Matches where fighters might have or did pull punches.

Just thought about a few matches where the winning fighter was beating on the other guy and either slowed down purpose, pulled punches, or signaled to the ref his opponent had enough.

Most recent one I remember was I believe Matt Brown vs Pete Sell, near the end of that match, Matt Brown looked at the referee and signaled and said something to him along the lines of Pete Sell having enough.

I remember a fight where Murilo "Ninja" Rua in Pride where he just literally stopped kicking the guy and talked to the ref like he didn't wanna hurt him anymore and the ref stopped it after he said that, which was kinda dumb cuz the ref should know when to stop it. I believe it was against Daijiro Matsui.

Not 100% sure about this one, but IMO, in Shane Carwin vs Junior Dos Santos, I think JDS had at least a very slight at least reason why he just literally backed off of Shane was he had a bit of a conscience. Yes, you could say he got tired in his hands from punching him, but the way he backed off just instantly and there was like a moment where no action happened made me wonder if he was at least just a little bit pulling punches.

Alex vs Rafferty in the 1st TUF finale. Alex was beating on Rafferty with GnP and punching his face at will, Alex paused and looked at the ref. Ref said keep going so Alex punched him one more time and ref stopped.

Whats some other instances of fighters maybe pulling punches?

 

well i would say hunt but hunt doesn't need to pull punches due to the ability to just one shot fighters.

 

I think Aldo could have finished Faber

 

Big Nog had Frank Mir TKO'd in their 2nd fight, but stopped to go for a sloppy guillotine. Part of it was because he was wrongly warned to stop hitting the head, and I think another part of it was Mir was so finished that he didn't want to continue hitting him.

 

Way back to UFC10, Don Frye was beating Mark Hall so bad it was kind of sad to watch....at one point Frye is ground n pounding him, and can be heard telling him to "Tap, you need to quit, just tap" and Hall was so stubborn just kept saying "I can't"....so Frye kept beating him, but not as bad as he had been until it was eventually stopped.

 

Penn v Sherk

 

Larkin did it last night. Ref didn't stop it so he just rained down lefts and got the stoppage anyway

 

BJ called his fight with Sherk after the 3rd . Still one of my favorite fights fot some reason and im not even a huge Penn fan