Black MMA fighters delivered eye-opening performances that ended early at UFC 328 at Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday.
In the final bout on the preliminary card, 24-year-old Cameroonian MMA competitor Ateba Gautier dropped opponent Ozzy Diaz with a powerful right hand and finished him a few seconds later to earn a knockout victory in round two of the middleweight showdown. But he may have made more news after the big win when he called out one of the greatest middleweights ever.
“My dream fight would be against, respectfully, my big brother, Israel Adesanya,” Gautier said of the former two-time UFC middleweight champion. “I really want to find him because, since I started MMA, I really, really admire him, so I want to face him.”
Adesanya, who will turn 37 this summer, lost his fourth consecutive fight — the last two by TKO — including to Joe Pyfer in March. Despite the losses, Adesanya said emphatically after the fight that he is not retiring. Perhaps a fight against Gautier would be a fitting way to pass the torch to a fellow African.
In the first fight on the main card. Veteran UFC fighter Bobby Ray Green, better known as King Green, defeated Jeremy Stephens with a rear-naked choke submission in the first round. Though Green received a $25,000 bonus for finishing his foe, he also made an unsuccessful bid for one of the night’s bonuses. Fight of the night went to Joshua Van, who successfully defended his UFC flyweight title against Tatsuro Taira, and performance of the night went to Jim Miller and Yaroslav Amosov, who performed an impressive breakdancing move following his triumphant performance. Each received a $100,000 bonus.
Later this year, the UFC will celebrate the 10th anniversary of its first event in New York City. While the company has hosted fight cards at Madison Square Garden annually since 2016, it has also held them at Barclays Center in Brooklyn and at UBS Arena in Elmont, NY, just outside of Queens.
“[Prudential Center has] been great to us,” UFC President and CEO Dana White told the AmNews when asked why Newark has become the second venue the company uses in the New York City area. “We came back in here and broke our record again at the Pru, and we will be back to MSG and, yes, MSG and Newark are the two spots that I’m going to keep hitting out here in this area.”
The UFC hosted its first event at Prudential Center in 2007, but White shared that its recent success there is why the promotion has returned for a fourth consecutive spring.
“The history here is number one, number two, number five, and number six, highest gates here,” White shared. “We kill it in this arena. The fans are always great here. The arena’s been good to us. The city’s been good to us. The state’s been good to us.”
