The first thing Johnathan Ivey wants people to know is that he did not fake a heart attack in his heavyweight title defense against Travis Fulton on Saturday in Kokomo, Ind.

“That’s just silly,” Ivey told MMAjunkie.

As for what happened after that, when Ivey (41-57) walked off from a downed Fulton and then tapped out, costing himself the win and the title? Well, he can explain that. First, though, you have to understand Ivey’s specific feelings about Fulton (256-54-10), who he calls a “hero” of his.

“Back in ’98 when I made my debut, it was on a HOOKnSHOOT card back when that was a big deal,” Ivey said. “I was on the undercard, and Travis Fulton was the main event that night. From then on, I always looked up to him. I got him tattooed on my leg maybe 10 years ago. I based my career on his, just how active he was, how he would always go in and fight guys in their hometowns. He was just that guy. He was a warrior to me. I wasn’t able to win some of the fights he won. He was always a little bit better than me. I was kind of like the poor man’s Travis Fulton, but I was OK with that.”

So when the Colosseum Combat promoter went through several potential opponents for this title fight before finally settling on Fulton, Ivey was excited. Here was another chance to fight a personal idol – one who had submitted him the first time they fought in 2002. Plus, Ivey knew Fulton wouldn’t pull out of the fight, since you don’t rack up more than 300 fights on your pro record by not showing up.

As the two big men were mixing it up in the first round, Fulton landed a kick to Ivey’s ribs. The kick didn’t hurt him, Ivey said, but it did land with a resounding smack that got a reaction from the crowd.

“The crowd went ‘oooh!’” Ivey said. “So I acted like it hurt me. I’ve seen people say I was faking a heart attack, or I was disrespecting him by doing that, but that wasn’t what I was doing. I like having fun in there. I’ve done stuff like that in 50 or 60 of my fights. I like playing it up for the crowd.”

That bit of theater complete, Ivey quickly rebounded and went on the attack, forcing Fulton back up against the cage and dropping him with a left hook. After following him to the mat, Ivey let fly with a stream of left hands that, in his view, severely damaged Fulton.

“After the second left, his eyes rolled back in his head,” Ivey said. “I turned to the ref and said, ‘OK, he’s done ref.’ The ref said, ‘No he’s not. Keep fighting.’ So I switch it up and throw a couple straight rights, thinking he’s fixing to jump in there. Then Travis comes back to, and he’s not defending himself but he switches his hips. I moved around and put my knee on his head, and then I started throwing some real light rights hands. He’s not defending himself. He’s defenseless. So I say to the ref, ‘Come on, this is it.’ And the ref says, ‘Keep fighting.’”

Ivey had other plans.

“If this had been some guy who’d been a real jerk to me, I’d have kept hitting him,” Ivey said. “But this was Travis Fulton, ‘The Ironman.’ So I hit him a couple more times, and I looked at the ref like, don’t make me keep hitting him. But the ref was adamant. So I stood up and backed away. The ref said, ‘What are you doing?’ I told him that if he wasn’t going to stop it, I would.”

As Fulton got to his feet, Ivey reached down and tapped the mat. At first, referee Gary Copeland didn’t seem to know what to make of it. But then Ivey made clear that he was tapping out. The way he explained it, he’d rather take the loss and give up his heavyweight title than keep hitting Fulton, whom he believed had already taken too much damage.

“It was a split-second call,” Ivey said. “I’m just not going to stand there and hit Travis Fulton unnecessarily. I’d already hit him 15 or 20 times, and he wasn’t throwing anything back. He was defenseless.”

In a Facebook post after the event, Fulton disputed that account somewhat.

“Would Ivey have finished me?” Fulton wrote on his Facebook page. “Would I have come back and won the fight in the second or the third round? After watching the fight I think either of those were a possibility. It wasn’t as if I was unconscious and the referee wasn’t intervening so Ivey showed me mercy and handed me the victory.”

Still, Fulton admitted, he was definitely hurt at the time. While he remembered seeing Ivey tap, he wrote, he didn’t remember the post-fight interview or leaving the cage after the fight.

When Fulton heard Ivey explain that he simply couldn’t go on punching his hero, it prompted some reflection on Fulton’s part. As he wrote in his post, it made him think about his own fighting hero, Dan Severn.

“I still have difficulty accepting the fact that I am another fighter’s hero,” Fulton wrote. “Did I want to beat my fighting hero Dan Severn? Absolutely. But I never put any thought into how I would feel in the moment when I’m on the brink of victory. You know what I realized? In the exact same scenario as last weekend…I couldn’t (expletive) do it! It was an emotional blow that I had never put any thought into.”

Reflecting on the fight also seems to have brought Fulton to another conclusion.

“In my first 275 or so mma fights I was only cut open twice,” Fulton wrote. “I was dropped just three times and I was never knocked out. In my last 30 or so mma fights I’ve been cut 4 times, dropped several times and I was knocked out for the first time in my fighting career.”

After getting dropped again and nearly finished by Ivey, Fulton wrote, “the way that fight played out showed me it was time to hang them up.”

And so ends a career that spanned more than 20 years and over 300 fights.

As for Ivey, he’ll fight on, he said. People may criticize his performance online, and he heard plenty of shouts from the crowd as he made his way out of the arena on Saturday night, but he doesn’t mind.

“I’m OK with my decision,” Ivey said. “It cost me the title, and it cost me the win, but I don’t mind that. I’ve lost lots of fights. Obviously I always want to win, but it’s not worth that if it means I have to keep hitting my hero that way. They can have that title. I don’t mind.”