5 athletes from other sports who fought in MMA

#4 Johnnie Morton

Plenty of former NFL players have made their way into MMA, usually with mixed results. Brendan Schaub managed to make it into the top ten at Heavyweight before a series of knockout losses ruined him, while the likes of Marcus Jones and Wes Shivers saw much less success.

And well, you’d need much more room than this to write about Bob Sapp’s fascinating MMA career. But one former NFL player who did about as badly as it gets in MMA was Johnnie Morton.

Morton had seen a long and successful NFL career as a wide receiver and played for 12 seasons in the league with the Detroit Lions, Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers. He’d only been retired from an active NFL career for two years when he stepped into the world of MMA, and if I’m honest, I don’t have a clue what made him decide to go on that career path.

At any rate, it didn’t last very long. Morton was matched with kickboxer Bernard Ackah at K-1’s debut MMA show in the US – Dynamite USA – and although Ackah had only one MMA fight on his ledger, he clearly had a lot more experience in martial arts than Morton. Morton came out and almost got a takedown, but seconds later, Ackah knocked him stiff with a right hand and the fight was over in 38 seconds.

Morton was knocked out so badly that he had to be removed from the ring on a stretcher, wearing a neck brace. And then things went from bad to worse when he failed a post-fight test for steroids. Unsurprisingly, his brief MMA career was over.