Preview: UFC Abu Dhabi prelims

It might not be the regular stop that it was for the Ultimate Fighting Championship five years ago, but Abu Dhabi still represents a major gateway to the Octagon for up-and-coming fighters from the Middle East and Central Asia. “Fight Island,” as the promotion dubbed high-end tourist destination Yas Island during the Covid-induced travel restrictions of 2020, introduced Western fans to future stars, champs and contenders including Khamzat Chimaev and “Shara Bullet” Magomedov, which in turn led to such organizations as Brave CF and UAE Warriors becoming premier feeder leagues for the UFC. While the UFC has broadened its footprint in the region, putting on events in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan in recent years, the UAE is still a reliable once or twice a year destination, and the cards are still rich with promising prospects as well as veteran fighters who in some cases have difficulty obtaining visas to travel to the U.S. or Western Europe for fights. UFC Fight Night 282, which takes place on Saturday at Etihad Arena, is a solid example of the UFC’s offerings in Abu Dhabi in the latter half of the 2020s. Headlined by a Dagestan vs. Uzbekistan light heavyweight contenders’ matchup and featuring the Octagon debuts of no fewer than four undefeated prospects—three of them from the region—the card is a reassurance that the talent pipeline remains wide open. Let us get on to the preview for the seven-fight undercard of UFC Abu Dhabi: Heavyweights Valter Walker (15-1) vs. Thomas Petersen (11-4) BETTING ODDS: Walker (-180); Petersen (+150) In the top undercard bout at UFC Abu Dhabi, Walker will attempt to extend his streak of consecutive heel hook submissions to five straight, while Peterson will…presumably do his best to not let that happen. Walker’s run of four straight heel hooks—all in the first round, three of them in under 90 seconds—is one of the most awesomely bizarre anomalies in MMA history, let alone the modern era. There’s a reason heel hooks are so rare in MMA compared to grappling; they are extremely difficult to finish when punching the leglocker in the face is a perfectly legal defensive tactic. On a previous preview, I compared the titanic Brazilian’s game to a Big Ten football team in the 1970s. Woody Hayes’ Ohio State Buckeyes were going to run the ball 50 times a game, 40 of them between the tackles: the fabled “three yards and a cloud of dust.” Everyone from the fans to the opposing coach to the waterboys knew exactly what was coming and they were usually powerless to stop it. That metaphor is valid up to a point, but conservative, brute-force American football evokes a starkly different mindset from a specialized grappling attack that requires a good bit of finesse and leaves the attacker extremely vulnerable. My podcast co-host Keith made a better comparison on our preview show this week: Walker is like a knuckleball pitcher. There are usually one or two knuckleballers lurking around the major leagues at any given time, their oddball style is effective in large part because batters get so few looks at it, and they can completely embarrass an opposing team or get shelled in an inning and a half depending on the day. If you’re a baseball fan, you probably remember R.A. Dickey, who in 2012 became the first knuckleballer to win the Cy Young Award. It was hailed as one of the most shocking accomplishments in the history of American team sports, as Dickey managed to embody the knuckleball’s mystifying qualities while avoiding its pitfalls over the course of an entire season. It was a validation of the man and moment more than of the pitch: Dickey had been just another pretty good knuckleballer before that magical season, he quickly regressed to that level, and nearly a decade and a half later, knuckleball pitchers are back to being fringe curiosities. Now imagine Dickey winning four Cy Young Awards in a row, with a solid shot at making it five. Oh, you want a preview of this fight? What stands out about Walker’s streak is how varied it has been. All four heel hooks have been distinct from one another in setup, execution and finish. Consider his inverted heel hook on Kennedy Nzechukwu, where Walker willingly rolled to his back, crammed against the edge of the cage, in his single-minded pursuit of the submission. If Nzechukwu had not been overwhelmed by the speed and aggression of Walker’s attack, he was perfectly lined up to drop a couple of hammerfists that might have made for a very different result. Walker will eventually run into an opponent with the athletic ability and presence of mind to defend the heel hook and pound his head into mush for trying—his recent callouts of Josh Hokit and Gable Steveson may have hastened that day’s arrival—but it’s an open question whether Peterson is the one. “The Train” has gone 3-3 since joining the UFC out of Season 7 of Dana White's Contender Series and has settled in as a solid mid-level heavyweight with good offensive wrestling, basic but effective boxing and a grinder’s mindset. The problems stem from Petersen’s approach. It isn’t hard to picture Walker struggling with a heavyweight who can employ a diligent sprawl-and-brawl gameplan, and it’s worth remembering just how mediocre he looked in his UFC debut against Lukasz Brzeski despite having him on the ground for nearly half the fight, but Petersen is not a sprawl-and-brawler by inclination. Short and compact by heavyweight standards, Petersen is most comfortable when he is the one pressing forward, throwing combinations and either looking for the takedown, or using the threat of the takedown to back his opponent into the fence where he can use his strength to make life uncomfortable for his opponent. That spells trouble for Petersen because he will need to close the distance in order to do anything at all to the much larger Walker, who is going to be perfectly happy to meet him against the cage, at which point he will change levels for a takedown and, failing that, roll for a leglock. Petersen has not displayed the kind of fast-twitch reactions or one-shot power that might deter Walker’s entries. As surreal as it feels to say this, the pick is that “The Foot Collector” will add one more to the mantelpiece: Walker by first-round submission. 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