Dan Ige scored a 22-second knockout and earned a cash bonus from theUFC on Saturday.- The finishing punch was the only strike Ige landed - but it was enough to close the show.
- Watch it right here.
American featherweight Dan Ige finished his opponent with the only punch he landed in a UFC fight that lasted 22 seconds Saturday.
Ige fought Gavin Tucker in a 145-pound match during one of the final clashes on the 13-bout UFC Fight Night 187 card at the Apex in Las Vegas.
Moments into the fight, Tucker took large strides side-on to Ige but before he could even throw a significant strike, Ige knocked him unconscious before he'd even fallen to the canvas.
As Tucker looked up from the floor, dazed and confused as to what had just happened, Ige walked off nonchantly as the referee waved the fight off.
"I was expecting a war [because] Gavin is a tough kid," said Ige in a statement sent to Insider.
"I'm pretty sure the [betting] line on this fight was pretty even and could've just as easily been me there on the canvas, but we trained hard, I saw everything in there and landed the first shot. The rest is history."
Watch the world class finish right here:
-UFC Español (@UFCEspanol) March 14, 2021
The win saw Ige rebound immediately after a unanimous decision los to Calvin Kattar on Fight Island last summer.
Ige has been working on improvements in the gym since that victory, he said. "Whether that was improving my technique on my striking, my boxing, my jab … [or] whether it was working on little details in my wrestling, my grappling, my get-ups, or my cage control.
"It was just focusing on the small, finer details, winning the small battles in practice.
"If you look back at some of the fights that I lost in the past, it wasn't that I got blown out of the water. It was just little things like I gave up rounds, so we stopped giving up rounds, stopped giving up rounds in practice, stopped playing around on my back where I'm losing. Just little things like that.
"I would have loved to have shown off all that tonight, but I can't argue with a clean KO."
Ige earned a $50,000 performance-related bonus because of how awesome the finish was, and he'll likely rise up the featherweight rankings as a result.
He said he now wants to book another bout and "keep the ball rolling.
"I'm just going to keep striving towards the gold," he said. "That's the overall goal. I got into this sport to be a champion."
Victory advanced Ige's pro