In a sport where fighters don’t often have control of their immediate future, Max Holloway is in the rare position of getting to do whatever he wants.
With the BMF title around his waist after a walk-off, heart-stopping knockout of Justin Gaethje at UFC 300 on Saturday night in Las Vegas, Holloway is free to chase any fight he desires.
That could mean a return to 145 pounds to challenge newly crowned featherweight champion Ilia Topuria, who vanquished Holloway’s nemesis, Alexander Volkanovski, to win the belt in February.
His decisive win over Gaethje, ranked No. 2 at 155 pounds going into Saturday’s fight, puts him in line to call for the winner between lightweight champion Islam Makhachev and Dustin Poirier, who will fight in the main event of UFC 302 on June 1 in New Jersey.
There’s also a chance to sit around and enjoy Saturday’s win for two months before taking a front-row seat to the Conor McGregor and Michael Chandler fight on June 29 in Las Vegas and offering up the BMF belt to the winner.
All options are plausible and they all are on the table. The only thing that isn’t happening is getting to see Holloway fight in his home state.
“I’m over that, brother,” Holloway said, replying to a post-fight question on if he’d pressure the UFC to hold an event in Hawaii. “There is one stadium that I think they could hold us in, but I don’t think I would be able to fight. It’d have to be like UFC 300 tickets, and I wouldn’t feel right with my people paying that kind of money to watch me fight.”
That stadium he is referring to is Blaisdell Arena, which has hosted multiple Bellator MMA fight cards in recent years.
Could the UFC get away with hosting a UFC event in a smaller venue charging outrageous prices for tickets? Perhaps, but UFC President Dana White has remained steadfast in his belief that the state doesn’t have a venue adequate enough to hold a UFC card.
“I want to go to Hawaii. Hawaii has been good to this company, good to this sport for a very long time,” White said. “Max Holloway went to another level tonight and he was already a superstar. They don’t have the infrastructure for a fight over there. We can’t do it.”
White was pressed on holding a card in a smaller venue like the 8,000-seat Blaisdell Arena as opposed to bigger venues such as Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena, which had a crowd of 20,067 for Saturday’s UFC 300.
“You’re not going to go to Hawaii and do an Apex fight night. You might as well stay here and let them fly over here. It doesn’t make sense,” White said. “Bellator could put on a fight in a parking lot.”
White called UFC 300, “a career-defending moment for a guy who has already accomplished so many great things.”
Holloway had the fight won at the end of the fifth round when instead of simply holding on for the victory, he challenged one of the best strikers in UFC history to slug it out in the middle of the cage over the final 10 seconds.
Style points matter in a sport where it’s on the fighter to build their own brand. Winning simply isn’t enough sometimes in the UFC.
Holloway has always known that.
“This is what BMFs is known for,” Holloway said. “If that’s not a BMF moment, I don’t know what is. If the cards were flipped and Justin was up, I know he would give me that 10-second shot. He’s a bad man.
“These are the type of stuff you do to etch your name in the history books. I’m just happy that I was the one who landed. He missed some shots. I was getting hurt by the wind of his shots. That’s how hard he hits.”
Holloway is the third fighter to hold the BMF title after Jorge Masvidal and Gaethje. He improved to 22-7 in his UFC career tying for the fourth-most victories in the organization.
Holloway seemed to have been knocked down in the fourth round with a punch to the side of his head, but the official statistics did not credit Gaethje with a knockdown.
That leaves Holloway without suffering a knockdown in his career.
“It was a slip,” Holloway joked.
Holloway won 13 fights in a row from 2014 to ’19 before losing to Poirier while challenging for the interim UFC lightweight belt.
He dropped the 145-pound title two fights later to Volkanovski and then lost an immediate rematch for his third defeat in four fights.
He’s won five of six fights since and is now in as good of a position as he’s ever been within the company as one of its top stars.
“I was counted out. People were telling me, ‘what am I doing?’ Justin is going to be too big, too strong,” Holloway said. “People needed to get reminded and I let them know. I’m here and you guys needed a reminder. At the end of the day, it was just a huge moment for me.”
