Ray “All Business” Wood made an impressive debut with the national-level Bellator mixed martial arts promotion Friday night, scoring a first-round knockout of Chris “Lionheart” Jones on the undercard of Bellator 151 at the WinStar Resort and Casino in Thackerville, Oklahoma.
The fight was broadcast via live streaming at spiketv.com.
“It felt great, that’s for sure,” said Wood while making the five-hour drive back to his current home in Amarillo, Texas, after the fight. “It’s weird, but every time I step in there I feel a little more confident, a little more calm, and everything just worked perfectly. It was crazy.”
Wood, a 26-year-old Bucksport High School graduate and former New England Fights MMA featherweight champion, dominated Jones from the outset of the scheduled three-round bout, which was fought at a catchweight of 150 pounds after Jones weighed in 7.4 pounds over the originally scheduled 145-pound featherweight limit.
Wood weighed in at 145.4 pounds.
“When you get a guy who knows about a weight for eight weeks, he has a lot of time to prepare for that and it says a lot about a person because if they’re not disciplined about making weight what else are they not disciplined about?,” said Wood
“In a way it gave me a boost of confidence. I wasn’t worried about the extra weight I was giving up, I just knew he wasn’t working as hard as I was.”
Wood began the fight by landing a succession of effective kicks, with one kick to the liver leaving Jones in trouble barely a minute into the opening round.
“I wanted to let my hands go, I’ve been working on my striking quite a bit,” said Wood. “But my kicks are scary, I feel, and if I set the tone with my kicks it opens up opportunities for my hands.”
Jones, a 34-year-old left-hander from Dallas, Texas, seemingly got a chance to regroup when the fight was halted temporarily after a borderline kick by Wood was ruled an unintentional low blow.
But little changed after the fighters resumed their combat a moment later.
Jones briefly pinned Wood against the cage wall, but Wood quickly returned the fight toward the center of the cage and then used a side kick followed immediately by a spinning back fist to the jaw to send Jones to the canvas and end the fight at 3:10 of the five-minute round.
“He was a southpaw, the first southpaw I’ve fought,” said Wood. “So any attacks from the right side were going to land pretty well flush. I was going to throw a lot of hands and a lot of right kicks and I could tell that first body kick I threw hurt him quite bad.
“I knew after that first body shot he’d be worried about being hit again, and that opened it up for the spinning back fist.”
Wood, who trains at Nick’s Fight Club in Amarillo but remains affiliated with Young’s MMA in Bangor, improved his professional record to 7-1 while Jones fell to 10-3 overall, 3-2 in Bellator bouts.
