Chris Leben is fighting in MMA again, and he’s doing it against the man he choked out with 20 seconds left in 2010. South Korean promotion Black Combat announced on social media on October 7 that Leben (22-12) will face Yoshihiro “Sexyama” Akiyama (16-7) at Black Combat 17 on November 21 at the Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul. The promotion has billed it as Akiyama’s retirement fight. He’s 51. Leben is 46. Together that’s 97 years of mileage walking into one cage.
The first fight still holds up. At UFC 116 in July 2010, the two middleweights traded heavy shots for nearly three rounds before Leben rallied and locked up a triangle choke in the final 20 seconds of Round 3. It handed Akiyama his first loss in the Octagon and earned Fight of the Night. Akiyama had arrived in the UFC in 2009 at 12-1 and won a split decision over Alan Belcher at UFC 100. The Leben loss started a four-fight skid. He beat Amir Sadollah in 2014 and closed out his UFC run with a split decision loss to Alberto Mina in late 2015.
After more than three years on the shelf, Akiyama signed with ONE Championship and went 2-1 in MMA there, losing his debut before stopping Sherif Mohamed and Shinya Aoki. His most recent outing was the strange one. In January 2024 at ONE 165, he met kickboxer Nieky Holzken in a custom-rules bout that was supposed to rotate boxing, Muay Thai and MMA by round. Akiyama got knocked out in the boxing round in under two minutes and never saw the other two.
Leben’s file is longer and messier. He retired after Uriah Hall stopped him at UFC 168 in December 2013, which made it four straight MMA losses to end his UFC career. His last MMA win was the 27-second knockout of Wanderlei Silva in 2011. A planned Bellator return in 2016 collapsed when doctors found a potentially life-threatening heart issue. He was later medically cleared and went 3-1 with three knockouts in bare-knuckle boxing, the last a stoppage of Quentin Henry at BKFC’s first KnuckleMania in 2021. Since then he’s worked as a referee and judge, including at UFC events.
Nobody seems to have seen this coming. Ben Fowlkes wrote in his Yahoo Sports mailbag that he spoke with Leben in January and didn’t get the sense Leben was seriously thinking about fighting again. Fowlkes guessed money and Korean fans wanting revenge for Akiyama might explain it. That’s speculation, and he presented it that way.
My take, since I’m required by temperament to have one. I’ve spent years yelling about fighters coming off long layoffs at short odds, and this card hands me the final boss: a guy nearly 13 years removed from MMA and five from any competition at all, against a 51-year-old whose last two fights in the cage ended with Aoki finished and then himself finished by a kickboxer. If a book hangs a number on this, I’m not interested in the favorite at any price, because the only reliable data point is that both men have been knocked out recently and Leben used to hit like a dropped piano. Akiyama gets familiar MMA rules for his send-off, which beats the boxing gloves that sank him against Holzken. He also gets the one opponent on earth who already knows how to beat him in a Fight of the Night. November 21, Seoul. Bring a defibrillator for the nostalgia.
