Chris Duncan earned another memorable win as he submitted Terrance McKinney amid a tense first round of their lightweight bout at UFC 323 in Las Vegas.
After being stunned multiple times by McKinney’s strikes, Scotland’s Duncan dropped the American with an elbow before taking control on the ground.
With noise levels inside the T-Mobile Arena rising, Duncan submitted McKinney with an anaconda choke for his fourth straight UFC win.
It comes just four months after Duncan’s brutal back-and-forth victory over Poland’s Mateusz Rebecki in a fight-of-the-year contender.
After beating McKinney, Duncan referenced his late mother in his post-fight interview.
In 2014, a day before Duncan’s amateur debut, his mother Elaine was murdered by her boyfriend James Morley, who was jailed for life for the crime.
“I lost my mother on the first ever MMA fight I had, on the day of the weigh-ins she died. And I still went ahead and fought,” said Duncan.
“That is heart. You cannot teach heart.”
Duncan’s triumph was his sixth in seven UFC fights since his debut in 2023 – and could see him break into the top 15 of the lightweight rankings for the first time.
The main event saw Russia’s Petr Yan end Georgian Merab Dvalishvili’s reign as bantamweight champion, while Myanmar’s Joshua Van beat Brazil’s Alexandre Pantoja in the co-main to claim the flyweight title.