MMA is an unpredictable sport. An often touted line in promotions is that anything can happen, and with the amount of sudden knockouts and upsets there is some grounds for that line. However usually the “anything can happen” is supposed to only cover exiting results.

UFC 83 was held in Montreal, Canada and headlined by Canada’s own George St. Pierre. As it’s expected in events like this, they brought out as many Canadian fighters as they could and one of them was The Ultimate Fighter alumni Kalib Starnes. Starnes wasn’t really in a good spot, he had lost in TUF due to an injured rib and had only won one fight in his last three encounters. But he was now fighting in his home country and had the entire audience on his side. It was his time to shine.

His opponent was Nate “Rock” Quarry, a heavy handed brawler and also TUF alumni that had only lost once in the UFC, and that had been against then champion Rich Franklin. Having been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, Quarry has a refined ability to persistently knock on stuff and refuse to leave no matter what. All of Quarry’s victories in the UFC had come due to some form of TKO or KO, Quarry has only one speed: skull murder.

Starnes, the local and crowd favorite, took a look at all these facts and came to the conclusion that he wanted none of that shit.

Quarry’s strategy was to kick Starnes’ legs to stop him and then jackhammer his face. Starnes’ strategy was more refined, but it can be summarized in two steps:

1) Fuck that

2) Run

Wise men will tell you that the smartest strategy when a fight breaks out is to run away, by that logic Starnes is the smartest man to enter the octagon, you know, for a pussy.

The crowd that had his back in the start, even holding signs with his name, was now calling for his blood. Quarry had become the favorite by the simple fact that he was the man that wasn’t there to run a 10k.

The commentators did their best to talk over the mockery that was going in front of them and make some sort of comment out of it, to little avail: “It’s very hard to win a fight when you are backing out like that.” No shit, Kenny.

In the magical last moments of the fight Quarry was completely out of fucks to give, and thus brilliance came to him.

Quarry did the running man. In an MMA fight.

Crowd, commentators and even the referee could not contain their laughter at the absurdity that was going on in front of them. Starnes himself was apparently offended! At least judging by him flipping out Quarry, yet no matter how offended he was he still was not willing to engage a man who now was not only exposing himself to a ridiculous extent but was not even making an attempt to attack anymore.

Quarry began to stretch his arm in front of him, doing everything short of elephant noises to mock Starnes. He had invented means through interpretative dance to inform Starnes of how much of a bitch he was. And surprisingly, Starnes seemed to be TERRIFIED of this as he seemed to backpedal even more from a man that was now as far away from a fighting posture as one can be while awake.

Taunting is very used in fighting, and it does serve a function. Dedicated counter fighter Anderson Silva uses taunting to make himself the most punchable target in the world, and a few times that you throw your hands up in a fight can tilt a judge’s scorecard in your favor.

This is a bizarre example in which taunting was done out of sheer necessity. Quarry fashioned a complex taunting routine to inform his opponent of how pathetic this was and simultaneously apologize to the audience. And even though the Canadian commission did not disclose fighter pay it is rumored that that night Quarry obtained the infamous “performance art of the night” award.

In the duration of the fight Quarry landed 84 strikes, and Starnes landed 12. One of the judges had the fight scored 30-24! Now you might not understand how absurd that is but there have been entire fights where one man sat on his opponent’s chest and fabricated play-doh on their face that weren’t that lopsided. To put it in context to another sport, the scoring in this fight is the equivalent of pitching a perfect game while the opposing team weeps softly in the fetal position. Nate Quarry could have literally killed Kalib Starnes and the judges would have given his corpse more credit.

In one night Kalib Starnes lost the crowd, the fight, and his job. After the fight Kalib was granted what he seemed to want: not to fight. He was promptly released from the UFC, as soon as they could catch him to give him his pink slip.