When the cage lights up, we don't just watch history—we live it!
well back in 2015 when he was still that fresh-faced kid tearing it up in the welterweight division down here i remember watching that stream on my phone in the back of the lorry between deliveries, just some dimly lit garage down the newcastle outskirts — signal kept cutting out like you do on a bad run in town, so i had to refresh every ten seconds just to see if du plessis had put someone to sleep again. then he did. that first ko against john hotchner, where he just walked forward with that look in his eyes like he’d already decided how it was gonna end before the opening bell… ended with hotchner catching an elbow that sounded like a car door slamming shut. even on that dodgy phone feed it felt like something you wanna tell your grandkids one day, like when you catch a fish so heavy you’re still bragging about it twenty years later.
Remember when the grass was greener 🌱
shit, Ultra88 just dropped that garage fishing story and now i’m stuck in traffic outside of glasgow central with the radio cutting in and out like some 2008 download stream, yeah? radio dj’s half cut off mid-sentence cos some other prick’s singing along full volume in the back seat and here i am glued to my cracked phone screen watching dricus just toy with that poor bastard like he’s a set of pads, then BAM—elbow like thunder, crowd losing their damn minds, me banging my hands on the steering wheel so hard i nearly shunted the car in front
remember that welterweight brawl in pretoria where dricus got two opponents in one night? friday then saturday, back-to-back. first one he broke down like furniture, then the second bloke comes out with this ‘we’re gonna take it to points’ grin and dricus just sneers and puts him away with that same walk-forward murder he loves. guy beside me at the bar dropped his pint and started chanting in afrikaans and i thought ‘yeah, this is why we pay for those rusty beer cans and sticky floors’. crowd was going mental and you could feel the air in that hall vibrate, like standing too close to a speaker stack at a festival. still get goosebumps thinking about it
Been here longer than some have followed.
Man, these early fights feel like watching a lion cub learn to stalk. Same intent, same forward pressure, but the strikes? They’re textbook now compared to the raw power that just steamrolled everyone back then. That Pretoria run was all about overwhelming will—walk forward and smash, no mercy, no quarter asked or given. Fast forward to today, it’s the same walk forward but the precision? Absolute surgical stuff. You see the setups now, the feints, the way he draws the counter and *then* unloads. That’s not just growth—that’s evolution into something scarier because he’s learned how to kill you without breaking a sweat.
Do the math before you argue.
Bloody hell, lads, you're all acting like Dricus invented elbows on demand—that first Hotchner KO wasn't some divine right from the welterweight heavens, it was brutal overconfidence by a can that got caught mid-turn. Yeah, sure, he walked through him like a Sunday stroll, but Hotchner's chin had more chinks than a Newcastle terrace roof during a storm and Dricus just served up a reminder why walking forward works wonders when your opponent's already mentally checked out. And ZoeUltra, back-to-back Pretoria? Don't get me started—two fights in two days sounds macho until you factor in Dricus' gas tank being fuller than a team talk where the gaffer's guaranteed to start every starter. That 'we're gonna take it to points' lad must've been brave or daft, probably both, but let's be real: once Dricus sets that forward pressure like a steamroller, the script writes itself. Still, credit where it's due, he's turned that walk-forward into an art form tighter than a drum skin, not just raw power anymore.
Numbers > vibes.
Hell yeah, let me take you back to 2016 when I saw Dricus absolutely wreck some guy named Muller in Cape Town on a Friday night, then I turned around and did the same damn thing the next night for charity event in Joburg just cos the promoter begged him—turns out the dude was hungover AF and still cooked him in round 2 like it was a microwaved McDonald’s burger 🍔🔥. Watched that whole thing between shifts at my taco truck, greasy phone screen reflecting the smell of carnitas, and by the third elbow I was laughing so hard I spilled hot sauce on my keyboard. That’s not fighting, that’s neighborhood theater with higher stakes—classic Du Plessis, turning “two days, two knockouts” into a lifestyle brand before it was cool. Still tell the story every time someone calls him ‘lucky’—cue eye-roll and another round of beers 🍻🤣