5 Times the hardest chins in the UFC were broken
An MMA fight can range anywhere between a screaming dervish of destruction and a meticulous symphony of dismantlement.
Because of this unbettable nature of the fight game, there have spawned an equally diverse scale of fans - the Depeche mode dilettantes, the insufferably overanalytical geeks, and the doers.
This isn't a comprehensive classification, but if there's one facet of fighting that leaves them howling, it's the never-goes-out-of-fashion knockout.
You can't help but be sceptical of the sanity of mixed martial artists. To willingly go into an appointment with punishment evinces a disposition that might be found in a textbook about abnormal psychology.
People who go spelunking or wingsuit flying have some amount of badassery in their DNA, but to fight for a living requires you to be a mutated chaos seeker.
Now, fighters take a lot of shots to the head over their years-long careers. So, according to Wolff's Law, their skulls should get tougher over time and be able to withstand more pressure, right? Well, if that's nature, consider guys like Rumble Johnson, Dan Henderson and Junior Dos Santos supernatural.
Every fighter has a puncher's chance, but when you're up against certain men whose chins are like cockroaches to a nuclear explosion, that possibility is eroded dramatically.
It would take a Dali-esque imagination to understand the cosmic alignment of power and precision behind the knuckles, that sends such men into the abyss before they bungee recoil into consciousness.
The names on this select list are men who are famed for their ability to take cannon shots to the moneymaker and still keep swinging. But, at the end of it all, they're just that - men.
So let's take a look at those times when shocked fans stood gaping at the mortality when the hardest chins in MMA were broken:
#5 Big Nog gets Cained
UFC broke out the big guns for their maiden venture Down Under. Since his emergence in the UFC, Cain Velasquez sent alarm bells ringing as the evolved predator in the ecosystem, devouring his way to the top of the UFC's Heavyweight division.
With a seemingly infinite gas tank, the then-undefeated Velaquez seemed like a Juggernaut with no apparent chinks in his armour.
Also read: Fedor Emelianenko: A victim of his own glittering legacy
The test came in the form of one of the doyens of modern MMA and former Heavyweight Champion, Antonio Rodrigo Minotauro Nogueira.
Big Nog had been knocked out just thrice in almost ten times the number of fights and was looking to get some wind in his sails after a tempestuous phase - he had won the Interim Heavyweight belt, lost it, and then defeated the legendary Randy Couture in 2009's Fight of the Year.
The gritty veteran lasted just half a round against the chainsaw offence of Velasquez, who earned a shot at UFC gold with this win. We all know what happened in the next fight.