Following last night’s UFC On ESPN 58 event in Las Vegas the recipients of the evening’s $50,000 bonus awards were announced.
Earning ‘Fight Of The Night’ honors was a women’s flyweight fight on the preliminary card between Gabrielle Fernandez and Carli Judice.
This was a back-and-forth battle that saw Fernandez landing the harder blows, but Judice offering up more volume and showing a better gas tank late on in the fight. That left the judges split on their decision at the end of 15 minutes, but it was Fernandez who ultimately emerged victorious (29-28 x2, 28-29).
Meanwhile, main event winner Tatsuro Taira won a ‘Performance Of The Night’ bonus and went 6-0 in the UFC after an assured all-round performance against Alex Perez in the main event.
The 24-year-old Taira looked composed on the feet against Perez’s aggressive pressure game early in the fight and was landing some clean, technical strikes. Then in the second round he started to blend in takedowns attempts, leading him to hop onto Perez’s back and stay latched on with a body triangle as his opponent stood up. Taira then grapevined one of Perez’s leg in order to disrupts his base and used that to bring him down, but in the process he managed to damage his opponent’s knee, leaving him writhing in agony on the mat, resulting in a TKO victory for Taira.
Also earning a performance bonus was Brady Hiestand who found himself in an extremely competitive fight with Garett Armfield that saw lots of his high-level scrambling and eventually led to Hiestand’s persistence paying off the in the final round when he secured a rear-naked choke finish.
