Looking for Max Holloway’s best showing tends to be a bit of a challenge — while the featherweight big three (Holloway, Jose Aldo, and Alexander Volkanovski) had all spent years looking to be a cut above other pound-for-pound talents of their era, Holloway was something different even among that elite class. What characterized Aldo and Volkanovski for much of their careers was a sort of workmanlike control in their fights — certainly the ability to pull away from overmatched opponents, but also the capability to be satisfied winning by decisive but not destructive margins each round, interpreting each avenue removed from their opponent as a discrete victory in itself. Certainly this describes Volkanovski’s brilliant first win over Holloway himself, and his more tepid win over Jose Aldo — as well as Aldo’s victories over the likes of Chan Sung Jung, where a vastly outskilled opponent was simply allowed to be slowly baffled for the entire fight by positioning and counters. There’s some sense in which this sort of conservatism is a function of both men contending with certain physical limitations — while neither had an objective weakness, Aldo’s strong preference for a low pace and Volkanovski’s formidable but not-unbreakable durability were relative ones, particularly in a division as historically strong as featherweight.
On the other hand, Max Holloway doesn’t have these limitations — and so where Aldo and Volkanovski grew to value the cold command of longtime champions, Holloway became one of the great champions (and contenders) of his time with the panache of a showman and an utterly unprecedented ruthlessness. Where equally great champions stripped down avenues, Holloway made a living creating them — and created so many of them per fight, even the most deserving foes often didn’t look to belong in the ring with him. Of course, there’s some sense in which this is a false dichotomy — Aldo and Volkanovski could go after domineering wins with the best of them — but neither one of the other great champions made a career of finding a single loose stitch and using it to rip their opponent’s entire style to ribbons quite the way Holloway has done time and time again.
As a result, before April 13th, 2024, the battle for the best Max Holloway win was something close to a three-way race between some of the most shockingly damaging showings MMA had ever seen. In terms of quality of opposition, it would be impossible to get a stronger win than Jose Aldo —where the greatest fighter of all time was expertly drawn into shootout after shootout by Holloway’s feints and throwaways until he could barely breathe (and then Max did it again). In terms of raw numerical dominance, surpassing Holloway’s inhuman battering of Calvin Kattar may simply be physically infeasible for the rest of time — Kattar was one of the very best boxers in the sport in his own right, but Holloway absolutely buried him under an unending swarm that seemed to threaten the Bostonian’s career on the spot. And in terms of dangerous circ*mstances, Holloway actually entered his title defense against Brian Ortega as an underdog — with a hyper-dynamic and crafty opponent in front of him, and Holloway being forced off UFC 226 under maximally concerning circ*mstances — and Holloway proceeded to force a fourth-round stoppage in the corner with flurry after flurry on the erstwhile-undefeated contender.
One would be hard-pressed to say that Holloway’s showing at UFC 300 definitively surpassed all of those — certainly Holloway/Kattar stands as perhaps the scariest showing to ever occur in MMA, in terms of both raw damage and how unreasonably good Max Holloway had to be to make something like that happen to a quality opponent — but at the very least, “dangerous circ*mstances” is now locked down by a different fight. After all, Holloway had tried the move up to lightweight before, five years prior — hunting for an interim belt in his rematch against the great Dustin Poirier. Holloway and Poirier put on an all-time great fight, but the takeaway for most was that lightweight power was too much for Holloway’s risk-neutrality — reducing a wonderfully complex fight to its basest essentials, when a hitter as huge as Poirier landed, not even Max Holloway could keep pouring on volume as if nothing happened. As a result, going back up to fight a legendary lightweight banger who had just sent Poirier himself to a swift end in a shootout seemed like the definition of insanity — particularly when even Holloway’s widest showings since Poirier had him taking more than a couple massive lumps, and the third Volkanovski fight saw Holloway taking a truly concerning amount of damage in his own right. Instead of the grimy warfare in the trenches of the Poirier rematch, however, Holloway pitched a near-shutout against Justin Gaethje; in a fight where Holloway arguably couldn’t afford to be touched on the chin, he hardly was, and comfortably made one of the top contenders a weight class above his own look like an utter fool.
Naturally, to understand Max Holloway’s initial reads against Justin Gaethje, one needs to understand Justin Gaethje; however, any evaulation of Justin Gaethje in 2024 suffers from the intricately intertwined nature of Gaethje’s terrific instincts for a fight that looks clumsy and artless, and his being coached into a sort of clean and crisp fight for which he’s quite poorly suited. There’s a sense in which a sport as varied and as chaotic as fighting can result in theory and practice becoming almost wholly decoupled — and nowhere is this more evident than in Justin Gaethje’s better ideas seeming weirdly unfruitful in the face of three of the least forgiving style matchups in the sport upon his debut, and his pivot to notably less sound ideas benefitting regularly from the small matter of being one of the most terrifying athletes around.
Some of those better instincts of Gaethje were forced out of him in the middle rounds, at the point where he needed urgency more than perfection. However, Holloway picked up a commanding lead early in the fight with the understanding that Gaethje would approach him in a similar way he approached Tony Ferguson — moving around on the outside and chopping at the legs, looking to draw his opponent into overcommitted positions that he could punish with his thudding rear hand counter and left hook, and turning to his previously-common hunched defensive shell and catch-and-pitch counters in less favorable exchanges. In the broadest of terms, Holloway’s task was quite simple (if not easy); coming in with the edge in speed and variety but an unprecedented disadvantage in firepower, Holloway needed to engage the shell and the movement as much as possible, and engage the counters themselves as little as possible.
In this sense, in contrast to Gaethje, Holloway’s skillset benefits from a wonderful clarity of purpose — there are very few Holloway fights that aren’t mostly about his jab from minute one. Holloway’s most masterful fights were all about how his the depth of his jab manifested to its full potential — where his trickier fights were all about crafty opponents like Volkanovski and Poirier (and Arnold Allen, in an unheralded but fantastic showing in a loss) finding ways to force Holloway into not jabbing them with impunity. For all the discussions of lightweight potency, the Poirier rematch for Holloway was just as much about Poirier’s greater comfort in a jabbing match from southpaw-orthodox — forcing Holloway into treacherous waters in conjunction with the firepower to take the round with singular successes. On the other hand, Justin Gaethje’s counterpunching and shelling provided Holloway with terrain that was dangerous but straightforward — and the straightforward nature of Gaethje’s approach very quickly became a hindrance to him.
Showing every example of Holloway’s default mode of probing and jabbing would just be the whole fight, but he quickly understood Gaethje’s reactive nature and started feeding him false intelligence. Here, Holloway breaks into a square stance for a moment — as if to circle out — only to immediately settle back into orthodox; Gaethje had already committed to a big lateral step, so Holloway’s foot feint into range caught him squared up and rushing out of range with his high guard. Holloway immediately draws Gaethje’s arms up again, and slots in a straight to the body as Gaethje looks to parry high and back out.
The instances where Gaethje committed to planting —particularly as he understood the issue with biting on every Holloway feint to swing offense — saw him default to parrying and dropping his level; in the old days, this would usually herald Gaethje looking to feel an opponent’s offense on his guard and immediately fire back with a catch-and-pitch. However, Holloway’s distance and nous made this impossible in the early going —here are two examples of Holloway drawing out the parry-and-duck with a foot feint, dropping his level with Gaethje to jab the body.
To his credit, Gaethje seemed to understand where Holloway’s biggest vulnerabilities showed themselves in that Poirier fight — as Poirier was able to track Holloway down moving backwards with shifting offense. Here, Gaethje responds to Holloway circling and feinting offensively — first feinting back to eat up space, moving to southpaw, and shifting through to catch up to Holloway circling off with his right hand. Holloway is able to hop back in his stance, duck, and angle off as Gaethje’s entry is massive and committed to one direction — but it’s a theoretically productive response in the long term.
These three responses of Gaethje to Holloway’s mobile and arrhythmic style were what Holloway would largely build on — Gaethje retreating straight, ducking down and shelling up, and looking to gain ground with big explosive flurries (crucially, not sustained pressure — as we’ll see later — but a mad dash of hypercommitted offense followed by more neutral activity). All three of the above were from the first seventy seconds of the fight, so Gaethje had shown his hand with plenty of time — and Holloway started to immediately adapt.
On the hunch:
Gaethje’s love of that hunched shell was largely the tendency exploited by Holloway through the first round — with the very obvious route for Max being the uppercut. Early in the first, Holloway was able to draw the same ducking reaction as earlier and smash him up the center, then do it again to stand him up for a wicked left hook.
The uppercut also served as one of Holloway’s rare simultaneous counters in this fight at one point — similar to its function against Alexander Volkanovski in the rematch, another fighter who liked to enter and exit low. As Gaethje struggled to close distance safely and tried to just enter with the duck, Max was able to pick him off with the uppercut/left hook nicely.
This wasn’t a consistent look as Holloway rarely struggled for space in this fight, but Gaethje planting himself in place gave Holloway a couple opportunities to flash offense at him and angle around. Against another featherweight, Holloway would’ve likely exploited the positional upside of an opponent who rendered themselves static on cue — re-entering at a strong angle to overwhelm them — but Holloway took what he got for free here.
On the forward-moving flurries:
Max Holloway isn’t routinely all that comfortable on the counter; what he benefits from most is that he’s almost always the more active and durable party, and mobile enough that chasing him around for the whole fight is unlikely to work. However, Gaethje’s overcommitments while pursuing Holloway often left him squared up — Gaethje would chase Holloway with a wide right hand (more on that later) and often fall in behind it, abandoning his stance. In this situation, Holloway was happy to retaliate with minimum risk to trading until Gaethje could reset his stance. Dustin Poirier looking to evoke Holloway’s bigger retreats could throw away his straight before stepping through, or even just cover distance with the shift while turning his rear hand to a jab (staying threatening enough that Holloway would prefer to just disengage for the time being) — but Gaethje’s positioning meant that Holloway could hurt him even for conceptual soundness.
Also noteworthy is Holloway maintaining his own stance on the backfoot—
Holloway hopsteps back, minimizing time out of position and giving him a way to sit down on the right hand he throws here (as he’s in a strong stance, allowing for sound mechanical punching). This is an important contrast to what we see from Gaethje later.
The most unique part of this aspect to Holloway’s approach was how he jerryrigged the spinning back kick into a genuine anti-swarming tool. For one, it’s a powerful linear strike that inherently creates a wall in front of an opponent over-enthusiastic to cover ground — and for another, the way Holloway aimed it, the kick couldn’t really miss. Gaethje would either be there to get hit in the gut after planting himself by overthrowing, or he’d turn to his usual defensive posture at the realization that he was too close — ducking into the kick. If one strike changed the course of the fight, it was Gaethje smashing his own nose on Holloway’s heel at the end of the first — looking to end the round taking ground and getting sent flying,
However, the worst liability for Gaethje against Holloway was his messy retreating and his hair-trigger for doing so — and in fact, this is an issue that contributed to his losses against both Khabib Nurmagomedov and Charles Oliveira. While Gaethje was never a defensive maestro, in his pressure-phase, his defense was quite solid and made him difficult to hit for free — even against terrific speed-demons like Michael Johnson, Gaethje would stay settled down in a threatening stance with his high guard, and the nature of his frantic pressure kept his opponent from making great decisions most of the time. This is why those catch-and-pitch counters and the counter legkicks worked; Gaethje would take some knocks as the price of knowing that anything his opponent did in those situations would be panicked and desperate, and he could destroy them for their own overcommitments or predictable timing.
Ironically, reframing himself as a counterpuncher seemed to have made Gaethje less capable on the counter — as his power-hitting became more of a liability against opponents with the space to toy with his expectations, Gaethje would become more and more forced to retreat at every twitch, and Gaethje’s tendency to break stance and move inefficiently meant that someone like Nurmagomedov could simply take his backstepping counters as the cost of doing business and run him ragged with measured pressure from his stance.
Holloway didn’t approach him quite that way — but did exploit similar vulnerabilities in Gaethje’s Wittmanized approach. In some sense, no one in the world was better equipped for it — counterpunching Holloway on the outside is a nearly pure test of footwork and positioning, because raw power cannot bail someone out. For instance, Calvin Kattar’s sharp mechanics and timing on bombing right hands led to no breaks, because Kattar’s skillset presupposes a moment of stunlock and an opponent with some sort of aversion to getting hit very hard to gain the necessary space — Holloway simply doesn’t operate that way, and Gaethje’s reliance on the nuclear option in the matchup became less threatening and more exploitable. As Gaethje continued to struggle to time Holloway’s entries through layers of feints and defaulted to less proactive solutions, Holloway found his most consistent successes.
As Gaethje’s more aggressive responses were quickly punished, and the nose became a real problem, Gaethje became more willing to retreat upon Holloway flashing offense. The problem is with the mechanics of this retreat, as well as Holloway’s ability to cover ground safely and consistently due to his proclivity for the jab (in contrast to Gaethje covering distance in bigger bursts that give him fewer options, and Holloway’s sounder positioning moving back).
For example, here’s a Gaethje retreat:
Holloway flashes an up-jab and Gaethje’s completely abandons his stance, pulling his lead leg back to square himself up and leaning backwards to take a wide route out of the exchange. If Holloway were to be able to keep up with him, Gaethje’s counters wouldn’t be a big problem — he’s too busy rushing to be able to threaten strongly positioned counters with any weight transfer behind them (unlike the example of Holloway himself earlier). So Holloway starts following him — setting up with the jab to cover ground into bodywork, as Gaethje can’t just stop and hit him on a dime. The 1-2 that began the flurry in the third shows this positioning difference most clearly:
Holloway has hopped into range while occupying Gaethje with the jab, maintaining his stance to be able to sit on a right hand after drawing Gaethje out of position; Gaethje commits to breaking stance and angling off as soon as he sees the first jab, destroys his own positioning, and the right hand comes at a shorter interval than he expects.
Holloway could also use the jab more directly to follow Gaethje out — here, he closes the door with the jab a couple times in response to similar big exits from Gaethje, allowing him to cover ground without exposing himself too much (and even when leaping into the jab, Holloway is diligent about quickly angling out — contrast Gaethje’s overcommitted positions off his pursuits allowing Holloway to immediately return and catch him unprepared).
Holloway’s kicking game was also nicely attuned to address the problem of Gaethje’s defense and positioning — Holloway would exploit Gaethje’s reactiveness to his lead hand by drawing Gaethje’s defenses or attempts to reposition and attacking from far out. Occasionally, he’d step up into openside bodykicks, but he’d also just be content to batter the closed side as Gaethje guarded high but couldn’t safely bring his level down anymore.
For the first three rounds, the “new” Gaethje was a sitting duck for the very best of Holloway — the Hawaiian was shockingly comfortable in front of one of the biggest hitters of a division above him. Gaethje’s job going into the fourth, where he likely needed a finish, was to make Holloway uncomfortable — and it seemed that both he and his coach Trevor Wittman knew that the retreat-heavy and considered approach was just getting Gaethje flummoxed by a sounder opponent in those situations. To his credit, Gaethje found a way to compete again in round 4 — which had a totally different tone to the rest of the fight.
II. Signs Of Life
Justin Gaethje’s backfoot game was decidedly a new phenomenon in the context of his entire career; while he began to temper his exchange-heavy style a bit by the KO1s of James Vick and Edson Barboza, the fence on his opponent’s back was still an integral part of how those fights developed. Where early in his UFC career, Gaethje would be totally fine barrelling into his opponent regardless of their position or preparedness — looking to create movement with his aggression alone — those two fights showed some inclination for patiently kicking at range but keeping the front foot, picking his spots for trades, and herding his opponent into his bigger shots with some more tact. Unfortunately, the knockout of Donald Cerrone revealed this intermediate approach to be a stopgap towards abandoning pressure altogether — but Holloway smoothly picking him apart for three rounds forced Gaethje back towards a strategy that was more natural for his tools and his temperament. As such, round four was much more thoughtful from Gaethje and seemed to potentially herald a dangerous turnaround in the fight for Max Holloway.
To start a bit earlier, Gaethje’s primary idea on the lead in this fight was the 3-2 — against a mobile opponent who kept trying to turn him, Gaethje would look to cover distance with a shift or a big lead hook, then bomb Holloway over the top as the initial attack stood him still. Unfortunately, this was a good idea that Gaethje didn’t pursue particularly well early in the fight, as it was much more actionable with an opponent on the fence — Holloway could simply give ground, threaten with the counter-jab, and use his lead arm as a bit of a long guard to get behind his shoulder as Gaethje barrelled forward from too far out.
Holloway also had an interesting look for when Gaethje telegraphed the shift — as he did in that first example back in round 1. Max would immediately use the rear-leg kick to occupy Gaethje and keep him from comfortably moving forward — combined with the rest of the bodywork, Gaethje had to respect it, but even from just a physical perspective, the kick served as a barrier to keep Gaethje from launching forward with impunity. In fact, Holloway’s ability to frustrate entries with the bodykick was a big part of his win over Arnold Allen — a tricky southpaw who often tried to enter with the 1-2, but got shut down with a shin in his gut midway through.
So Gaethje needed a way to cover his entries — to get close to Holloway in smaller increments, where big actions were just getting him picked off and wasting energy. Gaethje’s first good answer was setting up behind the frontkick — both men had traded linear kicks throughout their time at range, but round four was where it turned into something useful for Gaethje. Immediately feinting forward behind raised knees and flicking out frontkicks, Gaethje was able to gain ground more slowly as now Holloway was the one trying not to overreact to every action — and Gaethje was able to convert this to boxing success. Suddenly, Max didn’t have the room behind him, and Gaethje could find the 3-2 or the right hand off the threat of the frontkick.
The shifting offense benefitted from this setup too — Gaethje would often feint in behind his rear knee, throwing out static for that bodykick counter so he could convert that to a step into range, or find that shifting hook he’d been looking for.
In the same spirit of “the big actions aren’t working”, Gaethje finally turned to jabbing in round four. With his default tool off his left hand being a reaching lead hook prior, this really did catch Holloway by surprise a few times down the center — and Gaethje could now play those two tools off one another, drawing the parry to slot a tighter hook around the side. Now, those paws and ducks from Gaethje before his lunges had meaning behind them — Holloway couldn’t just wait for the 3-2, so the 3-2 actually started working.
Gaethje’s jab was an underrated tool during his pressure days — not extremely nuanced but powerful and quick enough, and it generally seemed to take him some time to turn to it as an outfighter. However, considering the difference it made in taking over against another slicker range fighter in Rafael Fiziev, Gaethje taking four rounds to start credibly jabbing might have been his biggest oversight in the fight.
Gaethje became the first man to knock Holloway down in this fight (although Poirier would’ve but for the fence), and it came from Gaethje’s work on the lead — as well as his transitional work, which was far more common in his pressure days and would’ve been a godsend as a more consistent tool against a slicker and more mobile boxer. Gaethje tried it one time earlier — darting in with the jab, grabbing a collartie to track him, and finding a right hand — and the second time, Gaethje was the one drawing reactions by feinting in to pull out Holloway’s uppercut and catch him by the neck. Slightly subtler work from Gaethje allowed him to be in range, establish several threats, and find Max Holloway with a shot that didn’t meaningfully hurt him but did win the round on the cards.
One may notice that for a counterpuncher, Gaethje’s best successes in this fight came from pushing forward, setting up himself, and mixing up his entries on the lead — which is no coincidence. Going into the fifth, had Gaethje been able to keep this up, Holloway might’ve found himself in trouble. Gaethje’s corner knew this too, telling him to keep on Holloway in that final round — to put on the volume and keep on the front foot. Unfortunately, Trevor Wittman also told him to abandon the front kick as a setup unless he could actually land it, which was a bit of a misstep — nevertheless, Gaethje was positioned for a big round five, and it was on Holloway to hang on for the final frame with three rounds in the bank.
Holloway did not decide to approach the fifth round looking to simply hang on and move around — while he was quite mobile (for a specific reason), round five was extremely clear for Holloway even before the ending to the fight rendered the judges academic. Gaethje made some clever adjustments and had closed the gap considerably in the fourth round, but Holloway had still done a great deal of good work — the previous openings were still there, Gaethje had just made them trickier to find with his more productive aggression. Holloway went to work turning that aggression against Gaethje, taking away the few tools left that worked for the top lightweight, and headed into the final ten seconds in full command of the fight.
As nice as Gaethje’s jab was through round four, Holloway’s greater depth as a jabber and his willingness to jab with Gaethje allowed him to take back over the jabbing battle decisively in round five.
Gaethje’s jab was almost invariably a power shot — where Holloway’s feints were indistinguishable from his actual entries due to his ability to flick out a quick jab disconnected from his feet at a millisecond’s notice, Gaethje’s stomping jabs (while a step up from his approach early in the fight) didn’t take Holloway much time to adjust to. When Gaethje was loading up to jab in, Holloway could simply move laterally and not be there, where in a similar situation, someone like Holloway would be far more likely to use lighter jabs to follow his opponent out. On the other hand, as Gaethje feinted the big jab, Holloway could simply scramble him with lighter ones and force him back into shelling up — and after a point, Gaethje stopped getting to jab for free.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Gaethje’s lowkicks — these weren’t nearly as successful as the commentary acted through the early going, but while Holloway took a lot of sting off them, they weren’t nothing. The issue for Gaethje here was that his best lowkicking performances featured a lot of counterkicking of opponents lashing out under pressure — in those situations, Gaethje’s huge whipping kicks knocked them off balance and destroyed their leg, making effective counters to the kicks very difficult (even Dustin Poirier struggled greatly with this in their first fight, as Gaethje’s kicks killed his shifts at the root).
However, in neutral, Gaethje didn’t replace that factor with any proactive setups — he just kept those powerful committed kicks in his arsenal without the structures that made them so difficult to deal with. Holloway has been vulnerable to fast sharp lowkickers (Yair Rodriguez) and clever versatile lowkickers (Volkanovski) before, so kicking him wasn’t a bad idea, but Holloway largely saw them coming and checked. After a point, he made sure Gaethje didn’t get to try them for free — following the defended kick back with the jab, forcing Gaethje to bail out while off-balance and on one leg, and again attacking the retreat to the body.
For a model of how to deal with this, Alexander Volkanovski was extremely picky about which kicks he sat down on against Holloway in their first fight; he’d pre-empt Holloway’s attempts to track him down off the kicks, using a light kick to draw the blitz only to backstep into a harder hook to catch Holloway moving forward. Gaethje has shown some clever kicking-into-punches moments (such as the Ferguson fight, weaving off his big kicks to find left hooks), but didn’t get to find them here due to Holloway’s facility in dealing with the kicks in isolation.
In fact, this legkick counter is what led to Holloway almost certainly heading for a 4-1 win as the fight drew to a close. Gaethje’s corner wanted him to double down on the legkick and Gaethje obliged — Holloway once again attacked the retreat in combination to go up to the head this time, Gaethje lost his feet backing up messily off his own kick, and Holloway rocked him badly. The ensuing flurry left Gaethje sucking wind with no routes to winning even a bad decision.
It would be impossible to talk about this fight without talking about the ending — but even at the time of writing, three days later, everything possible seems to have been said. Holloway took a massive risk to bang it out with a bigger hitter in the final seconds of a fight where he was cruising to one of his best wins — and turned that win into the stuff of legend, knocking Gaethje clean out in the final moment of the fight.
Even here, in the final moments when Holloway had decided to indulge Gaethje in a wild brawl, Holloway’s mind for exchanges shined through. Gaethje hadn’t really gotten the opportunity to counterpunch Holloway for the whole fight, and finally he could take Max’s entry at face value — only for Holloway to flash a straight and lower his level, ending up in Gaethje’s chest and allowing Gaethje to square himself up swinging in a fantastic Cody Garbrandt impression. Max then popped up with a body-head combination that rattled the lightweight to his boots. A brutal and brilliant end to a showing that didn’t remotely need it to still be one of Max Holloway’s magna opera.
IV. In Sum
The one thing that hasn’t been mentioned in this whole discussion was the (proximal) stakes of the fight — technically a title belt, but only technically. The “BMF” belt is the kind of novelty that seemed absolutely perfect for its debut, a bout between Nate Diaz and Jorge Masvidal — a perennial gatekeeper with the promotional capital of a top fighter, and a top fighter (at the time) with the mind and temperament of a perennial gatekeeper. The next time it made an appearance, it was between Gaethje and Poirier — and already, the true stakes of the fight seemed to vastly outstrip a title belt that meant nothing in particular. In fact, there was some sense in which Dustin Poirier (an all-time great with some of the best wins in lightweight history) was obviously too good to hold a belt that was made purely so Nate Diaz could fight for a belt — and Justin Gaethje joined that conversation when he was able to beat an opponent like Poirier, which obviously meant more than the belt itself.
With Max Holloway winning the “BMF” belt, the time has arguably come to retire it, because the original meaning would seem to have been completely lost. After all, for all the posturing of what “BMF” stands for, the belt was originally just a trinket for fighters who were “bad” enough to be notable for it but not enough to convert their gameness and their aggression into anything else, except a sticker on their chest saying “you are, indeed, quite bad”. And if Max Holloway is the baddest, he isn’t that in the same sense of the “BMF” — much more in the sense of “the baddest man on the planet”, a line generally reserved for the heavyweight champion of the world because it requires no additional context but the belt on their shoulder. Max Holloway is as elite as a fighter gets, and if he goes back to 145 after knocking a lightweight at the front of the queue clean out, there are very strong odds that the “BMF” championship just gets unified with the real one. At that point, we all might as well forget about it until it pops up in a random Sean Strickland fight.
More interesting than that specific belt for Holloway is where this sort of win leaves him in the all-time great conversation — equally meaningless (in fact, more so, since it doesn’t even have a physical manifestation), but worth more consideration. After all, while Jose Aldo and Alexander Volkanovski had some tremendous successes at different weights, one could easily argue neither compared to this one — Aldo beat several elite bantamweights but Holloway went up, not down, and Volkanovski got a moral victory up at lightweight (in his surprisingly competitive bout against champion Islam Makhachev) but that was where it ended. Where Aldo’s impossibly long reign (and absurd post-prime period) and Volkanovski’s three head-to-head wins over Holloway made it difficult for Max to separate from them, Gaethje is the kind of win that might do it — to leave him in territory that might not decisively surpass them, but still in the mix for being the most singularly impressive fighter in the sport’s history. While he went into UFC 300 with a legacy that was already nigh-untouchable, Holloway came out of it with one that’s truly just unreasonable — and while there’s likely less time left than it looks for the “Blessed Express”, if he can wrest the belt back from incumbent champion Ilia Topuria, Holloway could very easily be in a class of his own.
