Luis “Sapo” Santos needed only 1 minute, 17 seconds to knock out fellow cage veteran Rafael Silva in their main event ONE Championship welterweight bout in Jakarta on Saturday night.
Silva began aggressively, but appeared understandably cautious of the Brazilian’s devastating kicks, while Santos bided his time and waited for an opening.
Silva managed to block Santos’ initial kicks, but the heavy thud with which they landed portended a short night. Santos finished the fight with the first two clean strikes he landed, catching Silva with a knee to the body that dropped him to the canvas before following up with a brutal soccer kick that immediately spurred referee Yuji Shimada to jump in and stop the fight.
Photo: One Championship
The win improves Santos’ record to 62-9-1, while Silva fell to 40-16-0.
Santos was fighting for the first time since failing to make weight and forcing the cancelation of his highly anticipated main event rematch against ONE welterweight champion Ben Askren in November last year.
Their first bout ended in a no contest after Santos was accidentally poked in the eye and was unable to continue, but he had been giving Askren all he could handle until that point and appears to be Askren’s only serious threat.
In the other main event, heavy-handed Japanese featherweight Kotetsu Boku, a former lightweight champion, notched a technical knockout victory over Dutch-Indonesian Vincent Latoel.
Cheered on by a home crowd, Latoel enjoyed some early success in a closely fought first round, quickly knocking Boku down with a sweep and scoring another flash knockdown with a kick immediately afterward. Latoel repeatedly landed kicks to Boku’s legs, but the Japanese fighter increasingly established his jab and landed kicks of his own as the round went on.
In the second frame, Boku began landing straight rights and left hooks, and began dominating the exchanges. Latoel made a desperate attempt at a takedown, but Boku reversed it and quickly took full mount. With Latoel helpless under Boku’s relentless ground-and-pound, referee Olivier Coste called a stop to the contest at 4:04 into the round.
On the undercard, rising female star Angela Lee continued her unbeaten run with a second-round submission of the US’ Rebecca Heintzman.
The first half of the opening round was spent almost entirely in the clinch as the two traded knees and struggled to secure a takedown. It was Lee who landed one, midpoint through the round. Lee quickly took her opponent’s back and worked her ground-and-pound, before attempting an exotic choke and almost securing an arm bar before the bell rang.
Lee continued to dominate in the second. The two again clinched, before Lee was able to drag Heintzman to the canvas, landing a knee to her head and quickly taking her back, where she sank a rear naked choke to force the tapout 1:08 into the round.
Elsewhere on the undercard, Marcin Prachnio knocked out Alexandre Machado in the first round of an entertaining heavyweight brawl, while Andrew Leone decisioned Koetsu Okazaki.
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