(artwork by Alfredo Cardona)

UFC 189 was incredible. It was the great card promised and delivered. Even with Aldo gone from the title the entire card was outstanding so I will cover just about everything in the card at some point.

So it’s the event of the year, and you have a title fight with your golden boy putting everything on the line. All of this considered what fight do you pick to start your main card? The goddamn right one.

Thomas “Tominhas” Almeida is living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Coming into UFC 189 with a 19-0 record at only 23-years-old, having fought two times in the UFC already and earning a fight of the night and a performance of the night respectively, Almeida was looking unstoppable. A striker with impressive power and a sense for timing and range that has earned him a terrifying number of knockouts. Thomas Almeida is so harmful to brains that the NFL has attempted several times to deny his existence.

Brad “One Punch” Pickett looks, talks and fights like a character from a Guy Ritchie movie. He walks into fights wearing a wifebeater and suspenders topped with a little trilby and walks out wearing the other man’s face on his hands. Pickett is a boxer who will invite his opponent to try to engage only to make them look bad when they try, and if they attempt to take the fight to the ground he will slap a Peruvian Necktie on before you get to google what the hell that is. If that wasn’t enough he has the nifty feather on his cap of being only one of two fighters to hold a win over Flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson.

A longtime veteran of the WEC and UFC Pickett was coming in with a record of 24-10 after an unsuccessful run at Flyweight, eager to shake off his past two loses by returning to Bantamweight.

The card was ready to go, veteran and prospect both eager to prove they can earn a spot in the ranks. They stood in front of each other trading a few measuring strikes.

Brad Pickett’s MO isn’t a secret: he will incite an exchange by walking forward, then duck and weave their strikes and punish them. With not as long a reach as many in the bantamweight division Pickett has based his striking game on his head movement and countering in an infight where the longer fighters often cannot match up.

It became quite clear Almeida was not equipped to trade punches with Pickett.

One of the skills more stressed in boxing is head movement, in the exchanges of punches that you put yourself into in a boxing match learning how to avoid the punches coming your way and doing so in a way in which you place yourself in a better position to strike back is essential. If you want to see slick bobbing and weaving boxing is the place to go. Muay Thai is already a style that does not press too much focus on head movement, but Almeida himself is often stiff and an easy target, not surprising considering he is a relative newcomer to the scene.

However Almeida is not an easy man to put down, and as soon as he touched the canvas he scrambled to his feet and Pickett dived for a takedown against the fence. Almeida struggled to remain on his feet and exit the clinch, only to eat a knee on his way out that put him back on the ground with a broken nose to boot, because UFC 189 just hated noses.

Despite being put on the ground twice Almeida was still a dangerous man, and it didn’t take much for him to stand up. He started again to stand in front of Pickett and strike but it was now not much a surprise that he couldn’t box against the wily brit.

However there are still differences between styles and, in what boxers often are not trained to handle, the accurate and powerful Almeida put Pickett down with a counter elbow strike so picture perfect that somewhere, far away, Seanchai was grinning.

In what was a theme for the fight the stun didn’t last too long and Pickett quickly scrambled to take Almeida down.

In just one round both fighters had put on an amazing performance and had to struggle to survive, it was a wild and active five minutes and left no doubt that both of these guys were hungry for a finish.

As both fighters went to their corners and rested something sinister happened, Almeida’s neural-net processor had time to analyse the past round and formulate a new plan of action. Just as the second round was starting Almeida threw a jab that landed clean in Pickett’s face, then he threw another, only he wasn’t jabbing this time: he was grabbing.

Movie supercomputers run entirely on irony so it should not be a surprise that Almeida’s plan was centered around turning Pickett’s head movement, his biggest advantage in the first round, into his doom.

As Pickett attempted to dodge a second jab Almeida grabbed the back of his head and dragged it down into a switching knee. The combination of Pickett’s head movement accelerated by Almeida’s pull meeting a rising aerial knee resulted in an impact that put the boxing brit down for good but also created a thunderous sound wave that cracked most of the audiences iPhones and set off my neighbor’s car alarm.

Remember what I said about Muay Thai not stressing head movement as much? Yeah this here is the reason. With kicks and knees coming up the elaborate head movement of boxing puts you in risk of catching a kick or knee coming up towards you, and then you’d stop looking slick and start looking unconscious.

Pickett arched perfectly backwards into the ground and remained unconscious only for the duration of his fall as the impact woke him up and, baffling modern medicine, he was up in his feet in an instant and did not require time to re-learn the english language.

Almeida was victorious in highlight reel fashion and made a perfect start for the night’s main card, and all he had was a few cuts and a broken nose that wouldn’t take long for his team of engineers to fix.