62 year old man has MMA fight with much younger opponent!

Professional MMA is no place for a 62 yr. old man; no athletic commission would allow it.

But Alaska is still a bit like the wild wild west and at AK Beatdown 9, Wayne Smallwood stepped into the ring for the first and only time against a much younger opponent.

It all took place at an amateur MMA event called “AK Beatdown” in Alaska, which serves as a fundraiser for the Juneau Combat Sports Academy.

Few predicted 62-year-old Wayne Smallwood would make it through the first round, let alone win the fight. So when he TKO’d his 24-year-old opponent, Weeg Hewson, with an impressive spinning backfist to the jaw the stunned crowd erupted.

Both fighters seemed winded with little left in the tank after the first minute of the bout, but the 62-year-old Smallwood somehow mustered up the energy to land the perfect strike, and that was enough to end the fight.

Wayne Smallwood was born in Juneau in 1950 and spent most of his childhood – from age two to 16, off and on – in the Juneau Children’s Home. He was also in the Minfield Home and School for a few months, and in a home in Washington for about two years when he was seven or eight.

“My mom had a hard time trying to raise four kids back in the 50s,” he said. The home in Seattle is where he learned to fight.

“A bully used to beat me up all the time,” he said. “He used to beat me up just for something to do. Finally one day I beat him … after that, I said ‘I’m going to start learning martial arts.’”

After he returned to Juneau, his uncle, Dan Gore, began teaching him the basics of hand-to-hand combat. Gore learned hand-to-hand combat in the Korean war, Smallwood said, and was an expert in jiu-jitsu.

A teacher, Bernie Tackett, taught him boxing.