Ahavat Hashem Gordon kept his unbeaten record intact on Monday night, outlasting Brazilian veteran John Lineker over a bruising three rounds to win a unanimous decision in the main event of GFN 1: Israel vs. The World at Tel Aviv's Menora Mivtachim Arena.
The win pushed the 20-year-old Muay Thai fighter to 13-0 as a professional, and it came against the sternest test of his young career: Lineker, a former UFC and ONE Championship title contender nicknamed "Hands of Stone," arrived in Israel with a combat-sports record of 37 wins and 11 losses and a reputation for heavy hands.
It showed early. Lineker opened the fight the stronger man, working the body with hard, accurate punches that drew blood from Gordon inside the first round, according to ONE's ringside account of the bout.
Gordon regrouped in the second, and the fight's momentum swung as Lineker began to tire and struggled to keep up the pace he had set at the opening bell. The Israeli took control of the round as his more experienced opponent's work rate dropped off.
The third and final round turned into the kind of fight Gordon's unbeaten record had not yet been tested by: a genuinely tight, draining exchange in which, by ONE's telling, the Israeli came close to suffering the first defeat of his career before the horn sounded.
When the scorecards were read, all three judges sided with Gordon. He was visibly emotional in the aftermath, and his older brother Ruach Hashem Gordon — himself a Thai boxer and part of the same fighting family — was seen moved to tears at ringside.
The bout capped a card built around the Gordon name. GFN 1 featured a triple main event, with Ruach Hashem Gordon facing Maximus Bejenuta and a third brother, Kibedy Gordon, taking on Jose Alberto Quiñonez, before Ahavat Hashem closed the night against Lineker.
Gordon, born in Shiloh in 2006 to an American father and a Hong Kong-born mother, fights under one of the more distinctive names in world combat sports — Hebrew for "Love of God" — a naming choice shared by his brothers that has made the family a talking point well beyond the ring.
For Lineker, this was a rare venture into pure Muay Thai rules after a long career built mainly in mixed martial arts, where he held the ONE bantamweight world title and fought for years on the UFC roster. The step into a Thai-boxing ring in Tel Aviv, against a fighter more than a decade his junior, was framed locally as exactly the kind of crossover test that could have derailed Gordon's perfect record.
Instead, the Israeli crowd that filled the arena got the outcome it came for, and Gordon's win adds another high-profile scalp to a resume that has already included Turkish and Lithuanian opponents earlier this year on his way to a 13-0 start.
