For about two days this week, the whole internet asked the same furious question: how is Merab Dvalishvili the one sitting in a cell when Usman Nurmagomedov is the man who hit him? The answer wasn't what the outrage machine expected. The UAE buried Nurmagomedov.
As of Friday, an Abu Dhabi court sentenced Nurmagomedov and others to six months in prison, hit them with heavy fines, and ordered them deported once the sentences are served. Dvalishvili and his friend Saba Lazishvili were fined and sent on their way, roughly $13,600 each, no jail. Dvalishvili was released from a detention center early Friday morning and is expected to still wrestle Marlon Moraes at the RAF event this weekend. The court looked at who ambushed whom and ruled accordingly.
For about 44 to 48 hours, a blameless man sat in detention while nobody knew what would happen next. That looked terrible, and people were right to be bothered by it. But the detention was standard procedure for a public brawl: this was a hotel altercation caught on camera, involving around ten people, and everyone present got swept up and questioned. According to Ariel Helwani, that included Dvalishvili and Lazishvili, even though Dvalishvili wasn't pressing charges. That's how public altercations get handled there. It's a fair complaint about process, but the final ruling blew up the idea that authorities were sheltering the attacker.
The only people who actually walked away clean are the two who got jumped.
Nurmagomedov instigated this. The footage shows a group approaching Dvalishvili from behind while he was recording an interview. One man steps up to speak to him, throws the first strike, and his companions pile in. Dvalishvili described it himself afterward: "I was doing an interview for RAF in the hotel lobby and Usman and his buddies came up from behind and started punching me and my young friend. Security was holding me. They kept kicking us when we were down like losers." Six on two, a man and his young friend against a crowd. That's a coordinated ambush with a numbers advantage, and the people who organized it should pay.
Islam Makhachev tried to hand everyone a reason to shrug, writing that "what happened today was started by Merab in his own homeland when he took it upon himself to hit a guest and insult his mother," pointing back to a July incident in Georgia. That's context. A confrontation months earlier doesn't license six men to jump one guy during a press hit. You could tell how thin the excuse was by the fact that even Nurmagomedov's own manager, Ali Abdelaziz, called the attack unacceptable, and fighters across the sport, Topuria, Strickland, Cormier, lined up to condemn it while Makhachev stood alone stretching for a justification.
Meanwhile Zviad Lazishvili, the ex-UFC fighter whose brother Saba got caught in this, spent Thursday pleading for help, saying both men were "in jail up until now" and might sit for 48 hours before a judge decided anything. He thought it was unfair, and from where he stood it felt that way. The judge decided, and the decision landed on the right necks.
Spare me the idea that the system failed Dvalishvili. The system took the men who threw the first punches and gave them time behind bars and a one-way trip out of the country. The man they attacked is fined, free, and still fighting this weekend. Usman Nurmagomedov wanted to make a statement with a crowd at his back. He made one. Now he's got six months to think it over.
