Polaris 40: Tonon-McNally’s Biggest Rematch

Garry Tonon hasn’t competed in a straight no-gi grappling match since before the pandemic cut off his old competition schedule for good. In between, he went 9-2 in MMA for ONE Championship, got released from the roster in April 2026 along with four other fighters, and watched the sport he used to dominate move on without him. Polaris is putting him right back in front of the one grappler who’s beaten him worse than anyone: Sam McNally, the then-unseeded Irishman who shut him out at the 2022 ADCC World Championships in Las Vegas. That result still gets replayed as one of the biggest first-round shocks ADCC has produced. Polaris 40 runs it back on November 21, with an actual belt attached this time.

The Upset That Still Gets Replayed

Sam McNally walked into the Thomas & Mack Center on September 17, 2022, as the lowest seed in the 66kg bracket. Garry Tonon walked in as the number one seed, a Danaher Death Squad name with a reputation for finding scrambles and finishing them. Six minutes later, McNally had both hooks in on Tonon’s back with an arm trapped, and the judges handed him a 3-0 decision. No submission, no flash finish — just a grinding, patient takedown of a grappler nobody thought could be out-scrambled.

McNally didn’t fall out of a tree to get there. He’d taken gold at the ADCC European Trials that year, finishing four of six opponents on the way, and added a bronze at the IBJJF European Open for good measure. The seeding undersold him. Tonon’s side would point out afterward that the loss came on points, not a finish, and that the rematch clock had been running in his head ever since. The bout is still logged on Tapology as one of the tournament’s defining results, and it’s the kind of loss that follows a competitor around for years, not months.

Where Tonon Disappeared To

After the ADCC loss, Tonon mostly stopped showing up in jiu-jitsu brackets and leaned into the MMA run he’d already started with ONE Championship. It went well for a while — he finished Shamil Gasanov with a kneebar in July 2023, which is about as on-brand as a finish gets for a leg lock specialist moving into cage fighting. Gasanov got him back, though, winning a unanimous decision rematch in August 2025. That loss turned out to be Tonon’s last appearance under the ONE banner. In April 2026, the promotion released him along with four other fighters as part of a broader round of roster cuts, a move BJJ Eastern Europe covered as the end of nearly a decade with the organization.

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss: Tonon going back to grappling isn’t really a comeback story about chasing glory. It’s closer to a fighter whose other door just closed finding the fastest way back to relevance. Nobody doubts he can still move. The question is whether four years away from a discipline that punishes rust more than almost any combat sport leaves him sharp enough to beat the one guy who already solved him once.

McNally Never Left

While Tonon was trading his gi for four-ounce gloves, McNally stayed on the European no-gi circuit, piling up the kind of record that doesn’t make international headlines but keeps a competitor sharp: 34 wins against 27 losses across his career, 16 of those wins by submission. That’s not a gatekeeper’s resume. It’s a working grappler’s resume — somebody who takes hard matches often enough that a few of them were always going to go the other way. The Tonon win is the one everyone remembers, but it wasn’t a fluke built on one good night; it was the best result yet from a fighter who was already finishing people at a high rate.

McNally lost in the quarterfinals to Josh Cisneros a few days after beating Tonon, which is worth remembering too. He’s not unbeatable. He’s a black belt out of East Coast Jiu-Jitsu Academy in Dublin, coached by Darragh O’Conaill — a second-degree black belt under Saulo and Xande Ribeiro, a four-time IBJJF European champion himself, and one of the sharper instructors on the continent. That lineage matters more than it looks on paper. ECJJA has built a reputation as one of Europe’s strongest competition programs specifically because O’Conaill drills live scramble situations relentlessly, and McNally’s back-take on Tonon in 2022 looked exactly like a credit to that training rather than a lucky scramble. Polaris is betting that whatever produced it is repeatable on a bigger stage, in front of a bigger audience, for an actual title instead of a bracket seed.

What’s Actually at Stake on November 21

Southampton Central Hall has hosted Polaris events for years, and this one carries more weight than the usual card. The Polaris Lightweight Championship is on the line, which means this isn’t a superfight exhibition the way their first meeting technically wasn’t a Polaris bout at all — the 2022 match happened under ADCC’s banner, not Polaris’s. This is the promotion’s own belt, on its own mats, broadcast live on FloGrappling to an audience that has grown considerably since Polaris struck its newer broadcast partnership this year.

For Polaris, booking Tonon is a real swing. He’s still one of the most recognizable names to cross over between jiu-jitsu and MMA, and a win over McNally puts him right back in the no-gi title conversation at a time when organizations like ADCC-caliber leg lockers are having a moment across the sport. A loss, on the other hand, turns the McNally result from an upset into a pattern — and patterns are harder to explain away than one bad night in Vegas.

Why FloGrappling Is All In on This Card

Polaris and FloGrappling only started working together again in January 2026, after striking an exclusive streaming deal announced in late 2025 — their first partnership in a decade, dating back to when FloGrappling was Polaris’s original broadcast partner before the promotion moved around for several years. Polaris 35 in Ebbw Vale, Wales, was the first card under the new contract. Ten events later, Polaris 40 is the first one with a genuine crossover name attached to the main event, and that timing isn’t an accident.

A long-running European promotion rebuilding its broadcast relationship needs a card that pulls in viewers who don’t normally watch no-gi grappling on a Saturday night, and Garry Tonon — a guy with real name recognition from his MMA run — is exactly that kind of draw. McNally, for his part, gets the biggest stage of his career attached to the deal at the best possible time: a platform actively trying to prove it can deliver audience for Polaris, with a title fight as the centerpiece. Both sides have more riding on November 21 than just the result in the cage.

The Rematch Changes More Than People Think

Styles rarely stay frozen for four years, and that cuts both ways here. Tonon spent his absence training almost exclusively for cage fights, where scrambles get cut short by the threat of strikes and leg locks have to be set up differently against a wrestling-heavy opponent. Whether that sharpens his no-gi grappling or dulls it is a real question, not a rhetorical one — some fighters come back from MMA grappling cleaner, having had to simplify under pressure, and some come back having lost the small details that only live grappling repetition keeps sharp.

McNally’s edge the first time was patience: he let Tonon work and punished the one exposed moment instead of forcing something. If he tries to replicate that exact game plan, Tonon’s corner has had four years to study tape and build an answer for it. If McNally instead tries to prove he can beat Tonon in a different way — pushing pace early rather than waiting — he’s also handing Tonon more scramble opportunities, which was supposedly the strength that got neutralized last time. Either path has a real case for working.

Where This Fits in No-Gi’s Shifting Landscape

Tonon’s return lands at an odd moment for grappling promotions outside the ADCC umbrella. UFC’s push into BJJ events has pulled attention and some athletes toward a bigger, better-funded stage, and independent cards have had to fight harder for headline names and audience share. Polaris landing a fighter with Tonon’s name recognition — even four years removed from his last grappling match — is exactly the kind of booking an indie promotion needs to stay relevant while the bigger players circle the same pool of talent. It’s also a reminder that the Danaher-trained generation that defined no-gi grappling in the late 2010s hasn’t fully handed the stage over to the next wave yet. Tonon came up under John Danaher at Renzo Gracie Academy alongside Gordon Ryan, and that pedigree is still doing a lot of the promotional heavy lifting here — Polaris isn’t just booking a former ADCC name, it’s booking a direct product of the system that reshaped how no-gi grappling gets taught and competed.

That matters for McNally too. Beating Tonon once got him a moment. Beating him again, for a title, on a card built around that exact fight, turns him from “the guy who upset Garry Tonon” into a legitimate lightweight champion with a signature win attached to the belt. The sport’s current storylines have mostly been about who’s rising through the ADCC pipeline — this is one of the few cards built entirely around unfinished business instead.

The First Fight, If You Haven’t Seen It

FloGrappling’s footage of the original match is still the clearest explanation for why Polaris booked the rematch in the first place. Watching it back, Tonon’s instinct to scramble is exactly what McNally used against him — he kept giving McNally a path to his back by trying to create chaos rather than control it early.

Four years is a long time for a grappler to sit on a loss like that. It’s also a long time for an opponent to sit on a win and wonder if it’ll ever get a rematch. Polaris just gave both of them the answer, and a belt to go with it.

Sources

• Polaris 40: The Return of Garry Tonon — Yahoo Sports — announcement of the McNally-Tonon lightweight title rematch
• Sam McNally vs. Garry Tonon, ADCC World Championships — Tapology — record of the original 2022 bout
• Garry Tonon Parts Ways With ONE Championship After Nearly A Decade — BJJ Eastern Europe — details on Tonon’s April 2026 release
• Sam McNally — BJJ Heroes — career record and background