Joaquin Buckley's brutal KO at UFC Fight Island 5 lights up MMA Twitter, thrills Dana White

Tom Gatto

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Joaquin Buckley's brutal KO at UFC Fight Island 5 lights up MMA Twitter, thrills Dana White image

The UFC billed it "THE MOST UNBELIEVABLE KO IN UFC HISTORY." Even if that's a slight exaggeration, Joaquin "New Mansa" Buckley did put himself in the pantheon of lights-out artists.

Buckley hit a spinning back kick to flatten Impa Kasanganay in the second round of a preliminary bout on the Fight Island 5 card Saturday in Abu Dhabi.

The middleweight from St. Louis raised his lifetime record to 11-3 with eight knockouts.

"He was coming hard, he had heavy pressure, so I said,' Why not just throw it?' And I got it. I landed," Buckley said in his postfight interview in the Octagon.

His electrifying combination power and precision lit up MMA Twitter:

The kick also was a big hit with UFC president Dana White, who surprised Buckley with a postfight visit while the fighter was waiting to be interviewed again.

Buckley did not receive "all the bonuses," which is what Twitter wanted White to give him, but he was awarded $50,000 for a Performance of the Night. He was angling for double that right after the fight, however.

"Make that $100,000, because that was a Fight of the Night, too," he said in the Octagon interview.

Tom Gatto

Tom Gatto Photo

Tom Gatto joined The Sporting News as a senior editor in 2000 after 12 years at The Herald-News in Passaic, N.J., where he served in a variety of roles including sports editor, and a brief spell at APBNews.com in New York, where he worked as a syndication editor. He is a 1986 graduate of the University of South Carolina.