At Bellator Birmingham on Saturday, Raymond Daniels had a spectacular knockout that immediately caught the attention of the sports world. Fans, fighters and media alike said it was arguably the greatest knockout of the year, and one of the best ever.
How it happened was even more unique. The 39-year-old threw a spinning kick that dropped Wilker Barros. Then when he got up, Daniels did a tornado-like spin and decided how he would finish the fight while he was in the air.
“As I went into the first rotation I could feel him back up because I kind of have an awareness of how close or far I am,” Daniel said to MMAFighting. “As I’m in the first rotation, I’m already in it so I have to keep going with the motion, it’s not like I can bail out in the middle of it. When I’m coming around the second time, I’ve now had two looks at him—on the first rotation he flinched and on the second rotation he flinched again. I knew if I tried to throw a kick I wouldn’t land it, and if I missed with that kick, it’s really powerful, I could’ve put myself in a very bad position.
“At the stage I was just like, ‘I’m going to come down with my right hand,’ because I knew I would be way of the line if he tried to come back and counter me. When I came down with the right hand it landed cleaner than I possibly could’ve imagined.”
