygid Izgakhmaev equally easily punched out aging Pride legend Shinya Aoki in a minute and a half and Roman Kryklia won the ONE Kickboxing Heavyweight Grand Prix--a truly impressive, four-man affair--by TKOing Iran's Iraj Azizpour. The stoppage streak ended in the main event, as Petchtanong Petchfergus took a split decision victory (that really shouldn't have been a split) over Hiroki Akimoto to capture the ONE Kickboxing Bantamweight Championship.

And for once, the curse weighed most heavily on the UFC, as November 19th saw the ill-fated UFC Fight Night: Lewis vs SpivacUFC Fight Night: Nzechukwu vs. Cuțelaba. Not only was the card littered with decisions after the all-time action fest that was the previous week's pay-per-view, the main event--a top-ten heavyweight tilt between fan favorite Derrick Lewis and up-and-coming Sergey Spivac--was scratched from the card midway through the broadcast, when it was announced that Lewis had fallen ill and been hospitalized. The even weaker and even weirder card was still not without its points of interest. Natália Silva made her name as a real prospect at women's flyweight by knocking out the debuting Tereza Bledá with a spinning back kick to the face, and Brady Hiestand, Vanessa Demopoulos, Ricky Turcios, Miles Johns and Jennifer Maia all won solid decisions to round out the prelims. The abbreviated main card was both more violent and much funnier, as it began with Charles Johnson winning an intensely controversial decision over Zhalgas Zhumagulov after both men also repeatedly punted the other in the crotch, Jack Della Maddalena outright executed Danny Roberts with a brutal three and a half minutes of boxing, Muslim Salikhov overcame an early scare to knock out André Fialho in the third round, and Waldo Cortes-Acosta battered Chase Sherman's stone skull for three rounds but had to settle for a decision. The new main event--the first three-round main event in the UFC since 2019's Magomedsharipov vs Kattar--was the light-heavyweight tilt between Kennedy Nzechukwu and Ion Cuțelaba, which saw Cuțelaba nearly win with an early blitz only for Nzechukwu to shut him down with intercepting knees and ultimately knock him out in the second round.

The month, and the PFL until its next season starts in April, ended on PFL 10 on November 25th. This was PFL's big and almost certainly ill-advised attempt at moving their finals to a pay-per-view I cannot imagine having sold well, but the show itself, at least, was mostly pretty good. The prelims were a mix of not particularly notable, deeply gratifying, and sad: Dakota Ditcheva knocked out a woefully overmatched Katherine Corogenes, Magomed Magomedkerimov dominated Gleison Tibau, Natan Schulte dominated and choked out the mad, unstoppable and now 29-21 (1) Jeremy Stephens, and Marlon Moraes made his PFL debut, looked pretty good for two rounds, and tragically, inevitably, got knocked out in the third round by Sheymon Moraes, who is now the canonical Moraes. The main card saw the very bland, barely-active split-decision victory debut of Aspen Ladd, but was otherwise focused on the PFL's six championship finals. In the light-heavyweight division, Rob Wilkinson scored a doctor stoppage after punching Omari Akhmedov's face open. In the welterweight division Sadibou Sy, "The Swedish Denzel," which is my new least favorite nickname in a walk, won an outright unwatchably uneventful but unanimous decision over finalist Dilano Taylor. At lightweight, Olivier Aubin-Mercier went two back-and-forth rounds with Stevie Ray before knocking him clean out with a perfectly-placed right hook. Up at heavyweight, Ante Delija somewhat inevitably knocked out Matheus Scheffel for the second time in seven months in a fairly effortless 2:50. In the co-main event, Brendan Loughnane and Bubba Jenkins had what was probably the most technically sound fight of the night, trading back and forth for four and a half rounds before Loughnane finally put Jenkins out to win the featherweight championship. And in the main event, and easily the biggest upset in PFL history, Larissa Pachecho fought a close but decisive war with Kayla Harrison that saw her ultimately win a unanimous decision, taking both the Women's Lightweight Championship and, maybe more importantly, Kayla's 15-fight, 4 1/2-year undefeated record.

WHAT'S COMING IN DECEMBER

It's gonna be a comparatively sleepier December as we head into the only UFC vacation of the year, with nearly a full goddamn month between Cannonier/Strickland and Gastelum/Imavov, but there's a fun road through it and it's ending with a bang.

And it's beginning with a glut. ONE is still on their double-event madness, and this time around it starts on December 2nd with ONE on Prime Video 5: de Ridder vs Malykhin. It's the final Prime Video card of 2022, and ONE is stuffing it as full of championship belts as they possibly can. On the undercard you have atomweight tournament finalist Denice Zamboanga vs Lin Heqin, a Muay Thai bout between England's Amber Kitchen and American Muay Thai champion Jackie Buntan, Dae Sung Park vs Lowen Tynanes and two-time lightweight champion Eduard Folayang vs Edson Marques. The main card has one non-title bout between two-division KSW champion Roberto Soldić and Murad Ramazanov, and from there on out it's all belts, all the time. ONE Muay Thai Atomweight Champion Allycia Hellen Rodrigues is back from a two-year layoff to reunify the belt with interim champion Janet Todd, ONE Submission Grappling Lightweight Champion Kade Ruotolo will look to defend his grappling belt against Matheus Gabriel, ONE Kickboxing Featherweight Champion Superbon Singha Mawynn will kickbox a bunch with Chingiz Allazov, and in the main event, ONE double-champion Reinier de Ridder will defend his light-heavyweight title against interim heavyweight champion Anatoliy Malykhin, because divisions don't fucking matter.

But we're not done, baby. As always the next day, December 3rd, will see ONE 164: Pacio vs Brooks. The undercard is a little more low-key--three MMA matches, one of which has only one competitor announced, and two Muay Thai matches featuring Lara Fernandez vs Dangkongfah Banchamek and Tagir Khalilov vs Chorfah Tor.Sangtiennoi, but the main card is the show. Jeremy Pacatiw and Tial Thang will fight for contendership prospect status, Geje Eustaquio and Hu Yong will try to carve out a spot at flyweight, the somehow never-gone Brandon Vera is back after a year and a half on the shelf to fight Amir Aliakbari in the hopes of getting another crack at the heavyweight title, ONE's eight-man Flyweight Muay Thai Grand Prix will come to an end as Superlek Kiatmuu9 and Panpayak Jitmuangnon will battle to determine the tournament champion and the next challenger for the ever-terrifying Rodtang. The main event is take two at the title defense originally scheduled for this past summer, as ONE Strawweight Champion Joshua Pacio will defend his title against UFC veteran (and deeply unfairly cut) Jarred Brooks.

The UFC kicks off its month later that afternoon with UFC on ESPN: Thompson vs Holland. While there's still yet time for injuries to wreck it, this is currently scheduled to be the longest UFC of the year, with 15 goddamn fights on the books, so I'll save you from having to read about all of them right now. Preliminary highlights include Yazmin Jauregui vs Istela Nunes, Tracy Cortez vs Amanda Ribas, Michael Johnson vs Marc Diakiese, Clay Guida vs Scott Holtzman, Angela Hill vs Emily Ducote and Niko Price vs Philip Rowe. The main card gets off to a rough start with Eryk Anders vs Kyle Daukaus, but proceeds into a series of bangers from there: Roman Dolidze vs Jack Hermansson, Tai Tuivasa vs Sergei Pavlovich, Matheus Nicolau vs Matt Schnell, Bryan Barberena vs Rafael dos Anjos, and in the main event, the perennially unfortunate Kevin Holland is finally getting the non-wrestler main event he's been seeking for years, as he faces karate master Stephen "Wonderboy" Thompson in a match of striking experts that could be very, very good, or very, very boring.

We're over to Bellator for their home show of the month next: December 9th's Bellator 289: Stots vs Sabatello. I know I always rag on Bellator's prelims, and there's still some of that here--I use Tapology, the most complete MMA database on the internet, for fight research and Bellator has finally found a fighter in the 1-2 Kareem "The Dream" Kline that even they don't have a picture for--but there's some good stuff too, with Kai Kamaka III facing Kevin Boehm, Chris Gonzalez mixing it up with Shamil Nikaev, Mark Lemminger and Michael Lombardo fighting for recognition and Cody Law facing Cris Lencioni. The main card is pinned up by a truly hilarious match between Dalton "Hercules" Rosta, who looks like a living billboard for anabolic steroids, and Anthony "SugaFoot" Adams, who has managed to have ten fight cancellations in just the last four years, followed by a Bantamweight Grand Prix semi-final match between Magomed Magomedov and Patchy Mix, but it's all about the two title fights up top. Liz Carmouche will defend her somewhat oddly-obtained Bellator Women's Flyweight Championship against the woman she kind-of sort-of took it from, Juliana Velasquez, and after months of deeply lame, interminable trash talk, Raufeon Stots will both defend his interim bantamweight championship and fight out the other half of the Bantamweight Grand Prix semi-finals against Danny Sabatello.

Our big pay-per-view for the month follows on December 10th, UFC 282: Procházka vs. Teixeira 2Błachowicz vs Ankalaev, which unfortunately lost its main event and a bit of its luster just before American Thanksgiving with the somewhat shocking and deeply depressing news that Jiří Procházka was so badly injured that he was straight-up vacating the title. It's still a good card, and the prelims are basically a complete fight night unto themselves: Prospect clashes with Vinicius Salvador vs Daniel da Silva, Ronnie Lawrence vs Cameron Saaiman and T.J. Brown vs Erik Silva, borderline-ranked fights like Chris Curtis vs Joaquin Buckley, Billy Quarantillo vs Alexander Hernandez and Edmen Shahbazyan vs Dalcha Lungiambula, and fallen-but-trying-to-get-up name fights like Jairzinho Rozenstruik vs Chris Daukaus, Darren Till vs Dricus do Plessis, and Ovince Saint Preux vs Philipe Lins. The main card is its own beast. Bryce Mitchell and Ilia Topuria put their undefeated records on the line against each other to establish a new featherweight terror, Robbie Lawler and Santiago Ponzinibbio will box aggressively to see which of them still has time left on the clock, the UFC's most successful yet attempt to build a new Conor, Paddy Pimblett, gets another slight step up in competition as he meets Jared Gordon, and in our new main event and now championship match, Jan Błachowicz, the former champion and knockout machine, faces Magomed Ankalaev, the 18-1 phenom who hasn't lost in almost five years.

The next week brings us December 17th's UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs Strickland, and it's a much more subdued end to the UFC's year, with a lower-key card back in the dark, quiet depths of the empty-arena UFC Apex. While there's a touch less relevancy, that's not to say it's bad, by any means: There are, in fact, a bunch of interesting fights as it's basically Prospect Night. Cheyanne Vlismas looks to keep her headkicking streak alive against Cory McKenna, Sergey Morozov and Journey Newson will wrestle each other violently, Julian Marquez and Deron Winn will do a hell of a grapple, Manel Kape will fight for a rank against David Dvořák, Said Nurmagomedov will look to maintain the only non-Khabib-related Nurmagomedov winning streak alive against Saidyokub Kakhramonov, Michael Morales will try to be furious all over Rinat Fakhretdinov, Tafon Nchukwi will desperately defend his job against Vitor Petrino, Jake Matthews looks to follow up the best performance of his career against the insanely tough Matthew Semelsberger, Amir Albazi and Alessandro Costa will desperately seek a claim to flyweight contendership, Rafa García will try to deny the UFC their sacrificial lamb for new star Hayisaer Maheshate and Sean Strickland and Jared Cannonier will meet in the best kind of main event there is: The kind where both fighters have really shitty opinions so no matter who gets fucked up, everybody wins.

But it has been a tradition of the sport for nearly twenty years that the MMA year ends on a big, wild New Year's Eve event in Japan, and after a couple unfortunately underwhelming years thanks to the pandemic, we're bringing down the curtain with the rarest kind of showstopper in the sport: An actual, legitimate cross-promotional event. On December 31st Bellator and Rizin are teaming up to bring you, fittingly enough, Bellator MMA vs Rizin, a giant of a card. There's virtually no chaff on the card, which begins with what's technically Rizin 40, a Japan-specific undercard: BeyNoah himself, the wildly popular if recently unsuccessful kickboxing star, faces the up-and-coming Sho Patrick Usami in an MMA match, living legend Hideo Tokoro faces former UFC title contender John Dodson, rising contender Luiz Gustavo takes on Johnny Case, bantamweight Yuki Motoya meets the UFC's most nonsensical release in years, former flyweight top contender Rogério Bontorin, Naoki Inoue faces Kenta Takizawa, sumo turned wild brawler Tsuyoshi Sudario faces the Kiwi kickboxer Junior Tafa, and in the undercard's main event, atomweight queen Seika Izawa will meet the ridiculously tough Si Woo Park in both a rematch of their DEEP fight from last year and the finals of Rizin's Women's Super Atomweight Grand Prix.

But then it's time for the big card, and boy, it's a hell of a thing, featuring five well-matched bouts with representatives from each company. Rizin's lightweight contender Koji Takeda will face Bellator's Gadzhi Rabadanov in an opening bout that will probably have a bunch of grappling in it. Kyoji Horiguchi, despite being Rizin's biggest Japanese star, will represent Bellator as its former bantamweight champion when he faces Rizin Bantamweight Grand Prix winner Hiromasa Ougikubo. Soo Chul Kim, Korea's Road FC bantamweight champion and Rizin's newest top contender, will take on former Bellator bantamweight champion Juan Archuleta. AJ McKee, former Bellator Featherweight Champion and newly-minted lightweight star, will meet Rizin Lightweight Champion Roberto "Satoshi" de Souza in what could easily, easily be a main event for either company, but the actual main event slot is instead saved for a dream match: Patricio Pitbull, reigning Bellator Featherweight Champion and arguably their greatest fighter of all time, who has lost only one fight at his weight class in seven years, will meet Rizin Featherweight Champion and absolute jiu-jitsu monster Kleber Koike Erbst in a fight for international pride. It's a hell of a thing, it'll be a hell of a show, and if you want to watch it you'd better be prepared to stay up until 7 AM PST on a pirated stream, because it's only airing in America on tape delay. Don't worry, pirate NYE streams are part of the tradition too.

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CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS

Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Francis Ngannou - 17-3, 1 Defense

After getting dicked about by the UFC for most of 2021, Francis "The Predator" Ngannou met both the biggest challenge of his career and the nexus of his promotional challenges in the form of a championship unification match against heavyweight striking savant and (bullshit) interim champion Ciryl Gane. For all of his punching prowess, Ngannou found himself getting pretty soundly outstruck and on the road to a decision loss--and he adjusted by channeling Mark Coleman and repeatedly tossing Gane on his ass with double-legs and powerslams. In what was somehow a simultaneously incredible and disappointing performance, Francis Ngannou won a unanimous decision, notched his first title defense, turned away his stiffest challenge, and went home with his future one great big question mark. He's made a lot of noise about going into boxing thanks to the UFC's refusal to stop paying him peanuts, but his contract situation is complicated by his standing as a champion, particularly as he's now had knee surgery to repair his ACL and MCL and will be sitting out the remainder of the year on medical leave, which could mean dealing with a contract freeze. It all depends on how shitty the UFC decides to be to him, but the best gauge for that is Dana White's auspicious absence at the post-fight belt ceremony and post-card press conference. In response, Francis Ngannou appeared with Tyson Fury after his high-profile destruction of Dillian Whyte and the two hyped a potential boxing vs MMA fight between them. This, of course, did not happen, and now Tyson Fury is fighting Derek Chisora because boxing fucking sucks. Predictably, this has become a big, stupid thing. They were hoping to put more pressure on Ngannou by booking Jon Jones vs Stipe Miocic for an interim title on December 10, but Stipe wasn't dumb enough to do it for peanuts either. As of now, the UFC is HOPING to get Francis Ngannou vs Jon Jones together for UFC 285 on March 4, but they're still lowballing Ngannou. If they can't come to terms, it'll be Jones vs Curtis Blaydes. Or so they hope.

Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs

VACANT - The irrepressible doom that always wins

What, you thought Vacant was done with the UFC in 2022? Bitch, you thought. Just seven days before the end of November, tragedy struck. Jiří Procházka, just seventeen days away from his first title defense and one of the most-anticipated rematches of the year, announced that he was vacating the UFC Light-Heavyweight Championship of the World. He had torn his right shoulder thanks to an errant landing in training, and despite his stated desire to fight one-handed, the doctors convinced him it was better not to potentially cripple himself for life. With the timetable for recovery likely to leave him on the shelf for the entirety of 2023, the UFC made the call to strip him of the belt (and say he'd made the decision himself out of courtesy for the division, which was at least polite of them). Challenger and former champion Glover Teixeira was more than willing to rematch fellow former champion Jan Błachowicz that night--but the UFC wanted him to fight Jan's opponent, Magomed Ankalaev, instead, citing Jan's age and their previous bout, so please remember the UFC's desire for only the most vital, legitimate championship bouts the next time Jorge Masvidal or Conor McGregor gets a scrape at the gold. The title won't be held up for long--the UFC wasn't so concerned that they were unwiling to change Błachowicz vs Ankalaev into a five-round title fight and new main event of UFC 282 on December 10th, which is particularly impressive when you learn Błachowicz wasn't consulted at all and only learned of the change after getting off a plane and turning his phone back on--but that means for two more, wonderful weeks, the most prolific champion in the history of sports reigns supreme in the UFC one more time.

Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs

Alex Pereira - 7-1, 0 Defenses

Sometimes in this sport things that shouldn't really have happened wind up happening perfectly. Alex "Poatan" Pereira getting a title shot was ridiculous on its face: He was only 6-1, he'd only fought three UFC fights, he'd only fought one ranked fighter at all. It was the UFC's most blatant attempt to manufacture a title contender since Conor McGregor scored a comeback title fight after pulling a long-expired bag of Donald Cerrone from the back of the break room fridge. The UFC didn't even try to hide that Pereira was getting the shot solely because he'd beaten divisional kingpin and MMA superstar Israel Adesanya in kickboxing--twice. They ran highlights from an entirely different sport far, far more often than highlights from Pereira's UFC tenure during their monthslong attempt to hype up the title fight between the biggest and most consistent middleweight sensation since Anderson Silva and a mixed martial arts neophyte whose toughest test had been a guy who fought at 160 pounds for five years. Naysayers (like me!) said Pereira's lack of MMA experience would cost him when the fight inevitably turned to grappling, and it did: Israel Adesanya, noted non-wrestler, was able to repeatedly ground, control and almost submit Pereira. Naysayers (it's me again, being wrong!) said Pereira's untested MMA technique and staying power would cost him in a chapmionship-level fight, and it did: Israel Adesanya stung him repeatedly, nearly knocked him out, and was cruising to a broad decision victory on all three scorecards. And then, with two and a half minutes left in a five-round fight, Pereira caught him sleeping, put a string of fists upside his head and battered him to a standing TKO. All of the problems in the world fall before the power of destiny. For the third time and in the second sport of their lives, Alex Pereira defeated Israel Adesanya. Is he going to have serious trouble the second he fights any of the very, very good wrestlers at the top fifteen in his division? Oh, absolutely. Is the UFC going to let him? Probably not! They sound like they want a rematch so as not to deal with Robert Whittaker double-legging him and choking him out in ninety seconds or something. Whatever the future holds, Alex Pereira goes down in history as one of the few to mantle the UFC and stand as the best middleweight in the sport.

Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs

Leon Edwards - 20-3 (1), 0 Defenses

It took half a decade to get the world to notice, but everyone sees Leon Edwards now. "Rocky" came from the kind of circumstances sports movies are made of--a poor kid from Jamaica who moved to England, lost his father to gang violence, nearly lost himself to it as a teenager and found a healthy outlet for his anger in mixed martial arts. Edwards made his debut in 2011 as a prime example of the modern generation of fighter, cross-trained from the beginning in every discipline, and in just three years he was the welterweight champion of Britain and off to the UFC. Entering 2016, Leon had suffered the first true loss of his career--he was 10-3, but one of those losses was a DQ for an illegal blow and the other a coinflip decision that could easily have gone either way--at the hands of the newly-crowned Ultimate Fighter 21 winner, Kamaru Usman, making his debut as an official UFC competitor. It took ten fights without a loss for Leon to get his rematch. The UFC seemed especially resistant to his title contendership, pushing him down in favor of the ostensibly more marketable UK star in Darren Till and booking him against numerous other contenders and gatekeepers while repeatedly elevating less deserving fighters to the championship. He wouldn't have gotten it at all, in fact, had Jorge Masvidal not gotten arrested. On August 20, the UFC acquiesced and granted the clear #1 contender his shot at the championship, and at revenge against Kamaru Usman--and after getting dominated for three and a half out of five rounds, with the commentators openly opining on the likelihood that he had given up, with just fifty-six seconds left in the fight, Edwards uncorked a headkick that shocked the world and knocked Kamaru Usman out for the first time in his career. Holding onto the belt won't be easy--Dana White is foaming at the mouth for a Wembley Stadium rematch between the two to end their trilogy--but Leon Edwards is cemented into history as the man who killed the king, and for a beautiful moment, as the best welterweight on the planet.

Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs

Islam Makhachev - 23-1, 0 Defenses

Destiny has come. When Islam Makhachev made his UFC debut in 2015, Khabib Nurmagomedov, considered by most to be the #1 contender and soon to be the best in the world, swore up and down that Makhachev, not him, would be the best lightweight champion of all time. Coming from him, the praise made sense: Khabib and Islam have trained together since they were children growing up and learning to wrestle in Makhachkala. Islam learned under Khabib's father, trained with Khabib's team and even made the pilgrimage to America to join Khabib at the American Kickboxing Academy. And then, two matches into his UFC tenure, Islam got knocked the fuck out in the first round by the little-known Adriano Martins, who hasn't won a fight in the six years since. Even as Makhachev racked up wins, the memory of his loss and his wrestling-heavy approach to his fights let people cast doubts on him. Sure, he's good--but he lost, so he's not as good as Khabib. Islam Makhachev, as his trainer tells it, never wanted to be Khabib. He loves fighting, but he doesn't love the spectacle or the glory or the attention. So when, after ten straight wins, Makhachev was picked to challenge Charles Oliveira for the vacant title he never truly lost, a lot of folks just weren't quite sure what to think. Sure, he was an incredible wrestler, but Charles Oliveira is a submission wizard, and sure, he's on a ten-fight streak, but he hasn't fought a single person actually IN the top ten, and Oliveira represents a huge, dangerous step up as a man who's been destroying some of the most accomplished lightweights in the sport's history. Analyst opinion was split right down the middle; the fight, as it turned out, was nowhere near that competitive, and the only analyst who was entirely correct was Khabib. Islam demolished the former champion, outstriking him, taking him down at will, controlling him in the grappling, and ultimately dropping him with punches and choking him out in the second round. The Charles Oliveira story is over, the Islam Makhachev era has begun. Unlike most new champions, there's no question about what's next for him: The UFC is intent on having him defend against featherweight champion and pound-for-pound great Alexander Volkanovski when they go to Perth, Australia for UFC 284 on February 12.

Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Alexander Volkanovski - 25-1, 4 Defenses

Sometimes it takes a lot of work to convince people you're the best. Alexander Volkanovski's rise through mixed martial arts is the kind of thing reserved for the all-time greats of the sport: He lost once, in the fourth fight of his career--at welterweight--and that was nine years ago. He's won twenty-one straight fights since, defeating top talent from around the world before landing in the UFC and proceeding to dominate every fighter placed in his way. There was one, single weight placed around his career's ankle: Max Holloway. Holloway was the UFC's much-lauded and much-marketed featherweight champion while Volkanovski was on his way up, and even as a 20-1 dynamo, he was an underdog against the Hawaiian. Alex beat him--soundly--but because of Holloway's prior dominance, and because the UFC wanted to get the most for its marketing buck, they ordered an instant rematch. Alex won again, but this time it was by a very close split decision, and that left a vocal part of the fanbase even angrier and more certain Max was the real champion. Two years and two fights apiece later, Alex and Max met one last time on July 2, and Volkanovski beat every shade of hell out of Holloway, not just repeatedly wobbling and outstriking him but completely and utterly shutting him out of a fight for the very first time in his career. When the bell rang, there were no questions left: Alexander Volkanovski is the absolute, undisputed best featherweight in the UFC. And now, having more or less destroyed his division, he has his eye on the pound for pound ranks. Volkanovski called his shot at the lightweight title before Charles Oliveira and Islam Makhachev had even fought, and moments after Makhachev was victorious, Volkanovski was in the cage staring him down. Come February, he'll get his chance at all-time greatness, but Josh Emmett and Yair Rodríguez will be meeting that same night to crown an interim featherweight champion, so whether Volkanovski ends the night with one belt or two, he'll have business to attend to.

Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Aljamain Sterling - 22-3, 2 Defenses

Aljamain Sterling is the most simultaneously blessed and cursed fighter I've ever seen. A lifelong wrestler and grappler who started fighting at 19, Aljo took the long road to championship contention, dealing with setbacks and beating half the challengers the division had to offer before getting his shot at the seemingly unbeatable Petr Yan. He left their fight as the new, victorious champion, not because he had defeated Yan--he appeared to be on his way towards a loss--but because Yan had both illegally and outright intentionally kneed him in the head on the ground, resulting in the first-ever title change by way of disqualification. It took thirteen months for the inevitable rematch to materialize, and this time, Aljamain soundly outgrappled Yan and won fair and square--but the judges only gave him a split decision, which Dana White himself got pissy about, and the fanbase that already loved Yan and hated Sterling took it as carte blanche to shit on him all over again. Aljamain Sterling had the rare and coveted UFC title defense, and people hated him more than ever. The UFC itself made matters worse when, rather than booking the José Aldo title fight everyone wanted or giving Marlon Vera and his fan-favorite winning streak a shot, they tapped former champion and marketing favorite TJ Dillashaw as the top contender after winning one contentious split decision. Fans were split on whether Sterling would be able to outgrapple the accomplished wrestler, and Sterling made them all look extremely silly by catching a Dillashaw kick and immediately, easily ragdolling and controlling him thirty seconds into their fight. Unfortunately, seconds after that, Dillashaw dislocated his shoulder. Because everything is silly, Dillashaw was allowed to fight for a round and a half with one of his arms clearly not functioning, leading to Sterling getting a very easy ground-and-pound TKO in the second round, and after the fight Dillashaw immediately admitted that his shoulder had popped out dozens of times during camp, to the point that he had forewarned the referee of the injury before the fight so he wouldn't stop it immediately. If everything about that sentence sounds completely insane and backwards to you: Welcome to our fake idiot sport. Aljamain Sterling has three straight victories in championship fights, and through absolutely no fault of his own, most of the fanbase thinks none of them should count. Jesus wept.

Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Deiveson Figueiredo - 21-2-1, 0 Defenses

We have come so far, and yet we are still where we were. On December 12, 2020, Deiveson Figueiredo shockingly went to a draw with heavy underdog Brandon Moreno. On June 12, 2021, Moreno even more shockingly dropped and choked him out, wrestling the flyweight championship from his hands. On January 22, 2022, the two met for the third time and the result was an instant fight of the year candidate that saw both men trade the advantage in striking, grappling and wrestling alike back and forth, but Figueiredo's smart adjustments from their second fight won him a razor-close but still unanimous decision and the return of the flyweight championship. And now, having fought each other three times in thirteen months and finally finished their trilogy, the next stop for new champion Deiveson Figueiredo was seemingly yet another fight with Moreno, this time in Mexico as a big money card. And then: Things fell apart. What at first seemed like an amicable rivalry turned sour when Figueiredo refused to fight Moreno again, citing what he saw as racist disrespect from his corner, and called instead for a fight with top contender Kai Kara-France, only to then say he needed time to rehabilitate hand injuries and couldn't take the fight until later in the year, and the UFC, ever the sensitive organization, responded by booking Moreno and Kara-France for an interim flyweight championship match on July 30 at UFC 277.

Interim Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Brandon Moreno - 20-6-2, 0 Defenses

And just like that, we're right back where we started. Moreno and Kara-France put on a furious two and a half back-and-forth rounds, but as he somehow does Moreno became only more vicious and found his combinations as the fight wore on. Four and a half minutes into the third round he stunned Kara-France with a spinning backfist and followed it with a charging liver kick that put him down for good and put gold back around Brandon's waist. Immediately following the fight, Moreno called Deiveson Figueiredo into the cage and attempted to bury the hatchet, and the two appeared to somewhat tensely reconcile enough to agree on the now entirely inevitable rematch. After months of radio silence, the inevitable quadrilogy fight was made official: Deiveson Figueiredo vs Brandon Moreno 4: The Search for More Money will take place during at UFC 283, the company's first event in Rio de Janeiro since 2019, on January 21. I say this as a fan of all three of their previous fights: Please, god, no more. Whatever happens, just let it go.

Women's Featherweight, 145 lbs

Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 2 Defenses

Women's Bantamweight, 135 lbs

Amanda Nunes - 22-5, 0 Defenses

Things are back as they should be. Up until December of 2021, Amanda Nunes was unquestionably the greatest women's mixed martial artist in history. She held and defended titles at both the signature class of Women's Bantamweight and the arguably real class of Women's Featherweight, and with her mixture of vicious power, aggressive grappling and solid conditioning, she defeated every UFC champion in the history of either class and, for good measure, Valentina Shevchenko, the ultra-dominant champion of Women's Flyweight, twice. What's more, she crushed most of them, taking on legends like Ronda Rousey and Cris Cyborg and knocking them dead in under a minute. Which is why it was something of a shock when she was choked out by unheralded journeywoman Julianna Peña. The abruptness of the ending to her streak, and the shockingly sloppy way she was taken out, left the fanbase both demanding a rematch and openly questioning how much of the loss was due to something being wrong with Nunes, rather than Julianna Peña doing something right, and opinions flew wildly regarding how close the second bout would be. Seven months and one season of The Ultimate Fighter later they met on July 30, and the answer was: Not even slightly. Amanda Nunes dumpstered Julianna Peña for five straight rounds, dropping her a half-dozen times and elbowing her face entirely open, and barring one touchy moment with an armbar, Peña was entirely shut out and lost a wide unanimous decision that included an incredibly rare 50-43 scorecard. Back on her throne, Amanda Nunes signaled her readiness to take a goddamn vacation for the first time in years while the UFC figures out where to go from here.

Women's Flyweight, 125 lbs

Valentina Shevchenko - 23-3, 7 Defenses

Sometimes, when you've been untouchably atop your division for too long, any display of weakness seems like a loss. Sometimes, you might actually have lost. Valentina Shevchenko is a martial arts phenom: Multiple black belts, multiple Master of Sports degrees, dozens of kickboxing championships, hundreds of combined fights across all of her disciplines and twenty years of combat sports experience--by 34. Her most internationally popular achievement, of course, is her reign as the UFC Women's Flyweight Champion. She is, in fact, 12-2 in the UFC, and those only two losses came against Amanda Nunes, the champion of both 135 and 145, and the second was a split decision that could easily have gone the other way. This is what made it so shocking for people when the relatively unknown Taila Santos very nearly defeated her at UFC 275. Santos controlled Shevchenko on the ground, spend a good part of the fight in back mount and at one point nearly choked her out, but Valentina fought back and eked out a razor-close split decision victory that, as always, many people disagreed with. While the sport continues its ongoing struggle over what wrestling and positional control do and don't count for anymore, Valentina Shevchenko remains the queen of the hill. It was assumed--and at a couple points outright stated--that her next challenger would be the winner of UFC 280's battle between top contenders Manon Fiorot and Katlyn Chookagian, but despite Fiorot's victory, a number of people--bafflingly including Fiorot herself--called for her to have another fight before challenging for the belt. Which seems aggressively silly, because jesus christ, there's no one else for her to fight. The future is uncertain.

Women's Strawweight, 115 lbs

Zhang Weili - 23-3, 0 Defenses

Are you really surprised? There's a long tradition of underestimating unlikely champions in mixed martial arts, particularly when they're not the fan-friendliest in style or personality, from Michael Bisping to Frankie Edgar, only to have those demeaned champions remind the world that they didn't reach the peak of their divisions by mistake. Many of the wise, studied scribes of the sport warned the foolish masses against assuming the same about Women's Strawweight Champion Carla Esparza: She was no pushover, they said, and Zhang will have real trouble. And then, come fight day, we unwashed masses pulled them from their ivory towers and forced them to run in the streets amongst the mud and filth so they, too, could feel the unburdened joy of being, because Zhang Weili, as basically every fan had assumed, did, in fact, beat the absolute tar out of Carla. It wasn't particularly close: Carla got outlanded 37-6, hurt several times on the feet, and choked out just a minute into the second round. The inexplicable, season-long Cookie Monster subplot is over, Zhang Weili is now a two-time world champion, and things are back as they should be. What comes next, however, is tricky. Carla was blown out, so a rematch is out of the question. Rose Namajunas, the only person in the UFC to beat Weili, is a likely candidate--but after her disastrous performance against Carla, it remains to be seen how much faith the UFC has in her. Jéssica Andrade has a claim, but she's splitting time between 115 and 125, and probably needs to pick a weight class if she wants a shot. Amanda Lemos is on deck, but she could really use a marquee win first. The UFC is spoiled for almost-but-not-quite contenders: They just need to crown someone.

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ROGUES GALLERY: NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

Bellator Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Ryan Bader - 30-7 (1), 2 Defenses

No, I will never stop hating on Ryan Bader. I know it's not fair. Objectively, the man's had a pretty great career--he's a huge, action-figure-looking wrestleboxing motherfucker who only ever lost to the best of the best (EXCEPT TITO ORTIZ), when he puts it together he's got some great knockouts to his name and he humiliated Fedor Emelianenko AND Matt Mitrione, which are both things I deeply adore. But Ryan Bader is Ryan Bader, and that is both his blessing and his curse, and the continual ire he gets from the MMA community for daring to exist in the way that he does is as responsible for his career resurgence as his fists. He followed his successful slow-motion nothing of a title defense back in January with an even slower, less eventful defense in his rematch with Cheick Kongo, which for bonus points was in front of a very partisan and very upset Parisian crowd who in no way appreciated his wrestling and his refusal to mix any offense into it. He recently signed a new Bellator deal that he intends to retire under and he's made clear he no longer has any intention of competing at light-heavyweight, and that opened the door for Scott Coker's early-2000s PRIDE nostalgia humiliation fetish to rear its ugly head once again. On February 4th at Bellator 290, Ryan Bader will defend his heavyweight title in a rematch against Fedor, who swears it will be the final bout of his career. When last they met in 2019, Bader knocked him out in thirty-five seconds. Whatever happens: It's going to be very, very funny.

Bellator Light-Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs

Vadim Nemkov - 16-2 (1), 3 Defenses

Bellator CEO Scott Coker has been complicating title reigns with tournaments for decades and he's not about to stop now. Vadim Nemkov won the Bellator Light-Heavyweight Championship from Ryan Bader in 2020, and his title reign was immediately wrapped up in the Light-Heavyweight Grand Prix that started the following year. Nemkov, a Fedor Emelianenko protege, former Spetsnaz operative and understated wrecking machine who hadn't lost a fight since his early-career days in Rizin back in 2016, continued his Bellator streak by handling the always-game Phil Davis and dealing with some trouble en route to submitting Julius Anglickas, but then the tournament came to a screeching halt. Bellator threw all its marketing cash at the ultimately ill-fated Bellator 277 in April of 2022, and a sizable chunk of that misfortune came from both its championship and tournament-final co-main event. Corey Anderson looked handily en route to defeating Nemkov, only to unintentionally headbutt him while diving in to throw a punch. The headbutt opened an uncloseable gash on Nemkov's brow--and it happened five seconds before round three would've ended and allowed the judges to score a technical decision. It would be seven full months before the final got its re-do, and this time, Nemkov avoided Anderson's wrestling and controlled the fight with distance strikes en route to a unanimous decision victory. It took nearly two years for Bellator to complete an eight-man tournament, but they did it, and Vadim Nemkov is still your world's champion. He has no time to rest and celebrate, though: He'll meet Yoel Romero, winner of 0 fights over currently ranked competitors, at Bellator 290 on February 4th.

Bellator Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs

Johnny Eblen - 12-0, 0 Defenses

The world did not see this one coming. Gegard Mousasi, widely considered the best middleweight outside of the UFC and arguably better than the majority of those inside, was a -260 favorite to retain his Bellator championship and cruise through his second straight year as a titleholder. And then he got punched in his god damned face. "The Human Cheat Code" Johnny "Diamond Hands" Eblen "Suffix Nickname" dropped Mousasi on his face with a hook out of nowhere just minutes into the fight, and that signalled the beginning not just of an upset but a five-round shut-out, as Eblen dominated Mousasi standing and grappling, earning both Bellator's middleweight championship and, for the first time in his career, his own Wikipedia page. Unsurprisingly, Eblen is a lifelong wrestler out of American Top Team, explaining the power hooks and power doubles alike, and unsurprisingly, Mousasi's achilles heel was a really good wrestler. What comes next for Eblen is anyone's guess. Could be a Mousasi rematch if Scott Coker gets mad about wrestling existing again, could be Yoel Romero dropping back down to 185, could be #2 ranked Fabian Edwards trying to bring a second belt to the family. For the moment, Eblen gets to be on top of the world.

Bellator Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs

Yaroslav Amosov - 26-0, 0 Defenses

Yaroslav "Dynamo" Amosov is in that very strange place where he's simultaneously one of the most successful prospects in the sport and a fighter almost no one feels a need to pay attention to. He's a four-time world champion in sambo, he's undefeated in nearly a decade of mixed martial arts competition, he has a 26-0 record at just 28 years old and he dominated the very tough Douglas Lima to become the first Ukrainian MMA world champion (you came so close, Igor), and he has a total of 1,253 Twitter followers. Some of it is exposure--it probably doesn't help that Amosov was on Bellator's prelims just before his title eliminator--and some of it is a very tactical and sometimes control-centric style that does not lend itself well to attracting viewers, as seen in a 7-0 Bellator record with only two stoppages, one of which was a doctor's stoppage on cuts between rounds. The fact that he's a 26-0 world champion and is still mostly being looked at as a prospect is a testament to both the amount of talent he very clearly has and the way everyone's still kind of waiting for something big to happen to him, which, uh, also indicates where Bellator is in the pecking order of the collective MMA consciousness. Bellator had been planning to finally cash in on their many years of can-crushing by having Amosov defend his title against weirdo striker Michael "Venom" Page on May 13, but the small, unimportant matter of Russia fucking invading his home country saw him stay in Ukraine and join the defense efforts. Having fought a war for nearly the entirety of the previous year, Amosov will make his return to competition on February 25th at Bellator 291, where he'll reunify the title with the guy they tapped to take on MVP in his stead.

Bellator Interim Welterweight Champion

Logan Storley - 14-1, 0 Defenses

Stop me if you've heard this one before: A company books a massively-hyped international superstar striking specialist against an American wrestler and the result makes everyone really mad. Bellator has been salivating over the idea of getting a championship on British kickman Michael "Venom" Page for years, and with Amosov no longer available they thought the half-a-foot-shorter Logan Storley would be a good candidate, and shockingly, the 14-1 wrestler whose only loss was a split decision to Amosov himself proceeded to wrestle Page for about 2/3 of their 25-minute fight. He ultimately won a close split decision that should easily have been both broad and unanimous, and as always happens with this script, MVP wants an immediate rematch. Scott Coker, proving every promoter is just one piss-fit away from becoming Dana White, used the post-fight presser to complain about the judging and insist that Storley's choice to just wrestle "isn't MMA" and shouldn't have won him the decision. It's 2022 and it is still the wrestler's fault that their opponent can't wrestle. After a quiet half-year of twiddling his thumbs, Storley's going to be fighting to become the undisputed champion as soon as Yaroslav Amosov is back in a wrestler vs wrestler match for which the grinding will be enormous.

Bellator Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs

Usman Nurmagomedov - 16-0, 0 Defenses

If there's a single, developing throughline of mixed martial arts in 2022, it's the growing power of the Dagestani wrestling brigade. Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov built himself an army of powerful ultra-wrestlers, and after his passing, the American Kickboxing Academy's Javier Mendez and his son and protege, the now-retired Khabib Nurmagomedov, unleashed them on the world in force. Usman, Khabib's cousin (as well as the younger brother of Umar Nurmagomedov, undefeated and ranked UFC bantamweight), took to Bellator in April of 2021 and proceeded to burn an undefeated path through the Manny Muros and Patrik Pietiläe of the world. His style was a little more eclectic--lots of spinning kicks, lots of stick-and-move jabs and stomps to the leg--but the resemblance became uncanny once he inevitably, and easily, ragdolled his opponents to the canvas and generally choked them out in short order thereafter. When he was announced as the #1 contender to Bellator's lightweight title, I was somewhat miffed: He hadn't beaten any top contenders, Bellator had already held a title eliminator and it was won in a crushing thirty-second knockout by Tofiq Musayev, the whole thing smacked of a pathetic attempt to glom onto some of Khabib's mainstream attention. I at no point said that he wouldn't very, very easily win. At Bellator 288 on November 18th, Usman very, very easily won, defeating Patricky "Pitbull" Freire at every aspect of the game and leaving him sans both his championship and one eyebrow. A Nurmagomedov holds Bellator gold. Who they send after him next remains to be seen.

Bellator Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Patrício Pitbull - 34-5, 1 Defense

Patrício Pitbull has had a weird goddamn year. Pitbull has long been the GOAT of Bellator, sometimes to the company's open chagrin--there were definitely times they would have vastly preferred a Pat Curran or, most particularly, a Michael Chandler to carry their banner, and Patrício had this unfortunate habit of not just beating them but making them look like shit. By mid-2021, he was Bellator's dual featherweight and lightweight champion, he was on a seven-fight win streak, and he was a finalist in their Featherweight Grand Prix. And then undefeated rising star A.J. McKee dropped him and choked him out in two minutes. Bellator, clearly, felt they had hit the jackpot and were going to be riding the McKee train for some time, as by their rematch ten months later, McKee was the centerpiece of all of their advertising. It was somewhat awkward when, as he had done to so many before, Patrício took him to a victorious decision that made McKee kind of look like shit, neutralizing his offense in the clinch, jabbing under his range, and grinding away the clock. Bellator pushed for a trilogy, but McKee, pissed off, tired of cutting weight and worried about having it happen all over again, declined and moved up to lightweight. Instead of a big-money rematch, Patrício was left to face top contender Ádám Borics, and the match, while hard-fought, was not particularly entertaining or memorable. Unusually, we didn't have to wait long to hear about Pitbull's next fight, and even more unusually, it's a co-promotional matchup against Rizin featherweight champion Kleber Koike, happening in Japan, on New Year's Eve. ...and airing in America only by twelve-hour tape delay. Great job, Bellator.

Bellator Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Sergio Pettis - 22-5, 1 Defense

So Sergio Pettis is good now, apparently. It's not that he was ever bad, exactly, it's that he was more or less forever in big brother Anthony's shadow. Sergio had a long five years in the UFC where he on several occasions seemed poised to break out into the top ranks and vie for a title, but he always managed to fall just short, building a strong win streak before getting controlled by Henry Cejudo, barely squeaking past Joe Benavidez only to get dominated by Jussier Formiga, moving up to 135 and getting shut down by Rob Font. He went to Bellator just a few months before his brother left for the PFL, and now, in a stunning turnaround, Sergio is the successful one in the family. He won Bellator's bantamweight championship in his third fight with the organization, and in the biggest fight of his career, an interpromotional match pitting his title against Rizin bantamweight champion (and former Bellator champion himself, who vacated due to injury) Kyoji Horiguchi, Pettis shocked the world by battling through four difficult rounds he was fairly clearly losing and knocking out the heavy favorite with a painfully pretty spinning backfist. Sergio Pettis is no longer an also-ran. Unfortunately, as these things always go, he followed this up by getting injured. He's out of this year's Grand Prix and his timetable for return is iffy enough that Bellator immediately booked an interim championship between Raufeon Stots and Juan Archuleta for Bellator 279 on April 23.

Bellator Interim Bantamweight Champion

Raufeon Stots - 18-1, 0 Defenses

He did not waste the opportunity. Raufeon Stots has been looked on as a major bantamweight prospect for years: A two-time DII wrestling champion, a heavy-handed puncher and an exceptionally conditioned grappler with guidance from Roufusport, Jens Pulver and Kamaru Usman thanks to their shared alma mater who won his first regional title just two years into his career. He's 18-1 with his only loss coming via a shock 15-second knockout against one of the best in the world in Merab Dvalishvili. Stots stormed Bellator in 2019 and is on an unbeaten six-fight streak with the organization, and when faced with both the entrance to his first grand prix, the stiffest competition of his career in former champion Juan Archuleta and the interim Bellator championship on the line, Stots did what some of the best in the world couldn't and knocked Archuleta out in the third round. Loudmouth wrestler Danny Sabatello defeated Leandro Higo to reach the next round of Bellator's Grand Prix, and will face Stots at Bellator 289 on December 9 for both a berth in the tournament finals and the interim championship.

Bellator Women's Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Cris Cyborg - 26-2 (1), 4 Defenses

Yup. It's 2022 and Cris Cyborg is still out there. For those who don't know, Cris Cyborg was the canonical women's featherweight fighter, a muay thai wrecking machine who didn't just beat but brutalized essentially all of her opponents, including ex-Star Wars Gina Carano, and her popularity as a destroyer of humans is the only real reason women's featherweight even exists as a division, to the point that the UFC added it when she was the only actual fighter at the weight class they employed. She was 20-1 (1) when she passed the torch to Amanda Nunes, who slew her in just fifty-one seconds. She took one more fight in the UFC to complete her contract, but left for Bellator almost immediately afterward with uncharacteristic cooperation from the UFC itself--after all, they'd gotten what they wanted out of her. Her first Bellator fight was a one-sided destruction of their featherweight champion, and she's defended it three times since. At this point in Cyborg's career the problem isn't her or her fighting or her age, but simply that there's no one in Bellator for her to fight--after just five fights she's already hitting rematches, having just recorded her second one-sided bludgeoning of a very game but outmatched Arlene Blencowe. Consequently, Cyborg decided her next fight would be a boxing match, and on September 25 she faced Simone da Silva, a jobber to the stars coming off twelve straight losses across multiple combat sports, and won a unanimous decision. However, being as da Silva had been knocked out just one month prior, she was still technically suspended and the fight might not count. Cris Cyborg is the featherweight champion of a company she isn't currently fighting in, in a sport in which she isn't currently interested in competing, and her boxing debut may or may not have legally happened. But undeterred, she’s going to have her second boxing match on the undercard of December 10th’s Crawford/Avanesyan card. She’ll be facing…Gabrielle “Gabanator” Holloway, who is 6-6 in MMA and 0-2 in boxing. Great.

Bellator Women's Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs

Liz Carmouche - 17-7, 0 Defenses

Liz Carmouche made her own bad Christmas hat photoshop of herself, I feel honorbound to use it. This wasn't a thing most people expected, nor are most people happy about it, but it kind of makes me smile. Liz "Girl-Rilla" Carmouche is a former marine who's been grinding away at mixed martial arts for twelve years, and for the entirety of those twelve years she's been just good enough to touch the top of the mountain but not quite good enough to climb it. In 2011, just one year into her career, she challenged for Strikeforce's bantamweight championship only to get choked out, in 2013 she participated in the first women's fight in UFC history and nearly upset everyone's marketing plans by neck cranking the shit out of Ronda Rousey before ultimately getting armbarred, and in 2019 she challenged Valentina Shevchenko for her flyweight title but just couldn't touch her. Her shift to Bellator wasn't met with much fanfare, but three wins with two violent stoppages earned her a shot at champion Juliana Velasquez on April 22, 2022. It seemed to be going Velasquez's way, but just before the end of the fourth round Carmouche muscled her to the ground, put her in the crucifix position and began landing elbows that were, respectfully, pretty visibly inconsequential, but referee Mike Beltran felt differently and called the fight off, leaving Velasquez apoplectic and Carmouche a world champion for the first time in her career. For some reason it took Bellator eight whole months to get around to addressing this: The two will have a rematch on December 9 at Bellator 289.

It's worth noting that a) ONE uses different weight classes and b) ONE also has a dozenish various kickboxing champions, and for the moment, for sake of my sanity, we're just going to stick to the MMA champions. Maybe later we'll change this. FOR NOW:

ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs

Arjan Bhullar - 11-1, 0 Defenses

It's Arjan Bhullar, the man ONE CEO Chatri Sityodtong swears is better than Francis Ngannou. Bhullar, the first Indian world champion in the sport, was a big deal as a wrestler in his native Canada, won multiple collegiate championships at heavyweight, took a Commonwealth Games championship and ultimately achieved his dream of representing Canada at the 2012 Olympics where he was eliminated in the first round. He made his MMA debut two years later as, you may have already guessed, predominantly a wrestler. He was picked up by the UFC in 2017 at 6-0, and had a respectable 3-1 record with the organization, but chose not to sign a new contract after feeling the UFC was lowballing him. He signed with the then-growing ONE Championship in 2019, won his debut fight, took a year and a half off for the pandemic and returned in May of 2021 to TKO the baddest heavyweight in ONE, its reigning champion of almost six years, the man, myth, legend and Truth, Brandon Vera. And then, much like Vera, he promptly refused to sign a new contract and sat out for a year so he could play hardball. Chatri publicly shat on him and his management and set up an interim championship.

ONE Interim Heavyweight Champion

Anatoliy Malykhin - 11-0, 0 Defenses

For all things, there is a Russian punchman. Anatoly "Spartak" Malykhin is both an undefeated mixed martial arts fighter, a punching machine, and an avowed wife guy who credits her with his career, which he was about to give up as a 5-0 regional champion before meeting her. He promptly moved to Phuket, upped his game, met ONE's talent scouts and got signed directly into co-main event status. He is not only 11-0, and not only has finished all eleven fights, no one has yet made it further than the second round with him, including noted steroid elemental Amir Aliakbari, whom he starched in three minutes, and interim championship contender Kirill Grishenko. After many, many months of back and forth, and some truly irritating social media posturing, the inevitable unification fight got signed--and somehow, inexplicably, they opted NOT to put the heavyweight championship on the big American Amazon Prime card. No faith in the wrestlers, I suppose. Bhullar and Malykhin were supposed to end the heavyweights curse and reunify the belts at ONE 161 on September 29--and then Bhullar pulled out with an arm injury. So the heavyweight champion hasn't fought in eighteen months and the interim champion has been waiting for him for eight. There was increasing word about the fight getting rebooked for January, but clearly, something went wrong, as Malykhin did get a fight announced--but it was for Reinier de Ridder's 225-pound Light-Heavyweight championship at ONE on Prime Video 5 on December 3rd. Does the heavyweight division still exist? Is Bhullar gone? Who on Earth knows.

ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs

Reinier de Ridder - 16-0, 0 Defenses

ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs

Reinier de Ridder - 16-0, 2 Defenses

"The Dutch Knight" Reinier de Ridder is probably ONE's most successful MMA fighter and he was recently deemed insufficiently important to merit a Wikipedia page. ONE prides itself on creating the 225-pound cruiserweight class many MMA fans have wanted for years, but it almost immediately fell victim to the problem many had theorized: A sufficiently skilled 205-pounder will probably also just win at 225. Aung La N Sang was the first to hold both titles simultaneously, but Reinier, a childhood judoka turned all-around adult grappling monster, choked him out in one round to win his middleweight title. Curiously, Sang was scheduled to defend his remaining title against someone else, but COVID put the seemingly more logical Reinier in, who promptly took the other belt home too. Because ONE is very, very silly, Reinier then made his first defense of the 205-pound title against Kiamrian Abbasov, ONE's 185-pound champion (whose own title was not on the line) whom he also choked out, meaning Reinier de Ridder is now the lineal titleholder of 1/3 of ONE's entire men's MMA program. To further make this more ridiculous, his first post-triple-champ fight was not a fight, but a grappling match against all-time BJJ great André Galvão, and upon wrestling him to a draw, he challenged him to an MMA fight which Galvão accepted. André Galvão's last mixed martial arts bout was twelve years ago, it was at 170 pounds, and he was knocked out in two minutes by Tyron Woodley. While the fight is still expected later this year, de Ridder made a pit stop to defend specifically the middleweight title against former champion Vitaly Bigdash at ONE 159 on July 22, in which Bigdash, fighting a grappling savant, decided it was a good time to jump a guillotine. He was styled on and submitted with an inverted triangle choke. de Ridder was originally to defend the light-heavyweight championship against Shamil Abdulaev at ONE on Prime Video 3 on October 21st, but Abdulaev failed his medicals for as of yet unspecified reasons. He'll be defending his title against interim heavyweight champion Anatoliy Malykhin this month. Weight classes: ONE's not a fan.

ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs

Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 Defenses

ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs

Christian Lee - 17-4, 0 Defenses

It took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very, very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Favoritism is stupid, but quoting this in the thread for a video game isn't. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE'S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE's repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would by no means have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. I'm sure that Conor McGregor money will come rolling in any day now.

ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs

Tang Kai - 15-2, 0 Defenses

Tang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China's WBK (after investigating, we THINK it's World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz "Ong Bak" Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai's weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai's Dragon Gym and Phuket's legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It's worked out quite well: He hasn't lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China's Rebel FC got ONE's attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he's held for two years. Tang Kai, at the beginning of ONE's worldwide invasion, is suddenly a very visible prospect: A power striker on a 10-fight winning streak and a champion in the world's most competitive weight class. The target on his back is very, very real.

ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs

VACANT - The eternal, unbeaten force of entropy

It's said that when God closes a door, they open a window. After six beautiful months, Vacant's reign as the UFC Lightweight Champion had to come to an end. But ONE Championship has made no bones about their intention of bringing competition to the world of mixed martial arts, and they were not about to let the soon-to-be hottest free agent in the sport slip through their fingers. Just two days before Islam Makhachev and Charles Oliveira fought to claim the empty throne, disaster struck across the globe: John Lineker's reign as ONE Bantamweight Champion ended after 223 days when he came in 3/4 of a pound over the 145-pound championship limit. He was stripped of his title and the following day's match proceeded with only his challenger, Fabrício Andrade, eligible to become champion. But the vengeful spirits that watch over mixed martial arts refuse to let a good opportunity go. The fight was back and forth in the first two rounds, but Lineker began to visible fade in the third thanks to his bad weight cut, Andrade's excellent work in punching his eye shut, and the size and reach differential that saw him getting repeatedly punished. Two and a half minutes into the round Andrade landed a knee to the body that left Lineker reeling, absorbing punishment and seemingly on the verge of the first TKO loss of his career, and sensing the ex-champion was on the ropes and this was his chance to become a hero Fabrício Andrade charged bravely forward, wound up, and landed a perfectly placed, sharply thrust knee on Lineker's balls. It hit so hard it shattered Lineker's cup and left the unbelievably tough man dry heaving into a bucket. The fight could not continue, which meant Fabrício Andrade could not win, which meant that once again, Vacant claimed a world championship. Never before in mixed martial arts history has someone won two championships in two major organizations in one year. Count yourself lucky to have lived at the same time as this generational superstar. Lineker and Camoes will run it back for ONE on Prime Video 7 on February 10th.

ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs

Demetrious Johnson - 31-4-1, 0 Defenses

The king has returned. Demetrious Johnson's 2019 debut with ONE Championship was essentially scandalous. "Mighty Mouse" had long been a fan favorite of the lighter weight classes, a 5'3" combat machine who had been going the distance with world champions like Kid Yamamoto and Dominick Cruz while still working a day job in a warehouse, but it was only in 2012 when he dedicated himself to mixed martial arts as his full-time job that he became a star. He won the UFC's flyweight tournament and became its inaugural champion, and his talents are the reason a division that has existed for a decade has only had five champions--three of whom came in the last two years after he left. By 2018, Johnson had one of the longest winning streaks in the UFC, was the all-time recordholder for championship defenses in the UFC and had recorded some of the most outstanding finishes in the history of the UFC. By 2019, he was out of the company. Johnson and the UFC never got along--or, to be blunt, Johnson was one of the few publicly calling the UFC out on its bullshit. When he won the flyweight title and became a world champion while only getting paid $23k/23k he let it be known, when the UFC cut sponsorship money in the Reebok era he noted the raw deal it gave the fighters, and when Dana White tried to force him to take fights up at bantamweight by threatening to kill the flyweight division if he didn't, he told the world. After Henry Cejudo beat him in a razor-close coinflip decision and took the bargaining leverage of his championship away, it was over in a heartbeat. Dana White personally disliked him enough that he traded him to ONE Championship in exchange for their welterweight champion, Ben Askren. Johnson proceeded to immediately win ONE's flyweight grand prix, but took the first stoppage loss of his entire career in his shot at Adriano Moraes and his world championship and engendered a thousand MMA thinkpieces about if his time as a top fighter was over. A year and a half later, he got his rematch, and on August 27 at ONE on Prime Video 1 he returned the favor, handing Moraes his own first stoppage loss after knocking him out with a flying knee. A trilogy rematch seems inevitable, but for the moment, having just turned 36, Mighty Mouse is a world champion in the second weight class of his career and shows no signs of slowing down.

ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Joshua Pacio - 20-3, 3 Defenses

Joshua "The Passion" Pacio, thusly named after his passion for hotel and restaurant management. A childhood student of both kickboxing and wushu, Pacio quickly established himself as one of the best 125-pound MMA fighters in the Philippines and, ultimately, was too good to stay there. He signed on with ONE in 2016, and his combination of solid grappling, spinning kicks and quick, darting punches got him up to a strawweight title shot within the year, which led to the first loss of his career and the discovery of his primary weakness: Strong wrestling games. Fortunately, this being 125 pounds and a striking-centric promotion, there aren't that many threats out there for him. He's on his second title reign now, his first having been ended during its first defense in a split decision by the greatest rival of his career, grappler Yosuke Saruta, but he wrested the championship back from him in a rematch and this past September defeated him again in a rubber match. Pacio is among the longest-reigning champions in ONE, having notched 1000+ days and 3 title defenses, but as ONE's profile has risen it has begun attracting international talent, and at ONE: Reloaded on April 22, former UFC fighter Jared "The Monkey God" Brooks took a decisive victory and lined himself up as the most likely next contender--and then got himself injured and scratched from his title shot a week before it happened. The fight's now scheduled to serve as the main event for ONE Championship 164 on December 3rd.

ONE Women's Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs

Xiong Jing Nan - 18-2, 7 Defenses

Xiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She'd enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China's Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn't one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE's women's MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan's belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee's belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE's best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision.

ONE Women's Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs

Angela Lee - 11-3, 5 Defenses

Angela Lee is one of ONE's biggest stars and has been widely called its postergirl, and while the metrics may be debatable, she's an extremely solid choice. Her background is varied both culturally and martially: Born in Canada in a Singaporean-South Korean family made entirely of martial artists who all collectively moved to Hawaii when she was a child, she was not only training alongside them as a child, but training in multiple disciplines. By 15 she was a national Pankration champion, by 18 she had been signed by ONE before having a single professional fight, and by 20 she had two black belts and three defenses of ONE's atomweight championship. Lee is an extremely versatile fighter, capable of backing up her aggressive if sometimes loose striking with very solid defensive and offensive grappling, and her only two losses have come when fighting up a class at 125 pounds, against both its champion Xiong Jing Nan--whom she later choked out in a rematch at 115--and world jiu-jitsu champion Michelle Nicolini in a very, very close decision. Lee went on hiatus at the end of 2019 to have a baby and intended to be back by the end of 2020, but then the pandemic happened and she decided to use her cache within the company to just sit it out, making her arguably the smartest fighter in the world. ONE declined to make an interim championship, so she returned to competition this past March as a defending champion and main-evented the ONE X supercard against its atomweight queen in her absence, Stamp Fairtex, and notched her fifth title defense after choking her out in the second round. She got a trilogy fight with Nan on September 30, once again coming to her weight class and challenging for her title, but ultimately fell short and lost a decision. You may be shocked to hear this, but a Lee sibling disagrees regarding the idea that they lost a decision.

Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs

Roberto de Souza - 14-1, 2 Defenses

Roberto "Satoshi" de Souza is trying to become the new Gegard Mousasi. On April 17 he had the chance to avenge the only loss of his career, a half-knockout half-injury against "Hollywood" Johnny Case back in 2019, and he succeeded in emphatic fashion, climbing Case's back, locking him in an inverted triangle choke and eventually forcing an armbar. He's now 14-1 and inarguably one of the best lightweights outside of the UFC, but unlike most of the other fighters to bear that title, he has made it clear he has no interest in changing that. Where the A.J. McKees and Michael Chandlers of the world want to test free agency and notoriety, Roberto de Souza is happy in Japan, both because his Rizin pay is fairly lucrative and his entire family jiu-jitsu business is based in the country. This is admirable, but it's also a little unfortunate: Rizin really only has around a dozen lightweights under contract, and "Satoshi" has already beaten a third of them. He may be waiting for a Spike Carlyle or a Luiz Gustavo to work their way into contention, but the Rizin ranks hold few surprises for him at this point. If he's happy, though, he's happy. In mid-October, it was announced he'll be co-main eventing the RIZIN vs Bellator card on New Year's Eve, and he'll have the tall order of facing top Bellator gun A.J. McKee.

Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs

Kleber Koike Erbst - 31-5-1, 0 Defenses

Rizin has found the solution to Japanese MMA's historical troubles with losing their championships to foreigners: Get Japanese foreigners. Kleber Koike Erbst, while born in São Paulo, moved to Japan as a fourteen year-old and, four years later, elected to stay behind and continue training in grappling and mixed martial arts while his parents returned home. He found community with the above-mentioned de Souza family, working odd jobs to fund his continuing study at their school in Iwata, and later that same year he began his career as a professional fighter. His rookie years were somewhat fraught: By his twenty-first birthday he was only 4-3-1 and his prospects seemed somewhat dim. As it turns out, aging into actual adulthood makes a fucking difference, as in the following twelve years he has lost only two fights. One was a decision loss to Artur Sowiński, the champion of Poland's Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki federation, and he rematched and choked him out two years later; the other, Erbst's final KSW fight, was a loss to Mateusz Gamrot, who is currently the #8 fighter an entire weight class up in the UFC's lightweight rankings. Koike joined Rizin in 2020 and immediately snapped off a five-fight submission streak, leading to his challenging featherweight champion Juntarou Ushiku at Rizin 39 on October 23. It only took six and a half minutes for Erbst to submit Ushiku with his trademark triangle choke, making him, for the second time in his career, a world champion. He won't get to rest on his laurels for very long: He's been tapped for the main event of RIZIN vs Bellator, a champion vs champion match against Bellator's Patrício Pitbull. Neither has to worry about their title being on the line, it's just a matter of organizational pride.

Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs

Kyoji Horiguchi - 30-5, 0 Defenses

Kyoji Horiguchi is going through a difficult time in his career. Horiguchi is, indisputably, one of the absolute best flyweights on the planet. He's an incredibly fast, powerful striker with very solid wrestling and aggressive grappling to back up his skills, and the streak of incredible knockouts and submissions on his record is a testament to his skills. Trouble is: He's not fighting at flyweight, he's fighting at bantamweight, and it's finally starting to become a problem. His half-decade unbeaten streak ended in 2019 thanks to a first-round upset loss against Kai Asakura, but Rizin rushing him back in mid-knee injury was blamed for that, especially when Kyoji starched Kai in a rematch the next year. And then he lost his Bellator bantamweight championship to Sergio Pettis after winning most of the fight only to walk into a spinning backfist. And now he's lost his berth in Bellator's bantamweight grand prix after just getting grappled to death by Patchy Mix, who, while very good at jiu-jitsu, also had the advantage of half a foot of height and reach on Horiguchi. He continues to be almost certainly the best fighter in Rizin, and inarguably Japan's best at flyweight AND bantamweight, but three years ago he was the nearly-undefeated champion of the two biggest b-leagues in the world simultaneously and now he's 1-3 in said three years and has a Rizin title he's never defended. Last month, this section concluded with the difficult questions about where he goes from here, and Rizin's attempt to help him out by giving him a tune-up fight with Kintaro Masakiri, a 14-11-2 journeyman coming off multiple consecutive losses: Horiguchi won, but not before nearly getting knocked out. During the card's post-fight press conference he said he was coming to the conclusion that he was just too small for bantamweight, and needed to drop down to the 125-pound flyweight class and win Bellator's championship. Bellator doesn't have a flyweight class. Neither does Rizin. Even when Horiguchi was announced as competing on the RIZIN vs Bellator supercard on December 31st, it was a little baffling: He'll be facing Hiromasa Ougikubo. This means, under the theme of the show, Horiguchi is ostensibly representing Bellator, an organization in which he is 1-2, as opposed to Rizin, where he's 11-1.

Rizin Women's Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs

Seika Izawa - 8-0, 0 Defenses

All hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan's best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don't care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP's strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women's fighters in history on Rizin's New Year's Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin's atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin's talent is open to her--but that also means she's got a real, real big target on her back. She's successfully submitted her way through the first two rounds of Rizin's Atomweight Grand Prix, although she had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska, and is now set for a rematch of her 2021 battle with Si Woo Park at the tournament finals on the December 31st supershow.