The lights went out at the Meta Apex on Halloween night, mid-fight, and nobody stopped fighting.
It happened on the UFC Vegas 123 prelims during a women’s strawweight bout between Piera Rodriguez and Talita Alencar. At 3:49 of Round 1, the lights above the Octagon cut out. The room dropped into a murky dimness, but the two fighters were still faintly visible, so referee Kerry Hatley let them keep working.
The broadcast booth took it less calmly. “Oh, it’s lights out in the Apex,” Daniel Cormier said, sounding genuinely rattled. Michael Bisping, never one to pass up a bit, joked that the boogeyman had come out for Halloween. Laura Sanko was annoyed on the fighters’ behalf.
“How distracting is that, though, when you are in the middle of a fight, and the lighting is completely off?” Sanko said.
Essentially Sports, which detailed the incident, reported that the cause hasn’t been revealed. The outlet pointed to the venue’s complex lighting system and possible electrical distribution, circuit or power supply faults as likely suspects, though that’s the outlet’s guesswork and the UFC hasn’t confirmed anything.
Power came back quickly. Cormier gave both women credit for keeping the action going in the dark, and once everyone could see again, Alencar went straight to work. She landed a takedown and briefly threatened an armbar before Rodriguez reversed the position and got back to her feet.
That was Alencar’s best stretch. Rodriguez cranked up her volume from the second round on, tagging Alencar with combinations that did real damage, and she kept the same pattern going through the third. Rodriguez took it by unanimous decision.
It has happened before
Arena blackouts are rare in the UFC, but this one has company. At UFC 14 in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1997, the overhead lights died during the overtime period of the heavyweight fight between Maurice Smith and Mark Coleman. John McCarthy let them keep going, and Smith won a unanimous decision. Two heavyweights scrapping in the dark in 1997 is about as early UFC as it gets.
The 2010 version was messier. At UFC Fight Night 21 on March 31, 2010, at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, a power outage hit right as Bruce Buffer was about to introduce the fighters. That one was dark enough that the promotion briefly stopped the event until technicians fixed the problem.
Hatley made the right call. If the fighters can see each other and neither one is looking at the ref for help, you let it ride, and both women handled a bizarre stretch like they’d rehearsed it. Alencar came out of the blackout and nearly locked up an armbar, which is a pretty loud way of saying the dark didn’t bother her. Rodriguez got the win, the booth got its Halloween material, and as of the Essentially Sports report the UFC still hadn’t said why its own building went dark.
