Another fight weekend is here, baby, and we love to see it. This week’s MMA action kicks off with Bellator on Friday night, with a show that has relatively little of real interest – I’ll be watching closely for appearances from young talents Aaron Pico, Tyrell Fortune and Steve Mowry, but it’s hard to get excited to see Cris Cyborg kill another outmatched sucker in 2021. The UFC show on Saturday night is better, featuring a great main event, but has also been reduced some by injury. Still, there’s some good shit to find. And, as usual, here’s a look at the three fights I’ll be watching closest on Saturday:
Max Holloway vs. Yair Rodriguez
There are a few fighters that, when they hit the cage, I’m literally going to drop everything I have to do and make sure I catch it live. I will literally plan my life around watching them fight. Max Holloway is one of those athletes. His presence in the main event has instantly made Saturday’s card one of the most appealing Fight Night shows of the year, no matter what else is on.
Max is the kind of fighter who can lose two out of his last three and only have his legend grow. The former world featherweight champion came into 2021 off consecutive title fight losses to Alexander Volkanovski, both in extremely tight decisions – the second, especially, was particularly highly disputed. (I, like many fans and analysts, thought Holloway deserved to win.)
The MMA world has to recognize Volkanovski’s greatness, and those fights were such fantastic displays of the human chess match of MMA that Holloway didn’t lose a single bit of shine. It also helps that his following performance, against tough, skilled boxer Calvin Kattar in January, was the stuff of legend.
Throughout the history of MMA, you can point to a few iconic moments of a fighter simply being on another plane of existence. Anderson Silva putting his hands down, Matrix-style dodging Forrest Griffin‘s punches with head movement alone, then knocking him out with a right. Fedor eating the Randle-plex, not even blinking, and submitting Kevin Randleman seconds later. Jon Jones coming up with THAT spinning back elbow. Khabib: “You want to talk? Let’s talk now!”
Then there’s Max Holloway putting his hands down mid-fight, turning his head, having a conversation with Daniel Cormier at ringside, and slipping Kattar’s punches and tagging him up without even LOOKING Kattar’s way. “I’m the best boxer in the UFC!” Max Holloway could win the featherweight title three more times, and that moment would still go down as the indelible highlight of his career.
I felt bad for Kattar, because he got so relentlessly chumped out in that fight, when he’s absolutely a damn good mixed martial artist and a very slick striker. But he’s not Max Holloway. Holloway had entered that fight off two straight losses to the world champion, and yet that performance was so absurd that it seemed impossible that anyone else should ever be considered to get a shot at Volkanovski.
But with a win on Saturday, Yair Rodriguez will jump the line. The 29-year-old from Chihuahua, Mexico is still something of an enigma, ranking at No. 3 in the 145-pound division despite not having fought in over two years. Rodriguez’s signature win came at the end of 2018, when he knocked out Chan Sung Jung with an unbelievable Hail Mary back elbow just a second before the fifth-round bell, in one of the greatest knockouts in UFC history.
But after he beat Jeremy Stephens – in the middle stages of a winless streak that has since reached six fights – in Oct. 2019, Rodriguez has been off the radar. Rodriguez has had injury issues and dealt with a six-month suspension for violation of USADA whereabouts policy, and further rumors of arrests and other issues have surrounded him since. But Yair’s finally back, and at 29 years old, he’s reaching his theoretical prime.
I’m not sure whether Rodriguez has a championship future, but he’s usually a fun watch. A lanky 5-foot-11 striker, Rodriguez has a background in taekwondo, and brings a wide variety of kicks and and unique offensive style into the cage. His greatest strength lies in his unpredictability, but I worry about his gas tank against a fighter like Holloway in a five-round fight.
Rodriguez most recently bedeviled Stephens with his many different ways of initiating exchanges at range, and nearly finished the veteran in the second round after a sick body kick-leg kick combo that dropped him. But Rodriguez gassed out badly afterwards, and it was all he could do to hold Stephens off and clinch the decision win. Fighting Holloway, meanwhile, is like fighting a woodchipper. Holloway is the most prolific volume striker in the history of the UFC, and I don’t think Yair has the capacity to match him with the hands – and as the fight goes on, Holloway tends to only get stronger.
But if Yair can pull the upset, it’ll be an instant career-making moment that will set him up for a look at a world title. And it’s the fight game – you simply never know.
We lost some of the bigger-name fights on the card due to injury or other circumstance, but we do have a few nice low-key bangers that demand attention. One of the standouts is this bantamweight matchup between Song Yadong and Julio Arce, two of the most talented under-the-radar 135ers the UFC has in the fold.
Song carries more name recognition at present simply because he’s been more active recently – Arce returned in July after nearly two years on the shelf, during which time Song turned himself into one of the world’s top bantamweight prospects. Still just 23 years old, the “Kung Fu Monkey” has put together a 6-1-1 record, against very good competition, since inking with the UFC in 2018.
That includes a 2020 win over the red-hot Marlon Vera – a very, very close fight that actually took place up at 145 pounds, despite the fact that both are established bantamweights – and a recent decision win over another excellent talent, Casey Kenney. It’s a testament to the insane depth of talent in the UFC bantamweight division that Song isn’t yet ranked with that kind of record. That might not be true for long.
Song’s game is extremely well-developed for someone so young. He has finely developed footwork and movement, he has quick and powerful boxing, and when he integrates the body kicks the way he did against Kenney, he’s become an especially difficult problem to solve on the feet. I was super impressed by his showing against Kenney, a relentless pace-pusher – against a fighter who’s almost always moving forward, Song kept up with him for three rounds, getting the read on him, timing everything well and making him pay at every turn. He’s set to be a fixture in the UFC title hunt for a very, very long time.
I would have liked for Song to get someone in the top 15 off that win over Kenney – a rematch of his 2019 draw with Cody Stamann might have been nice – but Arce is still an interesting matchup. Another very talented striker, Arce hasn’t quite broken out yet at the UFC level – he had an early win over Dan Ige that has aged quite well, but split decision losses to Sheymon Moraes and Hakeem Dawodu have held him back – but he’s shown flashes of very tantalizing talent.
We might have seen the best version of Arce yet in July, when he returned from over a year and a half on the shelf to knock out Andre Ewell. Although the stoppage was early, Arce looked potent, powerful and patient off the counter, hurting Ewell bad multiple times with a series of crispy left hands.
Song’s weakness that he’s shown early on has been takedown defense – well, Arce’s only landed two takedowns in his entire UFC career, so we likely won’t need to worry about that. Both have shown a good mind for striking and some real technical chops, and I’d expect this to be a really fun, high-level standup bout. Go out of your way to watch this one.
Kennedy Nzechukwu vs. Da Un Jung
Sometimes, though, you need some dumb action. And this light heavyweight fight is a sleeper of sleepers – as the show is currently formatted, it’s going to be the curtain-jerker, the first fight of the day on the undercard. But if Kennedy Nzechukwu keeps going the way he’s going, he’ll get me tuning in for every single fight he’s in, no matter what time of day.
Nzechukwu, a 29-year-old from Nigeria who moved to the United States in his late teens, is a freakish physical specimen: 6-foot-5 with an 83-inch reach. Guys like him don’t grow on trees. But he was also a very late starter to MMA. Unlike most fighters who reach this level, he had no background in martial arts growing up. Nzechukwu was already in his 20s when his mother brought him to the renowned Fortis MMA gym in Dallas, hoping that it would teach her son some discipline.
Just a few years later, Nzechukwu is still, at times, shockingly raw. But with his frame and his natural punching power, he’s starting to turn into a problem.
In his last two fights, Nzechukwu has snatched knockout victories off of ridiculous comebacks. In March, Nzechukwu was all but dead in the water against seasoned kickboxer Carlos Ulberg, before Ulberg gassed out and Nzechukwu roared back to put his lights out in the second round – the fight was pure madness, and is on my Fight of the Year shortlist. And in June, grappler Danilo Marques had Nzechukwu deep in the danger zone throughout the early goings of the first round, before – you guessed it – Marques gassed out, and Nzechukwu roared back to put his lights out early in the third.
What we’ve learned is that Nzechukwu is very limited technically, but almost impossible to kill and extremely dangerous when he gets an opening. Those factors have combined to create a lot of action – it also combines to create a fighter who’s very beatable despite his positive UFC record, something Da Un Jung will look to exploit on Saturday.
The 27-year-old from South Korea is still relatively anonymous despite starting his UFC career undefeated at 3-0-1. We’ve seen power and a strong chin so far from Jung, but it was against William Knight in April that we saw some dominant wrestling ability – against one of the thickest and most muscular fighters in the division, Jung tossed Knight around the Octagon like a child. The cardio and the fight IQ may not always be there, but the pure talent is.
Both fighters, in a relatively week light heavyweight division, may be a win away from a decent platform opportunity. And I have a sneaking feeling there’s gonna be some action.
The Big Fight 