Max Holloway's Immortal
There are great fights, and then there are immortal fights. My breakdown of Max Holloway vs Justin Gaethje.
Max Holloway is a very rude man. Why, just last week I wrote a breakdown of his fight with Calvin Kattar, in which I explicitly said that it was responsible for turning him from merely an all-time great to a certified legend of MMA. I got into the technique and strategy, of course, but in addition I lavished heaps of praise on Mr Holloway, every word of it shot through with the uneasy subtext that it was not only his greatest performance, but probably his last great performance.
And then he goes and does something like this.
As you must already know, last weekend Max Holloway fought Justin Gaethje in what definitely should have been the main event of UFC 300. It was, in many ways, an atypical Holloway fight; or perhaps it was more typical of the fighter he is becoming as he tramps ever further into his 30s. By Holloway standards, it was a slow, methodical affair. Max spent much of the fight either circling on the outside or fencing in open space. He threw an awful lot of kicks, distributing his strikes between head, body, and legs in almost perfectly equal proportion. And the hands that painted record numbers on Calvin Kattar’s face in vivid red were decidedly reserved. I mean, he hardly surpassed 300 strikes, for Pete’s sake!
He also suffered the first knockdown of his entire career.
In other ways, however, it was the quintessential Max Holloway fight. Max outlanded his opponent by a huge margin, both in raw numbers and accuracy. He maintained perfect poise and wide-eyed focus for the entire 25 minutes. He threw tight punches in blistering combination. And he ended the whole thing with a massive flex. In the Kattar fight, Holloway showed off his command of the bout by dropping his hands and sliding effortlessly out of the way of Kattar’s desperate, sloppy attacks while explaining to the commentary team exactly how great he was. This time, however, Holloway repeated the move he pulled against Ricardo Lamas back in 2016: with ten seconds to go, he pointed at the middle of the canvas, cocked his head, and silently invited his opponent to one last donnybrook—except, this time, he knocked his man out cold with one second left in the fight.
Patterns & Positioning
Holloway’s last venture into the lightweight ranks was not so successful. Partly that was because Dustin Poirier’s style was a lot tougher for him to handle than Gaethje’s turned out to be. With his tricky southpaw tactics, sharp counter punching, and frustrating defense, Poirier simply had Holloway’s number.
On the other hand, Holloway took that fight on short notice, stepping up just five weeks before the date (after UFC brass discovered that Khabib Nurmagomedov would not be available to defend the lightweight strap). In contrast to the compact, muscular figure we saw last weekend, Holloway packed on so much weight so quickly for the Poirier bout that his teammates were calling him “Muffintop Max.”
The abbreviated camp must also have had an adverse effect on Holloway’s strategic preparation. He did manage to find his way into the fight eventually, but the first few rounds saw him continually frustrated and surprised by Poirier’s skills as well as his power.
At UFC 300, however, Holloway looked not only healthy but supremely well prepared for Justin Gaethje. Even without his usual output, Holloway still diligently got his hands around the initiative, feeding Gaethje jabs and feints, testing him from different angles, pushing him back and pulling him in. By the third minute of the fight, he already had a clear read on Gaethje’s defensive reactions. He wasted no time in punishing them.
Justin Gaethje is not really a bad defensive fighter, but he can be a predictable one, particularly when he lets his opponent build up a big initiative—something even a relatively patient Max Holloway is more than capable of doing. Holloway spent much of the fight exploiting one of two standard Gaethje defenses: the duck/slip, and the backwards lean.
Here, the former. Holloway uses a feint to draw the slip out, not only flashing his lead hand but breaking rhythm and stepping forward to sell the threat. Gaethje responds, and before he can do anything to regain the initiative, Holloway immediately hits him with the same feint again, following it with a tidy right uppercut.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Finer Points of Face Punching to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.