Strikeforce Challengers: The Gurgel/Heun Show
Published by Jim Genia on June 20th, 2009 in Current Events

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The event may have been called “Santos vs. Villasenor”, but the eponymous bout paled in comparison to the battle waged between Jorge Gurgel and Conor Heun, who forsook their grappling backgrounds to plaster each other with everything but the kitchen sink. Strikeforce Challenger’s latest installment featured Chute Boxer Evangelista “Cyborg” Santos and Joey Villasenor slugging it out in the main event, US Army Special Forces operative Tim Kennedy battering Nick Thompson into submission, and Sarah Kaufman picking apart Shayna Baszler for three rounds. Yet the night belonged to Gurgel and Heun, to their leather thrown and blood spilled for the sake of one of the hardest earned decisions in a long time.

Competing at a catch-weight of 160 pounds, Gurgel stepped into the cage a jiu-jitsu black belt with a propensity for fighting and losing kickboxing matches. This cost him his career in the UFC. But one promotion’s castoff is another promotion’s stud, as the Octagon refugee’s stand-up proclivities translated into three rounds of dangerous high kicks, painful low kicks and a flurry-and-circle strategy that had the durable wrestler Heun alternating between pursuing and wobbling. Any visits to the ground were brief and purely academic, the result of a caught kick and loss of balance, and while Heun managed to use his dirty boxing to tag the Brazilian and tag him hard, when time expired there was no question that Gurgel had done enough to garner the unanimous decision. The performance by both men was a show-stealer.

Which isn’t to say Cyborg and “Smokin’ Joe” didn’t have a decent brawl themselves. They did. Firing off a crippling leg-kick like a lumberjack wielding an axe to a tree, the Brazilian made his presence known, and he more or less stayed out of serious trouble with strong head movement. The Greg Jackson-trained Villasenor, however, kept coming, and his superior cardio enabled him to land more and stay the aggressor all the way until the final bell. It was a close one, as evidence by the split decision in Villasenor’s favor, but it wasn’t quite the epic Gurgel and Heun had had.

In his bout against the Afghanistan veteran Kennedy, Thompson’s first mistake was wearing a Taliban-esque beard. His second mistake was not finding a way out from under Kennedy’s smothering grappling game, which the IFL veteran used to keep the former BodogFIGHT champ on the defensive from the get-go. From the opening seconds of the first round until halfway through the second, Kennedy had Thompson on the bottom fending off chokes and hammerfists, under siege like a terrorist in a Tora Bora cave. The end came not in the form of a laser-guided “Bunker Buster”, but from a series of punches that had the turtled Thompson tapping out.

Baszler may have had a vastly superior submission arsenal to employ against Canadian striker Kaufman, but it availed her naught in what was primarily a fight contested on the feet. Surviving a first-round choke attempt to pepper her opponent with punches, Kaufman mostly kept it upright from then on, feeding Baszler a right hand mixed with other knuckle-sandwich variations. It went to the judges after three five-minute rounds, and like in Gurgel/Heun, there was no doubting Kaufman – the more effective striker – had won.

In the opening bout of the evening, American Kickboxing Academy student Luke Rockhold used a right hand to send Dennis Hallman-trained Corey Devela to the canvas, and he used a rear naked choke to elicit the tap out at just 30 seconds in. Official result notwithstanding, though, this one was all about Rockhold’s fist in Devela’s face.

As MMA events on cable TV go, Strikeforce Challenger’s “Santos vs. Villasenor” managed to deliver in the action department – due in no small part to the clobberfest between Gurgel and Heun. In essence, it was the “Gurgel/Heun Show”.