Brandon Halsey: ‘This Belt Isn’t Leaving Me for a Long Time’

For Bellator middleweight Brandon Halsey, 2014 couldn’t have gone any better.

After starting off the year by winning the promotion’s middleweight tournament, Halsey dethroned reigning champion Alexander Shlemenko in just 35 seconds to claim his first major championship.

Halsey was confident he could win the bout due to his familiarity with Shlemenko, but didn’t think it was going to end so quickly.

“I’d trained with Shlemenko quite a bit,” said Halsey. “He used to come into the gym at Ultimate Fitness to work out. So I kind of had a feel for him. We kind of predicted the fight would go that way.

“Did we think it would end in 35 seconds? Probably not. We thought it would stretch out a bit more…