The ABA in Mt. Eden, Auckland, was packed to capacity on February 27th, despite the stifling heat. With 15 fights on the card from C to A Class, the display of skill from the exponents made the perspiration worthwhile. I was there to shoot the event for ICNZ MMA. Thanks to ICNZ for inviting me along again, there’s always something new to shoot, and it’s great to see the fighters moving up in class and displaying greater skills with each event. I would like to also mention that they raised several hundred dollars for the Spinal Unit in Otara from the generosity of the crowd. Check out a small selection of highlight shots, as well as fight results from the event after the jump (courtesy of NZFighters.com), and then visit The Official ICNZ Website for full photographic coverage, with hundreds, and I mean hundreds of pictures of the pain.

It was a blisteringly hot on February 27th, despite being allegedly the second to last day of Summer, adding to the heat inside Crank’s Bar in Albany, north of Auckland.

With all doors and windows of the venue open, the bar’s darkened interior, along with the absence of a ring, only added to the atmosphere of the fights.

There were fifteen novice and amateur fights overall, and despite an engagement back in Auckland City to cover the the MMA (above), I faced the two-way gridlock on the Auckland Harbour Bridge to at least get this fast-paced fight. The novice fights are supposed to be “friendly” matches, during which fighters aren’t supposed to be trying to knock each other out, but the pace and ferocity of these two caused promoter, head coach and, on the day, ring announcer, to give at least one of them a stern warning. It’s the first time I’ve heard fighters being told off by the ring announcer. More pictures after the jump …

With 8 Fights on the Card for this event, and several of them ending in KOs or TKOs, the action was back to back, with a revolving door for the brand new ring that was having its debut at the YMCA. Don’t forget to contact us on 021-352-436 for the whole set of High Resolution Images from each fight. Highlights Gallery after the jump …

Philip Lam Lee Gar’s Steve Hahm and ETK’s Sefa Fue pose at the weigh-in for their title fight rematch on Saturday night, February 20th at the YMCA, Auckland. Their fight is just one of the top ranked fights on the card for the Philip Lam Lee Gar event. Some of the top fighters from Philip Lam Lee Gar are up against fighters from around New Zealand and Eastern Europe.

Head trainer at Philip Lam Lee Gar, Eddie Tongalahi, holds the pads for Slava Alexeichik as he trains for his Main Event fight against Slovakia’s Erik Kosztanko, while other fighters watch.

Fightshots went along to the final training sessions at Philip Lam Lee Gar in Auckland City, as some of the fighters completed their training programs for the event.

Click below to see more images from their training sessions.

Here’s the final of our series of the Top 50 Fight Images of 2009 … This time it’s the Top 20 21 Action Shots of the Year. Remember ladies and gents, they’re here not because of the importance of the fight or fighters, the shots represent something iconic about the year’s fights, they capture mean blows, knockouts or the like, or in the case of the above image, they’re just WEIRD. The full 21 shots are after the jump …

Here’s Part 3 of the Fightshots.com Top 50 Images of 2009, with 10 favourite images from the fight decisions. These aren’t the best fights, they were chosen for various elements that captured a certain kind of drama from the events of the year, looking through what there was to choose from, I wish we’d been doing a Top 1000 to fit all of the pictures. In no particular order, the 10 images are after the jump:

We had a huge year for fighting sports during 2009, with thousands of moments of outside any of the fights that took place. Choosing our favourite shots was not easy, with a gigantic back catalogue of all kinds of in between pictures, but we hope we’ve summed up some of the highlights of the year with these ten pictures. Don’t forget, the shots that we couldn’t include have no bearing on the merits of the people in them, or the events that were taking place (there were over a hundred before they were narrowed down), but as we only had space for 10 in the overall 50, they’re just a taste of the best examples of the kinds of moments that take place before, after and around a fight match, and that capture the different kinds of drama that are present at the events. The 10 Images are after the jump …

This is the first part of a series of our favourite images from 2009, to be divided up into categories, from our favourite 10 Ring Girl Images, Injuries, Behind The Scenes and the Action Shots themselves.

While we’re dedicated to bringing you the best action shots available from Auckland Fight Events, we can’t ignore the fact that the mere appearance of a girl holding a card with a number on it causes
grown men in the audience to shriek like banshees, as well as the fact that the most viewed images on our Photoshelter.com account were of ring girls, we thought we’d start the series with 10 of
our favourite shots of the unsung heroes of the ring, those ladies who dare to step up and be howled at.

In no particular order, here they are, after the jump.

We’ve got full pictorial coverage coming soon from ETK’s huge fight night from this past weekend. That’s 3 out of 3 victories for New Zealand. That’s one international and two World WKBF Titles for ETK. We’ve got more than 150 shots from this show coming up …

UPDATE: We’ve got the full gallery online now, click the jump to see!