Max Holloway Ready to Rule UFC as the Anti-Conor McGregor
There's something refreshing about a Max Holloway (20-3) fight week.
There are no ugly verbal attacks on someone's religion or family when the UFC featherweight champion competes. No one involved in the main event is likely to throw any sort of dolly or hand truck at a bus. There will be no fights in a hotel lobby or confrontations with other athletes.
Holloway, who is fighting Dustin Poirier in a rematch Saturday to add the interim lightweight title belt to his collection, is the anti-Conor McGregor. As great as the Irish legend was, a "Notorious" fight was rarely about what happened in the cage. For better or worse, his bouts become cultural touchstones, reaching out beyond the insular world of cage fighting, gently worming their way into the public consciousness.
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Holloway? He just comes to smile, play around with his kid and kick a little butt.
At times, that's a relief.
Instead of the endless drama designed to own each day's sports news cycle, the media coverage will be sporadic at best and mostly about how much fun everyone is having or how cute Max's ever-present son Rush "Mini-Blessed" Holloway is. The 27-year-old Hawaiian will talk about how much he admires his opponent, and the feeling will be mutual.
Then the two men will step into a steel cage and attempt to rip each other to shreds.
"Dustin's a cool dude," Holloway told the press after an open workout Wednesday. "We talked, we chopped it up a little bit. ... He's a dog. I can't wait. These are the kinds of fights that excite me."
In the UFC, this modicum of decorum constitutes downright gentlemanly behavior. But don't let the smile or familial collegiality fool you for a second. Holloway is one of the best, most vicious fighters ever to step into the UFC Octagon.
"The No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter should look dominant," Holloway said. "He should be dominant in everything. So I want to go out there and dominate. I said this before, and I'll say it again. I want you guys to be scratching your head saying, 'Who is this kid and what is going on?'"
What's going on is something special. Holloway last lost a fight to McGregor back in 2013. After that disappointment, he pulled himself back to his feet and put together a string of 13 straight victories. That kind of streak, the third-best in UFC history, is almost unprecedented considering his level of opposition.
This isn't a boxing-style record built on a collection of easy touches, cab drivers and men with an aversion to winning. Holloway has almost exclusively been in the cage with the world's best fighters for years. Save for a health issue last year, nothing has succeeded in slowing him down. And his advanced striking techniques have increasingly left even top contenders looking lost, alone and confused by his expertise in the stand-up portion of the fight game.
Holloway is the next-generation evolution of a Diaz brother: an action, pressure-based boxer who approaches a dangerous sport with an appropriate level of caution and concern.
"One wonderful thing about Holloway is that his game is built around pushing a pace, but not at the expense of his own defense," Vice's Jack Slack wrote. "The featherweight champ has a great sense of when to push his advantages to the fullest, and when to take a step back and look to counter."
Holloway takes his time dismantling opponents. But when it feels right, he can reach gears most fighters don't have. In his last defense of the featherweight title, Holloway set a UFC record by landing 290 significant strikes in the four-round fight, 134 of which came in the final round alone.
The experience made Holloway's opponent, Brian Ortega, appreciate him as an athlete.
"These are the fights I love to watch, because they're fights you don't know who to root with, or who to go with," he told Eddie Mercado of Bloody Elbow in reference to Holloway's upcoming bout against Poirier. "Because they're both so good that they could finish each other. Those are the fights you want to see, because that's how you get Fight of the Night."
Poirier, who has lost only once in his last 10 fights, is coming off spectacular wins over former champions Eddie Alvarez and Anthony Pettis and an all-time classic slugfest against Justin Gaethje last year. While this isn't the exact fight Holloway was looking for, it is a great bout for both fans of intricate martial technique and virtual vampires hoping for copious bloodshed and unvarnished violence.
Holloway remains steadfastly noncommittal about his future in the featherweight division, where he's reigned as champion since he unified the title in June 2017. But he's already defeated the two men at the top of the UFC featherweight rankings and is looking to let other potential challengers marinate a bit before a title bout.
"I'm the king in the division, but when you leave, people are going to try to take the throne," Holloway told the press. "... We've got the guys like Alex [Volkanovski], Renato [Moicano], Zabit [Magomedsharipov]. Dana White and the UFC, they know that ... I think right now, the UFC wanted to let them bake. They put them in the oven and let them bake a little bit longer."
No matter who emerges as the interim lightweight champion, he will attempt to shine in the enormous shadows of both McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov. The two rivals dominate press coverage of the sport, and Nurmagomedov's unquestionable excellence is difficult to overlook.
While either Holloway or Poirier will leave the cage Saturday with a championship belt, no one will consider the victor to be king of the lightweights until he dispatches with Khabib.
That's exactly what Holloway has in mind.
"Khabib said he wanted to fight me and he wanted me to prove myself. So I got Dustin," Holloway said at a press conference announcing the bout. "I have a simple relationship with the UFC. I tell them to send me the toughest guy, then I send [the contract] back. At the end of the day, first thing's first, I got Dustin Poirier."
Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
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