This Day in MMA History: April 4

World Extreme Cagefighting in April 2009 found itself in a strange place. Acquired by Ultimate Fighting Championship parent company Zuffa in 2006, the WEC had been left largely alone for the first two years, but in the previous few months, the organization had dissolved its light heavyweight and middleweight divisions, folded its welterweight division into the UFC and introduced a flyweight class.

On one hand, the promotion’s future felt tenuous, as fans wondered if the WEC was about to be absorbed wholesale into the UFC or, worse, simply shut down entirely. On the other hand, it also felt like business as usual, since, with all due respect to fighters like Brian Stann, Chael Sonnen and Carlos Condit—the former WEC welterweight champ had made his UFC debut just days before—the little blue cage had always been a showcase for the smaller fighters, first and foremost; and with the exception of eternal poster boy Urijah Faber, no fighter exemplified the greatness of the WEC like longtime bantamweight king Miguel Torres.

Going into WEC 40, Torres was 36-1 and riding a 16-fight winning streak, with 15 of those wins coming by stoppage. So dominant was his combination of rangy boxing and hyper-aggressive grappling that most observers regarded the 28-year-old as one of the five best pound-for-pound fighters in the world. For his third bantamweight title defense, the promotion offered up Takeya Mizugaki, a largely unknown commodity to American fans who had gone 11-2-2 entirely in his native Japan. To most observers, including the notoriously biased commentary booth of Todd Harris and Frank Mir, Mizugaki was a sacrificial lamb, a keep-busy fight for Torres while the WEC worked to bring Renan Barao stateside or perhaps make a champ-versus-champ dream match with Faber.

Once the fight started, however, it was a different story, as Mizugaki took it to Torres immediately. Eschewing wrestling—the one area in which he was expected to have the advantage—Mizugaki instead backed up the champion with combinations of power punches for five minutes. Torres regrouped to win the second round, then suffered a nasty cut in the third. For five rounds, the two men engaged in an absolute slugfest, largely on the feet, with wild swings of momentum from round to round. Fittingly, the last half-minute of the fight consisted of the two going toe-to-toe, giving no quarter and smashing each other until the final horn.

The final verdict—a 48-47, 49-46, 49-46 decision win for Torres—elevated both men’s stock. Overnight, Mizugaki went from an unknown quantity to a person of interest in the WEC bantamweight division, while Torres further cemented his status as one of the most dominant champions in any weight class. From there, the two men’s paths diverged. Mizugaki used the fight as a springboard to a lengthy run as a contender. He alternated wins and losses for the next few years, including a memorably grisly technical submission loss to Faber at WEC 52, before stringing together five straight wins in the UFC and earning a title eliminator fight against returning former champ Dominick Cruz. Unfortunately, Cruz vented three years’ worth of pent-up frustration on Mizugaki, blasting him in 61 seconds.

For Torres, however, WEC 40 was a last great hurrah. In his next fight, at WEC 42 in August, he lost the belt to Brian Bowles via first-round knockout. While Torres was absorbed into the UFC along with the rest of his division in 2010, he would never again contend for a title and was memorable chiefly for being released after making an inappropriate joke on Twitter. The man who had started his career 37-1 went 7-8 in his last 15 fights.