This happened in Louisville, Kentucky. The video begins with a voice saying off camera, “You don’t even know what the #@$%s is going on right now, do you?” Those words proved to be prophetic - the man being attacked in a mixed martial artist.
What Happened
A big guy, who doesn’t even know what the#@$% is going on, has his back to camera, and walks aggressively towards the notably smaller man. The little guy is backpedaling smoothly, in practiced fashion.
Calmly, the little guy asks someone further back, “You still got that bottle over there?” It is instantly established that there are multiple threats, and that it includes a weapon.
The first line of defense is and always is to keep your hands up. The second line, if it is available, is to distance manage, keep far enough away from your opponent so that he cannot reach out and touch you in the nose, or close enough to your opponent lacks leverage to strike. The little guy is distance managing with his hands up. And that’s not all that’s going on.
A central part of mixed martial arts is getting reads - learning what your opponent’s reflexes, reach, footwork, and countless other qualities are. Against a trained opponent, it can take as long as two or three minutes to get decent reads. Against the average person, who knows nothing about fighting, and worse, assumes he does, the reads come in almost immediately.
The pair square up and the fighter lands a low kick, that hits with a satisfying thud. Literally the first day of all strike training, student learn to exhale as they hit, rather than hold their breath, which is the instinctive method. You can hear a sharp, short exhale as the kick lands.
The nature of low kicks is such that a guy of sufficient size, especially drunk, can take one. Then a second low kick lands, and the taller guy takes a tell-tale hop - that hurt.
A smooth left hook drops Big Guy, who makes another unwise decision - getting back up. Big Guy then passes a wristwatch off to a friend, and appears to transfer something to his dominant hand. The fighter is keenly aware of his surroundings, briefly using a trash can to buy a little time, and says, “Make sure you get that other watch.”
Big guy runs at the fighter, who again backpedals, managing distance and doubtless getting further reads. The problem is, when you have suffered two clean low kicks with no knowledge of defense, you run like Pee-wee Herman on ice.
A third low kick lands, and then Big Guy is dropped with a shifting straight right. At this point, the fighter has thrown three right low kicks, one left hook, and one straight right. All five shots landed, causing two knockdowns.
Then Big Guy makes his last mistake of the evening - he tries to get up again, and it’s slow. Although soccer kicks are prohibited under the Unified Rules of mixed martial arts, on the concrete, PRIDE rules hold sway. Big Guy is out and something flew out of his mouth, a tooth probably. Anyone complaining about the final kick is not processing that the Big Guy already got up from a knockdown, that there were multiple assailants, and a weapon.
One of Lurch’s friends determines that this is a fine time to shove the fighter. There is a little Neo Footwork around a telephone, and with the same calmness you see in a cage, the fighter approaches the shover, who blurts out “I don’t have a problem.”
He does, actually. And then we get to the best part of the entire video.
At the close, the camera cuts to Louis CK* crawling out from under a nearby bush. There has been speculation that the figure emerging at the end was the BJJ black belt referenced in the title, and that he had been rolling with the shrub. However, he was actually the first one to end up on the wrong side of the trained fighter, and was only then coming to.
*That’s not really Louis CK.