San Jose, CA — The final of Bellator’s light heavyweight grand prix did not go down as planned at Bellator 277 on Friday.
In fact, in the end, it’s as if it didn’t go down at all. That’s because, due to an accidental clash of heads towards the end of the third round, the fight between champ Vadim Nemkov and Corey Anderson was ruled a No Contest. A nasty gash had been opened up on Nemkov, and not enough time had passed in the bout to go to the scorecards. That leaves Bellator without a tournament champion.
“It’s unfortunate, the way that fight ended. I was surprised, I didn’t realize his cut was so deep, to the bone,” Bellator President Scott Coker explained following the fight, speaking to Cageside Press and other media outlets. “I was asking Andy Foster [CSAC] ‘what happened, there was only three or four seconds left,’ and he said ‘no the damage is too much and we couldn’t safely move forward.’ They have the rule here that it has to go three rounds to have a decision, so there’s no tournament champion.”
That means Nemkov and Anderson will be running it back. “What we’re going to do, is we’re going to regroup, we’re going to put that fight together in the next, I would say, three, four months, as soon as everybody’s healthy and ready to go, everybody gets a good camp in, but we’re definitely going to rerun that fight. Sometime in the late summer maybe.”
The million dollars in prize money, said Coker, is a bonus on top of contractual pay, and to claim that prize, you have to win the fight. So it’s still up for grabs, while Nemkov holds on to his 205lb title following the No Contest. “We will give the million dollar check when we continue the tournament, sometime let’s say August or September.”
Watch the full Bellator 277 post-fight press conference with Scott Coker above.
