MMA fighter fakes injury, nearly finishes opponent before bizarre forfeit

The Colosseum Combat heavyweight title fight between Johnathan Ivey and Travis Fulton was always going to be bizarre.

The last time Johnathan Ivey and Travis Fulton fought each other was five World Cups ago. In 2002, Fulton scored a first-round kimura victory over Ivey in the XFC California Pancration Championships.

That fight was relatively normal. The rematch most certainly was not.

Hardcore MMA fans may recognise these two regional heroes as the dudes who have taken an outrageous amount of fights. Prior to their fight at the weekend, Fulton had a record of 253-54-10-1 NC while 'Big John' was 40-56-1NC. Between them, they had 416 fights in professional MMA. To put that into perspective, at the time of writing, that's 177 more fights than all 16 fighters in the UFC women's strawweight rankings have amassed in their entire careers. They haven't been exclusively fighting bums either. Ivey's fought legendary fighter Dan Severn (Fulton's fought him five times!), Ben Rothwell (Fulton's fought him twice) UFC Hall of Famer Ken Shamrock, former King of the Cage champion Jeremy Horn (Fulton's fought him three times) and former UFC heavyweight champion Ricco Rodriguez (Fulton's also fought him twice!). Fulton's faced former UFC champions Evan Tanner, Forrest Griffin and Andrei Arlovski. He also holds the record for the longest recorded win streak in MMA with 40 victories on the bounce.

Revenge... almost

Ivey was so close to exacting revenge on Fulton for their first fight. But he decided to tap out before securing what seemed like an inevitable TKO victory.

In the first round, Fulton landed a kick to the chest. Ivey had a delayed and exaggerated reaction. He held his chest as if he was having a heart attack.  It became apparent pretty soon that this was merely a ply. He quickly fired a right hand before dropping his adversary with an agricultural blitz.

Ivey pounced on his opponent, had him in serious trouble with ground and pound. Just when it looked like the end was coming, it did. Just not in any way anyone would have been expecting.

For some bizarre reason, Ivey got off Fulton. Seconds later, he was tapping the mat to forfeit the fight. So Fulton was awarded the TKO victory due to retirement at 3:50 of the opening round. https://twitter.com/Grabaka_Hitman/status/1013275694913159168 Yeah, we have no idea what just happened either.