Ryan Bader (photo via Bellator)

By FCF Staff

Ryan Bader quickly floored Fedor Emelianenko with a lead, left hook last night at Bellator 214, and “Darth” says he envisioned finishing the legend with the technique.

Bader faced Emelianenko in the finals of Bellator’s heavyweight grand-prix, and moments into the bout, he dropped the star with a booming hook. After Bader landed a couple more shots the fight was stopped.

After the event, the light-heavyweight and heavyweight champion had this to say about his use of the lead, left hook (quote via MMA Fighting):

“You know what? I saw that moment,” Bader said. “And you can ask my team, we practiced that moment a lot. I saw that punch was going to do it. You can’t see his right hand because he throws from his hip. He’s very hard to see, he throws hard. But in doing so, you leave yourself exposed. And we felt that he was going to respect my wrestling a lot, and I could put one up top. If you look through any of the footage on the Countdown shows and all of that kind of stuff, we were practicing that punch the whole time. Throwing a jab, getting our distance, and then feinting and throwing that left hook, and we knew he’d be there.

“That’s a hard punch right there. He went down, and I saw that over and over again already, so it just kinda played out how we saw it.”

With the victory, Bader extended his winning streak to 7 and he moved his overall record to 27-5.