Last night at Colosseum Combat 45, the strangest set of moments in MMA history took place. MMA Veterans Travis Fulton and Jonathan Ivey battled it out in the cage when Ivey started to have a heart attack. The attack turned out to be faked and he used it to get a knockdown only to tap out himself to save his opponent from more damage. It was a strange incident that became a meme and went viral in a matter of days.

Jonathan Ivey:
“Back in ’98 when I made my debut, it was on a HOOKnSHOOT card back when that was a big deal,” Ivey said. “I was on the undercard, and Travis Fulton was the main event that night. From then on, I always looked up to him. I got him tattooed on my leg maybe 10 years ago. I based my career on his, just how active he was, how he would always go in and fight guys in their hometowns. He was just that guy.”

Jonathan Ivey:
“He was a warrior to me. I wasn’t able to win some of the fights he won. He was always a little bit better than me. I was kind of like the poor man’s Travis Fulton, but I was OK with that. The crowd went ‘oooh!’”

Jonathan Ivey:
“So I acted like it hurt me. I’ve seen people say I was faking a heart attack, or I was disrespecting him by doing that, but that wasn’t what I was doing. I like having fun in there. I’ve done stuff like that in 50 or 60 of my fights. I like playing it up for the crowd.”

Jonathan Ivey:
“After the second left, his eyes rolled back in his head,” Ivey said. “I turned to the ref and said, ‘OK, he’s done ref.’ The ref said, ‘No he’s not. Keep fighting.’ So I switch it up and throw a couple straight rights, thinking he’s fixing to jump in there. Then Travis comes back to, and he’s not defending himself but he switches his hips.”

Jonathan Ivey:
“I moved around and put my knee on his head, and then I started throwing some real light rights hands. He’s not defending himself. He’s defenseless. So I say to the ref, ‘Come on, this is it.’ And the ref says, ‘Keep fighting.’”

Jonathan Ivey:
“If this had been some guy who’d been a real jerk to me, I’d have kept hitting him,” Ivey said. “But this was Travis Fulton, ‘The Ironman.’ So I hit him a couple more times, and I looked at the ref like, don’t make me keep hitting him. But the ref was adamant. So I stood up and backed away. The ref said, ‘What are you doing?’ I told him that if he wasn’t going to stop it, I would.”

Jonathan Ivey:
“It was a split-second call,” Ivey said. “I’m just not going to stand there and hit Travis Fulton unnecessarily. I’d already hit him 15 or 20 times, and he wasn’t throwing anything back. He was defenseless.”

Travis Fulton:
“Would Ivey have finished me? Would I have come back and won the fight in the second or the third round? After watching the fight I think either of those were a possibility. It wasn’t as if I was unconscious and the referee wasn’t intervening so Ivey showed me mercy and handed me the victory.”

Travis Fulton:
“I still have difficulty accepting the fact that I am another fighter’s hero,” Fulton wrote. “Did I want to beat my fighting hero Dan Severn? Absolutely. But I never put any thought into how I would feel in the moment when I’m on the brink of victory. You know what I realized? In the exact same scenario as last weekend…I couldn’t (expletive) do it! It was an emotional blow that I had never put any thought into.”

Travis Fulton:
“In my first 275 or so mma fights I was only cut open twice,” Fulton wrote. “I was dropped just three times and I was never knocked out. In my last 30 or so mma fights I’ve been cut 4 times, dropped several times and I was knocked out for the first time in my fighting career.”

Jonathan Ivey:
“I’m OK with my decision,” Ivey said. “It cost me the title, and it cost me the win, but I don’t mind that. I’ve lost lots of fights. Obviously I always want to win, but it’s not worth that if it means I have to keep hitting my hero that way. They can have that title. I don’t mind.”