The Ultimate Fighting Championship is back with us today, May 20, 2023, for UFC Vegas 73, coming down live from UFC Apex in Enterprise, Nevada.
The event headlined the women’s confrontation between no. 8 on BJJ Sensation Mackenzie Dern (13-3) and no. 14th ranked kickboxer Angela Hill (15-13).
Dern entered the game having gone 5-2 in her last seven matches, while Hill had gone 3-3 over her last six matches.
Keep reading to see how our main event of the evening went down:
Official result: Mackenzie defeated Dern. Angela Hill via unanimous decision (49-43, 49-44, 49-44)
Dern lands a sweet right hand to start the match before proceeding to clinch. Once she no longer secures the takedown, she separates and the two return to the hitting range, where Dern gets back to work with boxing. She looks very sharp on her feet and drops Hill with a short punch midway through the opening round.
Hence Dern’s absolute dominance on the mat; She came so close to securing the end of the bar at the end of the round, she probably would have stopped the fight had there been a few more seconds in it.
Hill has a much better second round, snatching Dern along the fence in large part while stuffing Dern’s hip toss attempts.
Dern goes straight back to punching in the third round, hitting the mound right from the top position with nasty punches and elbows. The opening round would have been 10-8 for Dern, and the third round would have been even more dominant. I came close to pinning a bar at the end of the round again, but the clock ran out again.
Round four is also all Dern, though she is unable to get Hill into the ring until the final forty seconds.
Dern’s boxing still looks sharp, landing a lot, mixing in a few leg kicks here and there, and winning assertive exchanges.
Her fifth and final round can also score 10-8 points, as she easily outsmarts Hill while overcoming heavy punches and elbows. This was by far Dern’s mean performance.
Over the course of Dern’s last two fights, she has had arguable five rounds going 10-8; She lost her latest fight by majority decision in a match that many scored a draw, and she returned to her winning ways tonight with a dominant victory over Angela Hill at UFC Vegas 73.
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I became a fan of combat sports when I was 12 years old. I was browsing channels and landed on Versus, which is where WEC was on TV. Uriah Faber fought Jens Pulver for the second time that night. This is the first fight I’ve ever seen, and I got addicted to it instantly. Eventually, I started covering the sport in the last quarter of 2018, and since then I’ve started writing about animals as well. If you’d like to see these pieces, be sure to check out learnaboutnature.com!