Buzukja Disputes Stoppage as Grad Wins in Belgrade

Dennis Buzukja put a hand on his opponent’s leg with the choke already sunk in against the fence. The referee read it as a tap and stepped in. As far as he was concerned the fight was over. Buzukja disagreed before he was even back on his feet.

The protest started inside the cage. Buzukja insisted he had not tapped, that he was trying to shove a knee off his body. It changed nothing. The books read: Bogdan Grad, submission by arm-triangle choke, 4:33 of round two, featherweight, on the prelims of the UFC card in Belgrade.

What did the replay actually show?

The replay settled nothing and started a second argument. The movement of Buzukja’s hand across Grad’s leg can be read as a tap, and it can just as easily be read as a man trying to clear a knee. The whole outcome sits between those two readings, because one of them is a surrender and the other is a defence.

The winner did not push back on that. Grad said afterwards that he never felt a tap. It is an odd detail in a dispute over a submission: the man holding the choke does not confirm the thing the choke was credited for. A referee makes that call in a fraction of a second, from a metre away, with a fighter’s hand resting on someone else’s leg. The result went into the record and stayed there.

How Grad got to the choke

The Austrian opened with a takedown but could not hold the position, and the fight went back to the feet. He kept shooting through the rest of the round. The last attempt landed, he climbed to mount and worked from the top until the bell pulled Buzukja out of trouble.

Round two looked different for a while. Buzukja defended the takedowns and kept the fight standing, right up to the final minute. Then Grad got in again, pinned him against the fence and wrapped up the arm-triangle. The rest is the part being argued about.

A fifth loss the fighter does not accept

Buzukja walked in at 1-4 in the UFC and walked out at 1-5. Grad moved to 2-2. At featherweight, the deepest division on the roster, a fifth loss is heavy on its own. This one carries something extra, because the man who took it does not accept it in the form it was written down.

We covered Buzukja before the fight too, when he made the double-headed eagle sign after the weigh-in and turned up the temperature ahead of a night in front of a crowd that was never going to be his. That pose was billed as the prelude. It ended in a row over one movement of a hand.

The rest of the prelims

The undercard in Belgrade treated the local fighters far better than it treated Buzukja:

• Nina Milosevic stopped Hailey Cowan with a body shot at 3:41 of round one
• Borislav Nikolic beat Mark Vologdin by unanimous decision, 29-27 on all three cards
• Marina Spasic lost to Stephanie Luciano by rear-naked choke at 3:30 of round one

Elsewhere on the same section of the card, Jovan Leka finished Alexander Poppeck with a liver kick at 2:22 of round one, and Mateusz Rebecki stopped Kyle Prepolec at 4:41 of round one.

A referee stoppage does not get reversed because the fighter on the wrong end of it objects, and that part is closed. Still, when the winner will not say he felt the tap either, what is left is a fight remembered for a hand movement rather than for the choke that caused it.