On This Day In MMA HistoryUFC Fight Night 108, which took place in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 22, 2017, just never quite got off the ground. When fans proclaimed their derision at the originally announced main event between Cub Swanson and Artem Lobov, the Ultimate Fighting Championship attempted to install a headliner featuring Demian Maia and Jorge Masvidal. With Maia on a six-fight winning streak over increasingly sturdy opposition, it shaped up to be a likely title eliminator for the veteran grappling wiz—and when they eventually did meet, he did in fact earn a title shot off of the win—but for a variety of reasons, the fight did not take place until a month later at UFC 211.
So it was that Swanson and Lobov ended up headlining a UFC Fight Night card on Fox Sports 1, where the former swept the last four rounds on his way to a ho-hum unanimous decision. However, the card was not without its peculiar charms. In the co-main event, Al Iaquinta returned from a self-imposed two-year absence to blow away Diego Sanchez in 90 seconds, proving that, in fact, real estate sales is strong, to paraphrase the great Kazushi Sakuraba. Earlier on the card, Mike Perry, still fairly new to the promotion and known primarily for his corner’s racist remarks between rounds in his fight with Hyun Gyu Lim, showed himself to be a growing problem not only for arbiters of socially acceptable language but for the welterweight division, as he crushed Jake Ellenberger with a second-round elbow strike from the clinch.
Perhaps most importantly from a historical or trivia standpoint, former University of Tennessee linebacker and UFC light heavyweight enigma Ovince St. Preux thrilled the crowd—and punished Marcos Rogerio de Lima for missing weight—by pulling off his second career Von Flue choke. When he had accomplished his first, putting Nikita Krylov all the way to sleep in 2014, fans ascribed it to Krylov’s then-hapless ground game. When he tapped out “Pezao” in Nashville, it became a curiosity. Three years and two more shoulder chokes later, nobody would bat an eye if they renamed the technique after St. Preux.
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