There’s been a prevailing feeling of saturation among MMA fans in Asia ever since ONE Championship finished their super stacked Tokyo card “A New Era” a few weeks back. A sense that everything to follow is just a little bit more muted, a bit less glamorous mostly because big name new acquisitions like ex-UFC champs Eddie Alvarez and Demetrious Johnson, had their debuts in that Japan event.
But then this “Roots of Honor” event might just pass under your radar and you’d be missing out on some pretty good barn burners.
It’s an underrated one, to be sure. You’d think it would be a given that a lot of Filipinos would be fighting on this Manila card, but the country actually only has four reps on the 15 scheduled matches. Still, with two championship belts on the line, the debut of a super hot female prospect, and the long-awaited return to the cage of the featherweight kingpin, “Roots of Honor” is shaping up to be something underestimated but certainly worth your chunk of time.
To start off, one of the best reasons to witness Roots is new female atomweight and Vietnamese-Filipina “Killer Bee” Bi Nguyen.
Nguyen grew up in California but forged her fighting career in Houston, Texas after she ran away and found a new home at an MMA dojo. She’ll certainly be a familiar face to reality show fans since she got propelled to fame via her stint on the 37th edition of Survivor. Nguyen’s fights tend to be brawl-y, bloody affairs and there’s a good chance she’ll want to make it that way and make a splash in her first outing at a new promotion.
Meantime, the Filipino Kelly Brothers, Edward and the elder Eric, are fighting on the same event since they got signed by ONE.
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Edward, who trains out of Team Lakay, is surging at 11-6 as a featherweight with his last win and loss due to Christian Lee and is facing a tough test in Korean grappler Kwon Won Il. Meantime, the late thirties Eric, who has hopped from training camps locally and in the Middle East, is currently on a very slippery, five-fight losing streak inside the ONE cage for the past three years—and “The Natural” hasn’t fought since May of 2018.
One of the fights we’re looking forward to is the welterweight clash between Luis “Sapo” Santos versus James Nakashima. Sapo has a whopping 65-11 on his pro MMA record and he’s looking to get another win at the expense of the American Nakashima.
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Nakashima may be undefeated at 10-0, but it’s notable that all his wins—and we do mean ALL of them—have come by way of decision. The Brazilian monster is known for snatching souls with his body kicks and that’s exactly what he did in his last fight with Daichi Abe in October 2018. If you were betting on a KO, out of all the main card fights we’d say this has the potential for a very quick, lights-out ending.
In the championship main event, let’s not forget how much Martin “The Situ-Asian” Nguyen has accomplished inside the ONE cage. Being a former two-division champ, he only had his lightweight belt taken away from his due to injury and not a loss.
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The “Situ-Asian” still comes replete with sniper-caliber fists and some of the best takedown defense in the featherweight division and he’s certainly added plenty of new tools with his training camp in Fort Lauderdale at Hard Knocks 365 headed by Dutch kickboxing legend Henri Hooft.
Nguyen is defending his belt against former champ and ground-and-pound powerhouse Narantungalag Jadambaa and it’s a hard one to pick for an easy win. The Mongolian challenger is a grappler par excellence with various wrestling disciplines under his belt like Russian Sambo and Mongolian Bokh. Plus he’s got a karate striking base, too. If the challenger can get Nguyen to the mats then he’ll be facing furious hammerfists all night long, even if Jadambaa is already a bit long in the athletic tooth at 44 years of age.
Lastly, there’s been a heartbreaking stretch of early 2019 for Baguio City’s Team Lakay when they lost all four of their belts in the promotion (two in one night at that recent Tokyo card), starting with Joshua Pacio just last January.
This, then, is the automatic rematch for the strawweight title given that it was a razor thin and arguably questionable split decision against Japanese grappling standout Yosuke Saruta. While Pacio was unable to execute his game plan at that fight in Indonesia, let’s not forget that at 23 years of age he still has plenty of room to grow.
There have been so many upsets in just the first quarter of 2019 that the gold belt might just change hands just as quick. Blink and the title picture could have changed drastically in those seconds.