Products You May Like
There has never been an athlete like Ciryl Gane in the UFC.
Ever.
When UFC president Dana White signed ex-Dallas Cowboys lineman Greg Hardy to a promotional contract, he raved about the one-time All-Pro’s potential as a fighter.
This is what he was thinking about. Gane played soccer and basketball growing up in France and was allegedly good enough to have been a pro in either of them.
He’s the size of an All-Pro linebacker and it’s not a stretch to look at him, close one’s eyes and see a guy terrorizing NFL quarterbacks while making $25 million a year.
He’s 6-foot-4, 246 pounds of muscle, but he moves like a man much smaller and thinks the game as well as anyone, despite being a relative neophyte to it.
Gane mauled Derrick Lewis on Saturday in their bout of the main event of UFC 265 at the Toyota Center in Houston, stopping him at 4:11 of the third round in a one-sided fight. Lewis, the UFC’s all-time heavyweight leader in knockouts, barely laid a glove on Gane in the 14 minutes, 11 seconds the fight lasted.
“The feeling was exactly what I expected,” Gane said of fighting for the interim heavyweight title in front of a heavily pro-Lewis sellout crowd. “That’s why he never touched me. He hit me maybe 10 times with the right hand, but he never touched me 100 percent.”
Gane was far quicker than Lewis. He was physically stronger despite an 18-pound weight disadvantage and was able to outmuscle Lewis in the few times they clinched around the cage. He was infinitely more athletic and his movement and footwork gave Lewis fits.
Lewis has been on a roll and he looked out of place against this guy who White called an athletic freak. White got a taste of it himself when Lewis and Gane came nose-to-nose in an intense exchange at Friday’s weigh-in.
White tried to hold Lewis back as others grabbed Gane, but it was as if they weren’t even there.
“I don’t know if he’s the evolution [of the sport], but he’s a freak athlete,” White said. “Every once in a while you’ll come across these freaks in different weight classes and he’s definitely one of those guys. He’s a big powerful dude.
“When you look at him, when he walked into the Octagon tonight, I was like, ‘Holy s***.’ When I was doing the staredown, let’s be honest here. I was doing nothing. If that had decided to go wrong, I’d have ended up in the sixth row of the stands, not the floor. They would have rag-dolled me. I can’t explain to you the power when I was between those guys. It was very humbling, man.”
And Gane humbled Lewis from the start. He knew he had to stay away from Lewis’ powerful right hand, and so he used kicks to chop away at Lewis’ leg and take away his base. He was in and out so fast that Lewis couldn’t react.
When Lewis tried to attack, Gane deftly moved out of the way and was nowhere in the vicinity when Lewis was prepared to punch.
Meanwhile, the kicks were taking their toll. If you can imagine getting beaten with a baseball bat for the better part of 15 minutes and trying to chase down a guy who was quicker and more athletic than you, then you have a sense of what it was like in there for Lewis on Saturday.
“He is one of the best heavyweights in the world,” White said of Lewis. “What tonight showed you and showed the rest of the world is how good Ciryl Gane is. So the [punches were] 104-8 [in Gane’s favor]. I mean, what does that tell you? We all know who Derrick Lewis is and that Derrick is one of the best in the world. He’s been in there with guys who are great athletes, probably much better than him and were sure to beat him and he caught them. He caught them with that punch and he ended up knocking them out.
“He couldn’t do anything in there tonight against Ciryl Gane. That’s how good Ciryl Gane is.”
Gane’s next assignment will be against heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, who is similar to Lewis with the pulverizing power, but who is more athletic than Lewis.
But anyone who thinks that Ngannou will just steamroll Gane either didn’t watch UFC 265 or doesn’t appreciate what they saw.
The interim title doesn’t mean much, if truth be told. Giving an interim belt to Saturday’s winner was the UFC’s way of identifying the No. 1 heavyweight contender.
Ngannou is the champion. There is no dispute about that.
But given the evolution of Gane, there’s plenty of dispute about how long Ngannou will remain on top.
More from Yahoo Sports: