For those of you that thought he made a bad call.......
Referee Dan Miragliotta admits he was razor close to stopping the Cheick Kongo vs. Pat Barry heavyweight fight.
But if you were watching the UFC on Versus 4 headliner, you already knew that.
Miragliotta was so close to stopping the June 26 fight, in fact, that he brushed against Barry after the fighter floored Kongo with a punch a few minutes into the first round and did so again with another punch.
If not for a personal rule the referee had made through his experience, he might have stopped it. But he didn't, and Kongo went on to deliver one of the most amazing come-from-behind wins in recent MMA history.
"Before, it was reaction to me," Miragliotta today told MMAjunkie.com (
www.mmajunkie.com). "As soon as I saw somebody knocked down or who I thought was knocked out, immediately I jumped in and stopped the fight.
"Now, what I do is I watch it. Before I jump in and stop it, I try to take a split-second to look again to make sure that he's definitely out, he's not stepping in to reach, or anything like that. I try to give myself a little bit of a second chance before I made that final decision."
That second chance enabled him to see that Kongo wasn't knocked out after taking Barry's punches.
"I was already stepping in to stop it, and as Pat was throwing more strikes,
I realized a lot of the strikes were missing," Miragliotta said. "And Kongo was reaching in for the leg, so I backed off. It was that close.
"I thought once I stepped back, there would probably be one or two more punches and then I would have had to stop it for good."
Instead, Kongo met a charging Barry with a right hook to the side of the head and then a short uppercut that knocked him out cold. (It took doctors several minutes to revive the open-eyed fighter.)The finish took the No. 6 spot on ESPN's "Top Plays" from this past weekend and lit up Twitter and online message boards. Considering the void left by the mysterious departure of scheduled headliner Nate Marquardt, who was not medically cleared to compete by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission, it quite possibly was the best-case scenario for the event's ending.
http://mmajunkie.com/news/24210/referee-dan-miragliottas-underground-events-led-to-ufc-on-versus-4s-big-call.mma