Otari Tanzilovi spent most of his fight with Malcolm Wellmaker getting stalked, and one kick erased all of it. The bantamweight knocked Wellmaker out cold with a head kick at 2:39 of Round 2 at UFC Vegas 122 on Saturday night at the Meta Apex. It was the opening bout of the main card, and it got Tanzilovi his first win in the Octagon. The UFC’s official account on X labeled it the head kick heard around the Meta Apex, which is about as close to restraint as that account gets.
For a round and a half, this looked like Wellmaker’s night. He came forward from the opening bell, cut off the cage well and kept fishing for his left hook. Tanzilovi had answers. He timed knees up the middle when Wellmaker walked in, and he threw combinations while Wellmaker mostly threw one shot at a time. But Wellmaker’s single shots were the heavier ones. One sent Tanzilovi stumbling to the fence, and a later one put him on the canvas, where Wellmaker went to work with ground and pound. Cageside Press described Tanzilovi as being in full survival mode at that point. He did recover enough to land a takedown and some punches of his own, but by the horn his pace was visibly dropping.
Round 2 opened the same way. Wellmaker stuffed a Tanzilovi takedown attempt without much fuss, got a brief clinch, and kept marching. Tanzilovi kept circling and kept answering with strikes in bunches. Then the kick came over the top, landed flush, and Wellmaker went down. Tanzilovi rushed in to follow up, but the referee was already there, according to MMA Junkie’s report.
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In his post-fight interview, Tanzilovi acknowledged Wellmaker had rocked him in the first round. He said the head kick was a technique he’d drilled extensively, and MMA Junkie reported those comments. Merab Dvalishvili was among those on their feet for it, per a clip the UFC posted on X.
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The win moves Tanzilovi to 11-2 overall and 1-1 in the UFC. His promotional debut in June ended in a decision loss to Shane Collins. Wellmaker drops to 10-3 overall and 2-3 in the UFC. He won his first two UFC fights by first-round stoppage and has now lost three in a row.
The detail I keep coming back to is the takedown attempts. In Round 1, Tanzilovi shot out of desperation after he got hurt, and early in Round 2 he tried again and got stuffed. At that point he could have kept forcing a wrestling exchange he clearly wasn’t winning. Instead he went back to circling, kept his hands busy, and let Wellmaker keep walking forward into kicking range. That’s a fighter making a decision with a fading gas tank, and it paid off. Wellmaker was probably up on the cards, and that won’t comfort him much. A fighter at 2-3 in the UFC with three straight losses needs a win next time out, and he’ll be studying how he walked onto that shin.
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