The UFC heavyweight curse: Fabricio Werdum loses his cool, and his belt

The UFC heavyweight title is said to be cursed. No champion has ever managed two consecutive defenses of the belt, going all the way back to the first ever UFC champion, Mark Coleman. Randy Couture, Cain Velasquez, and Tim Sylvia all own more than two title wins, but all three were felled The longest single title run belongs to Cain Velasquez, who wore the belt for 896 days between December of 2012 and November of 2014, a time period in which he only managed to defend the strap–you guessed it–twice.

Point is, holding onto the belt is hard. Until recently I wouldn’t have bought into any talk of a “curse” myself. Heavyweight has always been a dangerous division. The most dangerous division, in fact. Of the 15 times a challenger has upset the heavyweight champ, there have been nine KOs, and two submissions. With even the smallest contenders walking around in the neighborhood of 230 pounds, and the largest actually cutting weight to make the 265 pound limit, heavyweights have a much harder time absorbing the blows of their opponents, or returning to their feet once taken down.

Big men, big consequences.

But talk of a mysterious curse

WERDUM TIME

Stipe Miocic was expected to be a tough challenge for UFC heavyweight champion Fabricio Werdum’s first title defense, but Werdum was comfortably favored. How could he not be?

A quick tour through Fabricio Werdum’s history is evidence enough of his fighting prowess. “Vai Cavalo” has submitted three of the greatest (if not the three greatest) heavyweights of all time: Cain Velasquez, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, and Fedor Emelianenko. Before winning the UFC belt, he knocked out the resurgent and famously iron-chinned Mark Hunt. He holds dominant wins over Travis Browne, Alistair Overeem, and Antonio Silva. He beat Gabriel Gonzaga twice, knocking out the fellow submission ace both times.

So when Fabricio Werdum stepped into the Octagon on May 14th, 2016, he did so as a legend of heavyweight MMA. An undisputed great, whose ever-expanding skillset and crafty style had most in the MMA community confident in his chances.

And then Werdum, for reasons too nebulous to discern, decided to run after Miocic with both hands swinging, leaping chin-first into an effortless counter punch. Combined with the inertia of Werdum’s 240 pound frame, the short, backstepping blow was more than enough to separate Werdum from consciousness. The champion plummeted face-first to the floor and landed in a heap, champion no more.

I can’t accurately describe what it felt like to watch the knockout unfold, but I think I did a pretty good job capturing my emotions on Twitter immediately after the fact.

THA FUCK JUST HAPPENED

— Connor Ruebusch (@BoxingBusch) May 15, 2016

The outcome was almost immediately compared to that of the fight between Jose …

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