Bellator 79 was like the Predator 2 game for the Sega Genesis: unexpectedly brutal and actually kind of awesome in retrospect. We got to see the semifinals of the heavyweight tournament to find a replacement for Cole Konrad’s belt between Thiago Santos and Richard Hale. We got to see someone who might be my new favorite featherweight: Shahbulat Shamhalaev, put his Russian stamp on the face of Mike Richman. And to top it all off we witnessed one of the most one-sided matches in recent MMA history between Douglas Lima and Jacob Ortiz, who refuses to block punches and kicks with anything but his back and face.
In the main event Richard hale moved back up to heavyweight from light heavyweight, took a bunch of punches to the head from a raging Thiago Santos, then somehow managed to recover like Danny Glover (I’m watching Predator 2) and finish Santos with a battery of punches to the turtled Brazilian. It was actually a pretty shocking ending. Almost as shocking as knowing that Gary Busey’s character in Predator 2 replaced Arnold Schwarzenegger’s returning Dutch from the first classic.
Below are the .gifs expertly supplied by brand new father Zombie Prophet. His baby is officially a day old, so I’m sure he had a tiny hand in making these animated wonders of violence. Check em out below.
This fight was 14:50 seconds of pure beatdown from Douglas Lima.
Shahbulat Shamhalaev smashes Mike Richman with a right hand to move on in the featherweight tournament.
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