If you didn’t watch the first three fights at UFC on ESPN 10 on Saturday in Las Vegas, you didn’t miss much but you also missed a lot.
The combined fight time of those three fights was 1:53. In those 113 seconds, however, Christian Aguilera short-circuited Anthony Ivy with a monstrous overhand right, Tyson Nam starched Zarrukh Adashev with a straight right counter and Julia Avila overwhelmed Gina Mazany with a ferocious flurry against the fence. In MMA, a lot can happen in not a lot of time…
Richard Gasper didn’t exactly fit the look of a hip-hop pioneer.
Raised in Halawa, an area of Oahu most known for its proximity to Pearl Harbor and its max security correctional facility – the only one in the state – he rocked slippers, board shorts, half-cut tees and jobber hats with tails in the back. Gasper was more into surfing and heavy metal as a kid, but everything changed when his cousin came over and played Zapp’s funk hit “More Bounce to the Ounce.” His cousin started popping — dancing characterized by quick, explosive movements to make it look like joints were popping out of their sockets — and Gasper was hooked.
It was 1980, just seven years after hip-hop was born in a Bronx apartment party and less than a year after it rhymed its way into national consciousness with The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” Before the internet allowed anyone and everyone to call themselves rappers, before MTV became the arbiter of music and culture for a generation, hip-hop traveled 5,000 miles from its New York City birthplace to the shores of Hawaiʻi…
Jon Jones wasn’t the first to speak up, but depending how things go, he may be the most important. For the last week and a half, the greatest light heavyweight of all-time’s Twitter feed has been a long overdue polemic against the contractual precarity of Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors.
“Just go ahead and release me from my UFC contract altogether,” he tweeted on May 29. He doubled down on that request the next day, bid the light heavyweight title farewell a day after that and otherwise railed against getting ripped off “tens of millions” of dollars throughout his career. The alternative—forking out a little extra money for a banger against Francis Ngannou—is looking considerably better than it already did, which is saying something.
If it were just Jones kicking up dust and if times were normal, the UFC would likely do what it always does in these situations: keep the gears in motion and wait for the unhappy party to come back around. In the meantime, focus on promoting the next batch of stars, so if the unhappy party doesn’t come back around, some other G.O.A.T.-of-the-week can slide right into the spot and keep the general order of things intact. Most of the time, however, fighters come back around. What other option is there?
Still, these are not normal times, and Jones is not alone…
Gilbert Burns in the UFC on ESPN 9 main event did what no one had previously been able to do: He did not get knocked out by former Ultimate Fighting Championship welterweight titleholder Tyron Woodley.
Context is important here. After Woodley’s first career loss against Nate Marquardt in a failed bid to capture the Strikeforce welterweight crown in 2012, he bounced back with a 36-second knockout of Jay Hieron in his next fight. After dropping a controversial split decision against Jake Shields in 2013, he returned five months later with a hellacious first-round knockout of Josh Koshcheck. After getting outpointed by Rory MacDonald in 2014, he rebounded with a 61-second technical knockout of Dong Hyun Kim two months later. In the next fight after each of his first three losses, Woodley not only won but did so with highlight-reel knockouts in the first round.
Then Kamaru Usman thoroughly dominated “The Chosen One” in March 2019, taking the welterweight strap and derailing Woodley’s five-year, seven-fight unbeaten streak…
Only five full months have gone by this year, and already it feels like an eternity separates the reality we live in now from the one we knew at the end of 2019.
You’d be forgiven for forgetting that 2020 started off with the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian general. A few weeks later Kobe Bryant died in a tragic helicopter crash alongside his daughter Gianna and 7 others. COVID-19 arrived in the islands mid-February and has remained a daily presence ever since, despite interruptions from presidential primaries, murder hornets and, more recently, nationwide protests.
On top of everything else, as of yesterday we are in hurricane season for the next six months, because apparently not enough has gone wrong this year. But if it seems like things can’t get any worse, just ask a geologist…
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