Fixed? Hong Man Choi Stirs Up More Controversy

At the tail end of last year it was reported that South Korean fighter Hong Man Choi was in trouble with the nation's authorities over an unpaid debt.

An arrest warrant was issued for the "Techno Goliath" after he was accused of borrowing 710,000 HKD ($92,000) from a former associate to help him buy his girlfriend watches before later refusing all acknowledgement of receiving those funds. He then ignored multiple demands to hand himself in for questioning and had a series of lawsuits filed against his name. But, Hong Man Choi roundly ignored them.

With the authorities baying for the 7-foot-2ins giant's blood, his scheduled appearance for ROAD FC's Christmas show was in doubt. However, Hong Man Choi was able to compete in the organisation's inaugural event in China—beating little-known Chinese fighter Quanchao Luo, who now owns a record of 0-1.

Hong Man Choi's fight against Luo was in the quarter finals of ROAD FC's openweight tournament. After minutes of flailing arm punches and stalling against the cage, assigned referee Herb Dean went to break up and restart the action. However, Luo had other ideas and simply chose not to comply, appearing to refuse to adhere with Dean's restart. The fight was ruled in the Korean's favour—a TKO win by way of retirement of his opponent.

Securing the Techno Goliath's signature was a massive coup for ROAD FC as they attempt to imprint their status among other top East Asian promotions such as ONE FC and Rizin FF. After all, promotions such as Pride and K1 also saw fit to use Hong Man Choi against top-class fighters including the likes of Fedor Emelianenko, Mirko Cro Cop, Badr Hary, Remy Bonjasky, Jerome Le Banner and Semmy Schilt. Freak show fights have always been big bucks in kickboxing and MMA.

Four months on, the openweight tournament's semi finals took place in Beijing, China. It was Hong Man Choi's chance to shine once again. This round's opponent? A tubby Chinese brawler named Aorigele who beat the brakes off Kim Jae-Hun in the first round and refused to relent even after the fight had been waived off by the referee.

Standing a foot shorter than his foe and weighing in at over 300lbs, Aorigele found early success against the Techno Goliath. It wasn't pretty, with the wide, winging shots of the Chinese Aorigele being thrown with enough vigour to trouble the giant.

The aggression of Aorigele was paying dividends. However, the fight promptly ended in strange circumstances as the pair were once again fighting against the cage following the referee's earlier break in action. The aggressor in Aorigele was once again getting the better of his bigger opponent, before a missed knee and an innocuous glancing blow led the Chinaman to collapse unsettlingly as if he were knocked out.

With confusing finishes in recent fights such as in Bellator's bout between Kimbo Slice and Dada 5000, which could have easily been a fatal ending to that particular contest with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to say if the knockdown was genuine or not. Also, it's rather uncomfortable to say if a fighter threw a fight. But, it does look like Aorigele fell down on his own accord and that Hong Man Choi "finishes" the fight with some sloppy blows to his opponent's chest.

The replays provided by ROAD FC, rather inexplicably, only showed the ending of the contest once and at the worst possible camera angle to tell what had exactly happened. This finish, in addition to Hong Man Choi's first outing in the openweight tournament, which ended with his opponent bizarrely retiring in the middle of the fight for no reason whatsoever, reeks of fishiness. We'll let you decide what went on in both fights – ROAD FC is leaving us to our own devices, anyway.

Hong Man Choi's fighting career—coupled with his questionable exploits outside of combat sports, which has also seen him arrested for assaulting a woman over an unpaid bar tab—has been farcical since its inception and ROAD FC's latest event shows no sign of that changing any time soon.