By Sean Jones: In a battle of two washed-up 46-year-old former UFC champions, Anderson Silva obliterated Tito Ortiz in a devasting first round knockout last Saturday night in the co-feature bout on the Evander Holyfield vs. Vitor Belfort card in Hollywood, Florida. The fight was in the cruiserweight division.
Ortiz was over-matched in taking the more experienced Silva on the Triller pay-per-view card at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. But given Ortiz’s advanced age, he doesn’t have time to be working his way up to fighting a guy like Silva.
Tito Ortiz was out of his depth
It was a celebrity type of old timer’s fight, which Ortiz would have been crazy to turn down.
The referee immediately halted the fight at 1:21 of the first round after Silva knocked out UFC legend Ortiz with a textbook rabbit punch.
It was interesting how Silva was able to turn things around after seemingly looking like he was in distress in the round. Ortiz was showing no respect for Silva’s power, as he had him pinned to the corner and was unloading everything but the kitchen sink at him.
With that said, Ortiz’s punch accuracy was something awful, as he was missing everything he threw, and not because Silva was showing great head movement.
Ortiz didn’t have the hand-eye coordination to land his shots and looked like he was punching blindly with his eyes closed. But what do you expect from a fighter that has spent his entire career in MMA?
This is what you get. Those guys are lost inside of a boxing ring unless they’re talking about a 58-year-old Evander Holyfield. In that case, they look great.
Silva KOs Ortiz with a rabbit punch
After being backed up to the corner in round one, Silva, 46, landed a perfect right hand to the side of the head of Ortiz, hurting him.
Silva then quickly pivoted around Ortiz and nailed him with a hard punch to the back of the head to knock him cold. Ortiz was flat on his face on the canvas, out cold from that punch.
There was no way that the 46-year-old Ortiz would have been able to get back up to carry on even if he had wanted to.
Yeah, it was a rabbit punch from Silva, and it shouldn’t have been allowed, but the referee didn’t call it, so there was nothing that could be done about it.
As hurt as Ortiz was, the fight would have needed to have been ruled a no-contest or a disqualification if the referee had chosen to be proactive about the punch to the back of the head that Silva landed.
“I trained hard to show my respect for boxing,” Anderson Silva said after the fight. “I continue to work every day to prove my respect for the martial arts and for Wing Chun and for Bruce Lee.
“The grandmaster Bruce Lee said, ‘Be water, my friend.’ That’s what I do today.”
Ortiz never stood a chance
Obviously, it helps if you can land a perfect rabbit punch to the back of your opponent’s head the way Silva did. The stuff Silva is talking about with the water business has nothing to do with the rabbit shot that he landed. Anyone would have been hurt from a punch like that.
The win for Anderson Silva was his third in a row since losing his pro debut many years ago in 1998.
In Silva’s last fight, he defeated former WBC middleweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. by a controversial eight round split decision on June 19th in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Many boxing fans thought Chavez Jr. was robbed in that fight, as he landed the harder shots in each round.
The judges were more impressed with Silva’s volume punching and virtually ignored the much harder punches that Chavez Jr. was landing.
You can argue that if the same judges that worked last Friday’s fight between WBC super featherweight champion Oscar Valdez and Robson Conceicao had been working the Chavez Jr-Silva fight, they would have given the win to Chavez Jr. because he landed the cleaner shots the entire fight.