Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC
UFC featherweight champion Max Holloway wants to make another run at lightweight.
Max Holloway’s UFC lightweight debut didn’t go as planned, but the reigning featherweight champ isn’t giving up on his dream of one day becoming a two-division champion.
Holloway dropped a unanimous decision to Dustin Poirier in an interim lightweight title bout this past April, but ‘Blessed’ is ‘100 percent’ committed to returning to the lightweight division to prove his worth.
“100 percent [I will return to lightweight],” Holloway said. “There’s a future for me in the heavyweight division just watch me. It is what it is. That first fight, it’s not how you start the race, it’s how you finish.
“I’m contracted as a 145’er with a belt and I didn’t want to be holding up people or holding up a division. That’s why I came back. If they want me back at 155, who knows? The main event slot is 170. You don’t know what happens fight night. I’ll fight my fight and if they need someone to hurry up and go out there and fight, “Blessed” is here.”
Reflecting on his loss to Poirier at UFC 236, Holloway said he ‘learned a lot’ from that fight and will apply those lessons going forward.
“I learned a lot about myself in that fight,” Holloway explained. “I dug deep. I’m a fighter. I’ll fight heavyweight if I like. I did things and stood in front of him that guys in his weight couldn’t do. There’s a lot of things we took away from that fight and it’s only a loss if you don’t take anything away. We took a lot away.
“I learned. It’s either win or learn and that’s what we did. I learned a lot in that fight. I learned a lot about myself. I learned about my team and coaches and we came back strong. We took everything we learned from that fight and brought it into the next fight [against Frankie Edgar] and you saw how that went.”
Holloway rebounded from the Poirier loss with a dominant decision win over former lightweight champ Frankie Edgar at UFC 240. Holloway’s next featherweight title defense will be against top contender Alexander Volkanovski, who he is expected to meet in the UFC 245 co-main event on Dec. 14 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.