"Patrick Cummins put away onetime Strikeforce champion Rafael Cavalcante with third-round elbows in a grueling undercard pairing at 205 pounds," is how mixed martial arts website Sherdog.com opened its account of the fight. "Cavalcante succumbed to a combination of blows and fatigue 45 seconds into round three."
Patrick Cummins"The horror show that was Patrick Cummins' face in the second round belied the reality of the fight," wrote Matt Erickson of MMAJunkie.com, describing the battered and bruised face of the former college matman. "Then in the third, he gave Rafael Cavalcante's face a little horror show of its own."
After the match, Cummins said, "I got caught a couple of times. The first round, I got caught with some good and clean punches and that kind of dictated the pace of the fight. I decided, 'OK, I'm going to wrestle him and use my ground game,' and that went well."
With the win, the 34-year-old Cummins is now 8-2 in his MMA career, and 4-2 in UFC competition. His only two losses were to Ovince Saint Preux in April at UFC on Fox (knocked out towards the end of Round 1) ... and to former Oklahoma State NCAA finalist and Olympian Daniel Cormier via a first-round TKO. Cavalcante drops to 12-6 overall, and 1-3 in UFC.
Before launching his MMA career in 2010, Cummins made a name for himself in the 285-pound weight class ... despite being a walk-on at Penn State. He became a two-time NCAA All-American, placing third at the 2003 NCAAs, then making it to the heavyweight finals of the 2004 NCAA Division I Wrestling Championships, where he lost to 2002 champ Tommy Rowlands of Ohio State in the finals, 6-2. A year later, a bearded Cummins won the heavyweight (265-pound) title at Real Pro Wrestling, a 2005 cable TV series featuring former college wrestlers competing under rules that were a unique hybrid of various amateur wrestling styles for prize money.
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