Karo Parisyan
Those of you who were MMA fans before the Ultimate Fighter would most certainly know how great a fighter Karo Parisyan was. At just 16, the judo phenom was 6-0 in professional MMA competition with all of those victories coming in the first round.
By the time he was 21, he was fighting in the UFC and boasted a 12-3 record. Those losses came against Sean Sherk (twice), who was then known as one of the world’s top fighters and Georges St. Pierre, who had begun to assert himself as a top welterweight.
Parisyan went on to have a successful career in the UFC, losing just one of nine fights over a four year span between 2004 and 2008. However, things changed for the worse in 2009 when it was revealed Parisyan had been battling an addiction to painkillers he had originally taken for various injuries.
That derailed the Armenian-American’s career as he went 4-4 between 2010 and 2012. He made his Bellator debut in 2013 in a losing effort against Rick Hawn, but followed it up with a second-round KO victory over Bellator veteran Ron Keslar in April.
While his career didn’t pan out as some may have expected, Parisyan is still just 31, so the ship is far from sailing for his MMA career.
