UFC
295 was one of the most memorable events of the year, and its
top performers were compensated accordingly.
The Las Vegas-based promotion handed out seven $50,000 bonuses
following Saturday’s card at Madison Square Garden in New York. Of
those, five main-card fighters received “Performance of the Night”
honors: Alex
Pereira, Tom
Aspinall, Jessica
Andrade, Benoit St.
Denis and Diego
Lopes.
Pereira became the ninth two-division champion in promotion history
by virtue of his second-round knockout of Jiri
Prochazka in the evening’s light heavyweight headliner, while
Aspinall captured interim heavyweight gold with a 69-second
shellacking of Sergei
Pavlovich in the co-main event.
Earlier, Andrade set a UFC women’s record with four knockdowns in a
second-round stoppage of Mackenzie
Dern in a featured strawweight affair; St. Denis secured his
fifth straight finish with a head-kick KO of Matt
Frevola and Lopes knocked out Pat
Sabatini 90 seconds into their main-card opener.
Finally, Viacheslav Borschev and Nazim
Sadykhov might not have gotten much in the way of closure when
their preliminary lightweight bout was declared a majority draw,
but the back-and-forth nature of the contest resulted in the
combatants earning “Fight of the Night” accolades and $50,000
apiece.