Steve Garcia picked up arguably the biggest win of his career at UFC Vegas 110 after he scored an emphatic opening-round knockout of David Onama in his first main event.
It was a dominant showcase from start to finish as Garcia pursued Onama across the cage from the first second until the last. The end came after Garcia blasted Onama with a blistering combination and continued unloading shots until the referee had no choice but to stop the contest.
The fight served as Garcia’s seventh consecutive win, with six of those fights ending by way of KO/TKO.
“I will say I was a little surprised on how he approached things,” Garcia told MMA Fighting about Onama’s performance. “Because I think what some of the [interviewers] were relaying to me is that they’re saying he was welcoming a scrap right in the middle of the octagon and it didn’t happen.
“With that being said, when I’m in there I do have a different energy. I have a different feel in there. I feel strong and I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if he’s wanting that. I think it sounds nice to meet in the middle and just scrap but then you have a smart coach like Marc Montoya and they’re really going to just go out and [say] he look, we’ve got five rounds for this, let’s just slow things down a little bit, we’ll have our moments and we’ll try to do this. That’s how I would assume they would approach that.”
Onama never made it past the first round, but Garcia chalks that up to his own aggressive strategy where he was going for the kill immediately.
“I was just going to be on him the whole entire time because when you feel that energy in there, I just know that I felt superior in there,” Garcia said. “Even in the back, my hands felt strong, they felt heavy. I felt like I could touch anybody and they were going to fall.
“It’s a great feeling to have right before a fight, I’ll tell you that much. So we were able to go out there and dominate.”
In the days following his win, Garcia celebrated a job well done, only to see the attention being paid to the event shift dramatically.
Just two fights prior to Garcia’s win, Isaac Dulgarian was quickly submitted by Yadier del Valle via rear-naked choke in the opening round. The finish wasn’t anything unusual for the UFC, but the circumstances surrounding the fight were met with immediate scrutiny due to unusual betting activity where the odds on Dulgarian dropped after he was heavily favored to win and prop bets regarding a first-round finish were actually removed from several prominent sportsbooks.
It wasn’t long before the FBI opened an investigation into potential fight fixing allegations and the UFC released Dulgarian from his contract.
UFC CEO Dana White later revealed the company was made aware of the betting irregularities but spoke to Dulgarian and his attorney with the fighter claiming nothing strange was happening and he was prepared to go out and win the fight. When Dulgarian was submitted in rapid-fire fashion, White says the UFC reached out to the FBI directly to report what happened.
While none of this actually involved Garcia or his win, he still somehow felt the blowback because Onama trained at the same gym and under the same coaches as Dulgarian.
“It doesn’t really make it look good,” Garcia said. “I’m assuming this maybe happened a lot back in the day with boxing. It didn’t sit well with a lot of people. I know it doesn’t sit well with Dana [White]. I know it doesn’t sit well with people that are actually trying to win. It’s rough and it kind of sucks. I feel bad for the team. I even got a little bit of it [with people saying] ‘well Onama was supposed to win’ or ‘he didn’t really seem like he looked like he was trying to win’ or something like that. Just because you’re training at the same gym, you’re guilty by association.
“I’m like look, me and Onama were very close in the [betting] line. I was like a -135 [favorite] and he was like a +130 or 140 [underdog] or something like that and I’ve got a black eye to prove it. He tried to freaking get me.”
Marc Montoya, the head coach at Factory X in Colorado later denied he had any knowledge regarding possible fight-fixing, but said his team cut ties with Dulgarian after the allegations first surfaced.
By all accounts, Montoya is a well-respected and well-liked coach who works with numerous fighters competing in the UFC with a sterling reputation in the industry. Garcia actually vouched for Montoya based on all his interactions with the coach, but one of his fighters getting drawn into an FBI investigation over fight-fixing claims effectively touches anybody and everybody close to him.
“In my head, you can’t hate on the gym,” Garcia said. “You can’t hate on everybody else. Marc Montoya, all this stuff like that, I hear they kind of disassociated with Dulgarian and it doesn’t look good. Nothing’s proven with anybody yet. I hope they figure it out. It doesn’t look good for him. I just don’t know what good can come from it.
“That’s why I felt for Marc Montoya. I have a lot of respect for him, I really do. He’s always been really kind. I fought a couple of his guys before. No matter what, he’s always a straight up guy, at least to me. When he disassociated with Dulgarian, I don’t know if there’s a timeline on it. Like once all this comes to an end, maybe we can talk it out. I don’t know what happened but that’s what sucks. You become associated [with] that. This ain’t the mob. It’s hard to speculate when you don’t really know anything. You don’t know what to think. You don’t know what to believe. Most of that team, they’re gunning to win. They all win. They do really well. That’s why it’s weird coming from that gym.”
Back in 2022, the UFC became embroiled in a different situation involving fight-fixing allegations after Darrick Minner suffered a loss after the odds in his bout made a huge swing, which led to another investigation into possible fight-fixing.
The UFC not only released Minner from his contract, but his coach James Krause was effectively banned with promotion officials stating that any fighter associated with him would no longer be welcome to compete in the octagon. Flyweight fighter Jeff Molina, who counted Minner as a teammate and Krause as his coach, was also released and eventually suspended for three years by the Nevada Athletic Commission after he placed “significant” bets on that fight.
Minner also faced a 29 month suspension of his own from the commission.
The current investigation has largely centered around only Dulgarian, but Garcia understands that anybody close to the now-former UFC featherweight basically gets dragged down with him.
“It’s not fair to everybody else. It’s really not,” Garcia said. “I don’t know if Dulgarian is legit. Maybe somebody tipped him off. I don’t know. You’d want to stand up for a fighter. We are all so competitive, we all want to win. At the end of the day, you could be in this crazy situation where you’re in a bad way with some people and you just never know.
“I’m not going to excuse that. If you did that, you better have some pretty damn good excuse. You almost need to be like ‘he was going to kill me’ type situation because if not, yeah you should probably go to jail.”
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