G
Gyro
Guest
Extremely underrated fight for those who haven't seen it. Nishijima was a former pro boxer taking on Mark Hunt in his first MMA fight and giving a very sizable weight advantage to Hunt. Nishijima, though defeated, gave an incredible effort and displayed beautiful boxing using good boxing fundamentals like crisp jabs to the body and head, shoulder rolls, and good head movement. Unfortunately for him though he was still very green on the mat coming into this fight and a few times mark was able to capitalize on this. Not only that but he was still very much just a boxer so Hunt was able to intelligently use knees and low kicks to throw him off his game. Deapite all of this he managed to make it to the third round eating some heavy heavy shots along the way but holding up like a champ. Hunt did begin to gas in the later rounds though which gave Nishijima some good openings to which he took adavantage of using combinations and body shots to help wear Hunt down. It was just an overall classic battle like almost every single Hunt fight and a great display of striking by both. If you're a big fan of technical striking and have fight pass I definitely suggest checking it out. Also much respect to Nishijima, he never gets brought up but he had some of the best pure boxing in MMA even though it wasn't well adapted for the new threats that come with the sport and he took on some monsters in both MMA and K-1. The guy had Melvin Manhoef and Hunt shooting for takedowns in their fights.
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