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Everyone knows the UFC is the pinnacle of the proverbial MMA mountain, and thus it’s incredibly difficult to actually succeed there. Plenty of great fighters have gotten all the way to the UFC, only to be unable to fight to their potential for one reason or another. It isn’t easy.
Some fighters, though, managed to pull off an incredible win inside the Octagon that was enough to make observers expect a lot more from them. Unfortunately, following up a massive win isn’t always easy either. These five fighters managed to deliver huge victories inside the UFC only to follow up with, well, not all that much.
#1 Dennis Hallman
Only a fool would claim that Dennis Hallman was never a top fighter – a state champion wrestler in his youth, ‘Superman’ became a brilliant submission grappler and ended up fighting all over the world. Unfortunately for him though, his UFC record of 4 wins and 5 losses is hardly one that suggests he was once one of the most feared men in the world at 155lbs and 170lbs.
His one big win in the UFC though definitely stands out over pretty much anything else achieved in his career. At UFC 29 – his debut with the promotion – he was matched with the juggernaut Matt Hughes. This was prior to Hughes’s dominant Welterweight title reign, but he was still on an 18-fight win streak, with his last loss being to... Hallman, interestingly enough. Basically, the fight was put together with the idea being Hughes would avenge his one career loss.
It didn’t go that way at all as Hughes slammed Hallman to the mat early on, only to be caught in an armbar and submitted in 20 seconds. It was a huge win for Hallman, but his next trip to the UFC wasn’t as successful – he was clearly outpointed by Lightweight champion Jens Pulver in a dull outing.
And that was basically the story of Hallman’s UFC career. He was violently knocked out by Frank Trigg, lost a dull decision to Jorge Rivera, was knocked out by John Howard in the dying seconds of a fight he was winning... you get the picture. The worst moment was of course when he wore a Speedo into a fight with Brian Ebersole and was knocked out in the first round.
He did pick up three UFC victories later on, but two of them came with major asterisks – Karo Parisyan was strung out on painkillers, while Hallman badly missed weight for his win over John Makdessi. Essentially, ‘Superman’ never came close to recapturing the momentum given to him by the Hughes win.
#2 David Terrell
When you’re talking about one-hit wonders and missed prospects in the UFC, they don’t come much better than David Terrell. ‘The Soul Assassin’ came into the UFC with much hype in 2004; an MMA record of 4-1 wasn’t that extensive, but his grappling background was incredible as he’d won all sorts of tournaments and had apparently never even had a point scored on him in jiu-jitsu competition, despite facing some incredible competition.
For his first UFC fight, he was matched with Matt Lindland, a man who most observers saw at the time as the uncrowned Middleweight champion – at the time he’d lost twice in the UFC, one fluke to Niko Vitale that saw Lindland KO himself, and one loss to then-champion Murilo Bustamante. Outside of that, he’d been perfect with seven wins. That was until Terrell uncorked a huge left hand and knocked him unconscious in 24 seconds.
The MMA world was set ablaze by the win as of course, Terrell was supposed to be a grappler, not a striker. The UFC were impressed too and quickly set up a fight for the vacant Middleweight title between Terrell and Evan Tanner. But despite a super-fast start in the title match, Terrell ran out of steam and succumbed to Tanner’s ground-and-pound. It would be the last time we’d see him for well over a year – something which would become a pattern, although at the time we didn’t know it.
Terrell returned at UFC 59 and choked out newcomer Scott Smith, but it turned out to be his last fight – injuries forced him out of multiple bookings with the UFC, including two fights with Yushin Okami and one with Ed Herman, and his problems became both extensive and weird – at one point he had his ear removed and reattached in order to fight a bad infection. He remains the standard bearer in MMA for missed potential as his injuries reduced him to the definition of a one-hit wonder.
#3 Charlie Brenneman
The previous two fighters on our list all managed their proverbial “one hit” in the UFC in their first fight with the promotion, whereas former Lock Haven wrestler Brenneman pulled off his biggest win in his fourth fight in the Octagon. It was a huge win, but ‘The Spaniard’ never came close to finding one as big in his later UFC days and ended his career with a UFC record of 4-7.
Brenneman entered the UFC with a reputation as a stifling wrestler and picked up two wins – dull decisions – over Jason High and Amilcar Alves, sandwiching a knockout loss to Johny Hendricks. The win that changed his career came next – Rick Story, on a six-fight win streak at the time, was supposed to fight Nate Marquardt in the main event of UFC on Versus 4, but Marquardt was busted for elevated testosterone and removed from the card on the day of the weigh-in.
Brenneman took the fight on less than a day’s notice, and as coincidence would have it, had the perfect style to take out Story – he outwrestled, outhustled and out-bullied him to a lopsided decision. The win was huge and threw Brenneman into the Welterweight title picture, but a head kick loss to Anthony Johnson in his next fight threw him right back out again. He bounced back with a win over Daniel Roberts, but UFC losses to Erick Silva, Kyle Noke, Danny Castillo, Beneil Dariush and Leandro Silva ended his Octagon run on a low note.
It may have been the case that styles make fights and Brenneman’s was perfect to counter Rick Story’s, but not any of the other top 170lbers, but the win was huge at the time and means ‘The Spaniard’ definitely belongs on our list of one-hit wonders in the UFC.
#4 Elvis Sinosic
If we’re going by reputations for niceness in MMA, ‘The King of Rock n’ Rumble’ Elvis Sinosic would probably be unbeaten – the UFC’s first Australian fighter is universally loved by fans and fellow fighters alike and generally comes off as someone who you’d love to have a drink and shoot the breeze with. His UFC record of 1-6, however, is less than impressive by anyone’s standards.
Something endeared him to UFC brass though and meant they brought him back so many times, and it wasn’t just his likeable personality. Back in 2001 – the infant days of the Zuffa-run UFC – Sinosic was brought in to fight Jeremy Horn, at the time a top contender in the 205lbs division, after taking former champ Frank Shamrock to a close decision in a K-1 bout. Horn was expected to win and go on to face then-champion Tito Ortiz in a title fight.
Instead, Sinosic surprised the accomplished grappler Horn with a triangle/armbar combination and submitted him in the first round. In turn, he was given the title shot against Ortiz...which didn’t work out so well as Tito elbowed his head into pieces within four minutes. And Sinosic’s following UFC fights went badly too – losses to Evan Tanner, Babalu Sobral, Forrest Griffin, Alessio Sakara and Michael Bisping left him with one of the worst records in modern UFC history.
In Elvis’s defence, his opposition was always incredibly tough and he usually put up a decent fight before losing, but his huge win over Horn was always going to be tricky to follow up and the fact that unfortunately, he simply couldn’t do it, makes him one of the all-time great UFC one-hit wonders.
#5 Houston Alexander
You could probably make an argument for Houston actually being a two-hit wonder, but his rocket-like rise and subsequent and sudden fall definitely puts him on this list. At 6-1 and with no impressive names on his record, it was a surprise when he was signed to fight Keith Jardine – who had just beaten Forrest Griffin and broken into title contention for the first time – at UFC 71. He certainly wasn’t supposed to actually win.
But win he did and it was in brutal fashion, too. After absorbing an early knockdown, Alexander came roaring back to absolutely smash Jardine with punches en route to a first-round TKO. A star was born, all in just 48 seconds. A TKO win over Alessio Sakara – in a minute – followed and it seemed like the UFC had a new superstar at 205lbs. A one-sided loss to Thiago Silva just two months later put paid to that, and from there the hype train was derailed for good.
Alexander was knocked out by James Irvin and then submitted by Eric Schafer in his next two fights to erase any thought of him being a genuine title contender as some had first believed, and his final UFC fight – an appalling loss to a post-TUF Kimbo Slice – made him into a punchline more than anything else.
A decade on, Alexander remains perhaps one of the finest examples of the unpredictability of MMA, and the possibility that you can be a superstar one day, and a washed-up loser the next, all in the space of one or two knockouts.
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