Phantom Tap, Flying Mouthpiece: LFA 243's Wild Figueroa Comeback

Lorenzo Figueroa's win over Helton Jose at LFA 243 might be the single most ridiculous comeback you'll watch this month, and the chaos started with a referee's whistle that should never have blown. Jose had Figueroa hurt and locked in a lifting guillotine against the cage, but Figueroa never looked in genuine trouble — and the open-handed slap he put on Jose's shoulder read more like flailing than a tap.

Referee David Shurley saw it differently, jumped in, and waved it off. Figueroa protested on the spot. After a lengthy cageside huddle, officials reversed the call and ordered the fight restarted — a rare enough outcome that it's worth pausing on. You almost never see a submission stoppage un-rung mid-event.

The Part Nobody Scripted

Then it got better. Jose cracked Figueroa a second time, swapped the choke for ground-and-pound, and again couldn't close. Figueroa recovered, walked him down, and landed a left so clean it launched Jose's mouthpiece across the cage. He poured it on until Jose was folded on his hands and knees, and this time the stoppage stuck. Was every call textbook? Not remotely. But it was a blast.

LFA 243 wasn't the only officiating adventure this week. In the Kevin Fernandez vs. Enrique Pacheco bout, referee Kane Vandal physically stepped in and made contact with both men — then backed off and let them continue. Pacheco survived a head kick, fought back, and was eventually put away by a knee, but the half-stoppage could have ended things prematurely either direction.

Elsewhere on the global circuit, Joe "Cutthroat" Thurrott and Mason Hartshorn both logged clean knockouts, and Vinicius Rieger restored order at Teuto Fight 8 with a precise finishing shot after a genuinely chaotic scramble. In California, amateur lightweight Joe Graydon switched Joaquin Jackman's lights off in an instant.

The highlight reel also delivered a lesson in the dangers of imitation. Someone, somewhere, keeps trying to fight like King Green — the 36-18-1 veteran who built a 10-submission, 13-KO career on controlled chaos. For everyone else, dropping your hands mid-exchange ends badly, as Kinji Oruben learned when Takuya Kuramoto dropped a right hand the second his guard slipped at a DEEP card in Shizuoka.

Green, for the record, is unranked and coming off a first-round TKO loss to Esteban Ribovics, proof that even the originator can't always pull off the originator's act. The takeaway from a week like this: keep your hands up, don't slap the mat unless you mean it, and never assume a stoppage is final until the cage door opens.