Another fight weekend is here, baby, and we love to see it. On Saturday night, the fight world will give way to a UFC pay-per-view, as UFC 266 brings us two world title fights and a host of other very interesting bouts. It’s one of the standout cards of the year. And that means, as usual, here’s a look at the three fights I’ll be watching closest:
Alexander Volkanovski vs. Brian Ortega
Ask most mixed martial arts fans the question of who’s the best featherweight in the world, you’ll probably get a lot of people saying Max Holloway. And hell, I won’t blame them – Holloway has the ability to perform at a level that is almost unfathomable. But the UFC featherweight title is on the line on Saturday night, and Max Holloway isn’t going to be there. That’s because the real world champ, Alexander Volkanovski, did what seems like it should be impossible: beat Holloway twice.
MMA stardom wasn’t originally supposed to be in the cards for Alexander Volkanovski. The 32-year-old from Australia was an excellent rugby player, a standout for the Warilla Gorillas in the semi-pro South Coast Rugby League. MMA was a hobby he took up in his early 20s to help him stay in shape during the rugby offseason. Then he found out that he was a fighting genius, and that was that.
Before then, his combat sports experience was limited to some Greco-Roman wrestling when he was a pre-teen. He doesn’t have a lifetime of experience. He’s a very good athlete, but there are better athletes. He’s a very, very good technical striker, but there are more intimidating hitters. He’s a very good wrestler, but there are more imposing grapplers. But what Volkanovski has is one of the best minds for MMA that the sport has ever seen, an expert ability to make reads and adjustments in the heat of battle, and an unmatched skill at crafting and executing a winning fight.
It’s how he beat Holloway the first time, when very few were giving him a shot of beating the reigning champ. It’s how he rallied from two rounds down to come back and edge out Holloway in the rematch. It’s how he’s never lost a UFC fight – his winning streak currently stands at 19 – and has given us some of the best, most complete performances in featherweight MMA history.
Over the course of two fights, Volkanovski put on a masterclass of diagnosing how to strategically approach one of the greatest fighters of all time, and pulling that plan off in the cage. There’s only so much you can do at the end of the day – the second fight was very contentious, and the majority of fans and media scored it for Holloway. Even so, there should be no doubt that Volkanovski is a great, deserving champion.
Volkanovski is a fighter who, above all else, knows his strengths and weaknesses, and knows how to gameplan to emphasize the former and de-emphasize the latter. He’s also extremely well-rounded: he can win with his active and nuanced technical striking as well as his pressure wrestling, he has good range, he can control the distance, and has the ability to get fights where he wants them. Those qualities combined make him incredibly, incredibly difficult to defeat.
And if Holloway can’t beat him, how’s Brian Ortega going to do it? Ortega was 14-0 and the featherweight division’s hottest property when he challenged Holloway for the world title in 2019 – he ate an absolutely hellacious beating in one of the single greatest performances of Holloway’s career, and disappeared for two years.
But Ortega returned last October and looked radically improved in a unanimous decision win over Chan Sung Jung, stunning the Korean Zombie with a brilliant spinning elbow early and keeping him off-balance for the rest of the fight.
Ortega brings a lot to the table himself. He has some good counter-striking skill that may challenge Volkanovski, and has that ability to cleanly pick shots and reset when the fight is clean. Volkanovski likes a clean fight as well – he’s not Holloway, who was just out to beat Ortega’s ass. He’s also an excellent jiu-jitsu player if the fight hits the mat, which I don’t expect it to.
All the fake drama caused by the two being opposing Ultimate Fighter coaches aside, Ortega stands as a very interesting opponent, due in no small part to the huge steps he seems to have taken since his first shot at the title. He completely changed his training set-up, and appears to have developed a much stronger grasp of how to use his considerable gifts.
Now, he’s looking for redemption in what looks like a standout main event. No matter who wins, I’d expect this to be an exhibition of cerebral, technical MMA on the highest level. Kinetic chess at its finest. I can’t want to watch it.
Valentina Shevchenko vs. Lauren Murphy
Bring out your dead! Valentina Shevchenko is almost undoubtedly going to win her fight against challenger Lauren Murphy on Saturday, defending her UFC flyweight title for the sixth straight time. She’s pretty much completely cleared out the 125-pound division – at this point, the only conceivable interesting fight left for her would require her to fight someone currently in a different weight class.
So yeah, there may not be another flyweight who can conceivably beat her in the near future, especially after she so handily dispatched Jessica Andrade, a former strawweight champion who appeared to have finally found her ideal weight class. But that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate Shevchenko’s dominance – as it was in the men’s half of the 125-pound division when Demetrious Johnson was so much better than everyone else for such a long period, we owe it to ourselves to enjoy greatness while it’s here.
I really thought if there was ever going to be a flyweight to give Shevchenko a real challenge, it’d be Andrade. But Shevchenko – who’s been winning fights with her smothering grappling more than her world-class Muay Thai as of late – overpowered her opponent with little effort.
It seems extremely unlikely that Murphy will be able to contend with the champion in either the striking or grappling arenas. But Murphy’s a scrapper – the 38-year-old from Alaska, a former drug addict who didn’t start any martial arts training until her mid-20s, is as tough as they come. And although her recent five-fight win streak doesn’t have any standout wins – the victory that earned her a title shot, a split decision over Joanne Calderwood in June, was highly disputed – she seemed as good a choice as any to get this opportunity.
And hell, it’s the fight game. A world title is on the line, and crazy things sometimes happen when the stakes are high. Who the hell knows?
Nick Diaz vs. Robbie Lawler II
In April of 2004, two fresh-faced young studs – a gamebred, 20-year-old badass from the streets of Stockton, California named Nick Diaz and an uncommonly talented, uncommonly powerful 22-year-old named Robbie Lawler – met for six minutes of pure action at the Mandalay Bay, on the undercard of then the most anticipated fight in UFC history: Chuck Liddell vs. Tito Ortiz.
To this day, it remains one of Diaz’s most fearless and powerful performances. He stood in front of Lawler, jawing, daring a dangerous knockout artist to trade hands with him, and landing big shots. He took Lawler’s punches full-force and stayed in there for more. And just as Lawler started to really assert himself, Diaz put him to sleep out of nowhere, with a short little backpedaling lead right that sent Lawler sprawling face-first to the mat.
It was a thrilling fight between two amazing talents, and a glimpse of MMA’s future. Both Diaz and Lawler went on to become world champions and true legends of the sport. And on Saturday, 17 years later, they’ll step into that same Octagon for the rematch as two completely different men.
Of course, the big headline is the return of Diaz, who emerged as one of the most exceptional welterweight talents in the history of mixed martial arts. Diaz combined trailblazing jiu-jitsu with effective and powerful volume striking – the “Stockton Slap” that he made famous – and an utter fearlessness and take-no-prisoners attitude that made him a major fan favorite.
Nate Diaz has become a major pay-per-view star, but in every way, he’s a shadow of his elder brother. Nick wasn’t just an incredibly talented fighter – he was one of the rare special ones, kept by cruel circumstance from ever truly achieving his full potential. But from 2008 to about 2011, Diaz went on a run that solidified him as probably the No. 2 welterweight in the world behind only Georges St-Pierre, and catapulted himself to superstardom.
Then, suddenly, he was gone. After owning Strikeforce as its conquering champion, Diaz was one of the big names to make the leap when UFC parent company Zuffa acquired the promotion in 2011. He re-debuted in the UFC – his first fight in the Octagon in almost five years – with a win over an already-fading B.J. Penn in October 2011. Carlos Condit snapped Diaz’s 11-fight win streak in an interim UFC title fight four months later, and Diaz lost to GSP in March 2013. Two years later, he lost a middleweight decision to Anderson Silva in a fight where both competitors later failed drug tests. He hasn’t fought since. The fight with Penn, which happened nearly 10 years ago, is his most recent win. He hasn’t fought at all in six and a half years.
And while Diaz spent most of the last decade on the shelf, Lawler spent that time making himself a superstar. Lawler spent the better part of a decade as a middleweight journeyman, one who had notoriety because of his UFC hype at a young age, but was ultimately seen as a disappointment. From 2004-12, Lawler bounced around to now-defunct organizations like EliteXC, IFL and ICON Sport, with highlights being a cool KO in his only Pride appearance and an unsuccessful Strikeforce title challenge in 2011.
The UFC acquired a ton of great talent when it merged with Strikeforce, but at the time, not a single person was thinking about Robbie Lawler. But Lawler took the opportunity to drop to welterweight for the first time in eight years, and launched his career into the stratosphere. With GSP retiring and vacating his title in 2013, the door might have been wide open for Diaz, a beloved big-name star. Instead, Robbie Lawler – the man he beat almost a decade earlier – was the man who walked through it. Lawler won the world title in 2014 and held it for two years, solidifying his status as an all-time great.
It was a spot that could have belonged to Diaz, and perhaps should have belonged to Diaz. But Lawler was the man to earn all the career accomplishments and acclaim that Diaz seemingly wasn’t interested in. So why, then, is this fight happening in 2021? Diaz’s return to the sport is huge news on its own, and having taken a long break while still in his early 30s, it’s conceivable that he still could have something strong left in the tank. He’s been open about wanting a shot at welterweight champion Kamaru Usman. And if that’s so, why Lawler, who’s looked over the hill in recent fights?
Diaz himself seems confused that for his return, this is the fight that’s happening. Even with his long layoff, Diaz should be able to win this fight against the version of Lawler we’ve seen over the last couple years. But there’s still an incredible amount of unknown possibility in this matchup: will Diaz, who got this fight changed to middleweight just a few days ago because he apparently just didn’t want to cut weight, actually have taken this seriously? Seriously, what in the damn hell does a 2021 Nick Diaz fight look like?
It’s the long-awaited return of one legend, and perhaps one of the last chances we get to pay tribute to another. That alone is worth the price of admission. But as Nick Diaz steps into a completely different MMA world, does he have one run left in him? Will the genius again shine through? It’s been so hard to mentally visualize a current-day Nick Diaz fight. Soon, finally, we won’t have to.
Honorable mentions: Curtis Blaydes vs. Jairzinho Rozenstruik (the UFC just keeps trying to make Jairzinho happen!), Jessica Andrade vs. Cynthia Calvillo (Calvillo gets the next shot at Valentina with a win, for sure), Marlon Moraes vs. Merab Dvalishvili (Moraes, formerly the No. 1 contender at 135, needs to prove he’s not washed), Dan Hooker vs. Nasrat Haqparast (these two guys went through actual hell to make this fight), Shamil Abdurakhimov vs. Chris Daukaus (Shamil’s first fight in over two years, against an under-the-radar rising heavyweight contender)
The Big Fight 