UFC Fight Night 79 results: Mike De La Torre takes split from Yui Chul Nam

Mike De La Torre

SEOUL – Mike De La Torre battered and bloodied Yui Chul Nam for three full rounds, but just couldn’t put him away.

With a cut over one eye and the other swollen shut, Nam (18-6-1 MMA, 1-2 UFC) kept marching gamely forward, but De La Torre (14-5 MMA, 2-2 UFC) consistently beat him to the punch and stonewalled his many takedown attempts, earning De La Torre the split-decision victory by scores of 29-28, 28-29 and 29-28.

The featherweight bout was part of the preliminary card of today’s UFC Fight Night 79 event at Olympic Gymnastics Arena in Seoul. It streamed on UFC Fight Pass.

A reliable pattern emerged early in this fight, and it then kept repeating itself throughout all three rounds. Nam came wading into De La Torre behind big, looping hooks, only to catch the shorter, quicker punches from De La Torre on his face instead. With Nam woozy from punches, he tried to swing his way into a clinch up against the fence and then worked for takedowns from there.

The problem with this strategy, at least for Nam, was that he wound up taking considerable damage in the punch exchanges, and never did bring the fight to the floor, as De La Torre shut down one takedown attempt after another.

After one of the first exchanges, Nam’s left eye was cut and bleeding. By the time they’d repeated the same script over and over into the third, his right eye bulged out in one swollen mass.

Still, Nam kept coming forward, throwing looping haymakers and trying for takedowns right up until the final seconds. But De La Torre seemed to realize he was in no danger of being put on his back and instead coasted to the finish against a damaged opponent who simply refused to fall. That even one judge scored the bout for Nam was something of a surprise, but it still added up to a win for De La Torre in the end.

De La Torre’s victory is the first since his TKO loss to Maximo Blanco in July. Nam has now lost two straight.

Up-to-the-minute UFC Fight Night 79 results include:

• Mike De La Torre def. Yui Chul Nam via split decision (29-28, 28-29, 29-28)
• Tae Hyun Bang def. Leo Kuntz via split decision (28-29, 29-28, 29-28)
• Seo Hee Ham def. Cortney Casey via unanimous decision (29-28, 29-28, 29-28)
• Fredy Serrano def. Yao Zhikui via TKO (arm injury) – Round 1, 0:44
• Marco Beltran def. Ning Guangyou via split decision (29-28, 28-29, 29-28)
• Dominique Steele def. Dong Hyun Kim via knockout (slam) – Round 3, 0:27

For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 79, check out the UFC Events section of the site.

(MMAjunkie’s John Morgan contributed to this report on site in South Korea.)