After last night’s action-packed UFC on Fox 23 in Denver, all of the winners on the four main card fights will receive $50,000 ‘Performance of the Night’ bonuses after the promotion was left spoiled for choice on a night where everyone showed up to entertain.
UFC on Fox 23, otherwise known as UFC Denver, took place on Saturday, January 28 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado and featured a women’s bantamweight headliner between Valentina Shevchenko and Julianna Pena to decide the number one contender for Amanda Nunes’s bantamweight crown.
Shevchenko would take home a ‘Performance of the Night’ payout for her second-round armbar submission victory over Pena in the main event. Despite spending a lot of time with her opponent in guard throughout the second, the Kyrgyzstani fighter would scramble and secure the armbar with thirty seconds remaining to set up big title clash with champion Nunes.
Jorge Masvidal would also collect a performance bonus with his impressive second round TKO of fan favourite Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone in the night’s co-main event. “Gamebred” looked sharp from the get-go and almost finished Cerrone at the end of the first, only for referee Herb Dean to declare that he was saved by the bell.
Cerrone wouldn’t recover and Masvidal would pick up where he left off to start the second round before securing the finish with a flurry of punches to a rocked and defenceless “Cowboy.”
UFC heavyweight Francis Ngannou was the third fighter awarded a performance bonus after his brutal first round knockout of fading former heavyweight champion Andrei Arlovski. A big right hand from “The Predator” was enough to drop Arlovski and the shots that followed got the stoppage not even two minutes into the fight.
Lastly, talented scrapper Jason Knight would continue to show people there’s more to his game than heart and toughness with a dominant performance over Alex Caceres which ended in the second round when Knight would secure the rear-naked choke for the submission win. This was enough to grab the Missouri native the final performance cheque of the night.
Despite it not being officially announced, Dana White declared that he would also see that Li Jingliang and Bobby Nash were rewarded after seeing what he considered ‘Fight of the Night’ between the two in their welterweight preliminary bout.
“That fight was ridiculous. I’m going to give those guys a little something too,” said Dana White at the UFC on Fox 23 Post-fight press conference
