Derrick Lewis
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By In Mixed Martial Arts

The Old Man and the Beast

“Getting old sucks. Your body starts to ache and creak in places you didn’t think possible. Youthful vitality slowly erodes into vague weakness and general malaise. Simple tasks become more labored and painful. The ability to get excited fades, thinking fogs and things like sleeping and standing cause lower back pain. It gets harder to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing world, and all the while there are younger, sharper people nipping at your heels, impatiently waiting to render you obsolete.

Indeed, getting old sucks — unless you’re Mark Hunt.

The 43 year-old “Super Samoan” on Saturday penned another chapter in one of the unlikeliest careers the sport has ever seen. The longtime combat sports veteran with over 50 combined fights in MMA and kickboxing took out a younger, more athletic Derrick Lewis in the fourth round of their UFC Fight Night 110 main event in Auckland, New Zealand, snapping Lewis’ six-fight win streak — one of the longest in the history of the heavyweight division.

A number of factors make Hunt one of the most improbable characters to loiter around relevancy. Though he’s sneakily crafty and reliably exciting to watch, there’s little else about Hunt’s career that has resembled consistency. After reeling off five straight wins in Pride Fighting Championships, including wins over Wanderlei Silva and Mirko Filipovic, he then lost six straight, topped off by a 63-second submission loss to Sean McCorkle in his UFC debut. He was finished in all six of those fights…”

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By In Mixed Martial Arts

The Black Beast: A Meditation on Ethics in MMA

“A philosophical dilemma arose shortly after “The Black Beast” announced he needed to take a dump.

By the time Brian Stann was interviewing Derrick Lewis in the cage after UFC Fight Night 105 on Sunday in Halifax, Nova Scotia, there was subdued outcry at the fact that referee Mario Yamasaki was late to stop the fight, allowing Lewis to land a few additional strikes on an already unconscious Travis Browne. Lewis did nothing wrong; the strikes weren’t malicious, just unnecessary, which is an expected occurrence in this line of work. It’s just that Lewis hits harder than a 10-foot wave breaking onshore, which makes those extra shots a bit more serious than if it were, say, Jared Rosholt delivering them. Alas, Yamasaki was a little late to intervene, and “The Black Beast” crashed on the eroded shoreline of Browne’s consciousness.

In other circumstances, that may have manufactured some outrage, at least for a few hours until people got bored. Not this time. Browne has become one of the more reviled fighters on the Ultimate Fighting Championship roster in certain circles. His association with perpetual punchline Edmond Tarverdyan and his relationship with Ronda Rousey are both part of it, but Lewis made sure to remind people why they shouldn’t feel too bad for Browne: “He calls himself a man, but he likes to put his hands on women, so forget that guy.”

If there was any lingering resentment about the late stoppage, it evaporated quickly at that line…”

 

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